⛩️#44 The Sex Line Murders
Ring Ring, You're Dead
RinRinHouse Telephone Club, Shinjuku branch. Still image taken from Madonna’s 2006 music video for single Jump
In the early hours of March 2nd, 2000, a man hurled a Molotov cocktail into the RinRinHouse telephone club in Kobe’s bustling Motomachi shopping arcade.
The homemade bomb failed to ignite, and the would-be arsonist attempted to flee —pursued by an alert employee. The man tried to cover his escape by lobbing a second Molotov, only to have the employee snatch it out of the air and heave it straight back at him.
Bad idea. This time, the gasoline went up — starting a fire that quickly ripped through the building. The firebug-chase was abandoned as staff scrambled up to the third floor, where customers were asleep in tiny private booths. They managed to rescue one person, but several other poor bastards were trapped, and quickly suffocated (one hopes while still asleep) as acrid smoke filled the premises.
By the time the Kobe City Fire Department extinguished the fire, neon had melted into the street and the store had been reduced to a burnt-out shell. Four bodies were found inside.
To understand this crime, we’re going to get familiar with the concept of a telephone club, why they proliferated in 1990s Japan — plus examine the rise of Tokyo’s infamous “King of the Sex Industry”, a man whose latest venture you’re probably already familiar with, whether you realize it or not.
Let’s get into it:
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SEX & MONEY
There exists in Japan a vast sex industry, by some measures the largest per capita in the world. This includes a panoply of euphemistically-named services offering out-and-out sex — “soaplands”, “delivery health” — but also other, tamer variations on the age-old concept of man-pays-to-meet-woman.
Two examples of such establishments are “cabaret bars” (“Kyaba-kura”) and “girls bars”, where men (and very occasionally women) pay for the privilege of engaging in conversation with attractively-dressed (usually) young women, with no sexual strings attached.
These businesses are scrupulously regulated by law as to the precise conversational arrangements they can offer — kyaba-kura businesses being allowed to seat customers and staff together at tables, while in girls bars, well, the girls must remain behind the bar. The rules are so extensive they dictate the precise lighting arrays allowed in each type of establishment (measured in lumens per square meter).
Money is extracted through multiple means: entry, or membership fees; seating fees; fees for specifying a member of the “cast” one wishes to be seated with — lest one be assigned the inarticulate newbie — which are all topped by the financial biggie: the cost of your own drink plus the drinks you will provide your interlocutor.
In return for large dollops of money, in other words, you get a conversation partner — nothing more — who calibrates their gassing on as best they can to flatter your ego. These conversations can become ruinously expensive.
(And as anyone who has hung out with kyaba-kura employed women on their off-hours knows, their main topic of conversation when gathered in groups is how to most efficiently extract the money from the man -- a nice trick being to ask regulars to give them, say, an expansive Gucci handbag as a birthday gift. Three regulars gifting the same bag yields two spares, which can be swiftly wheelbarrowed down to the closest pawn shop and turned into cash; the bonus being one does not have to remember which customer gave which gift...)
This phenomenon — men spending extravagantly in return for chit-chat from someone transparently motivated by cash — is puzzling for some people. To them it’s an incredibly pathetic waste of money, while others, of course, call it loneliness.
As Freud pointed out, the male libido is like being chained permanently to a madman, and results in all sorts of outré behavior, including the compulsion to plunge into catastrophic debt — which happens a lot — and torpedo one’s life in order to gossip with a woman in a tight dress.
(We once thought about writing that movie — a man literally chained to the personification of his libido, which only he can see (a plum Jim Carrey role if ever there was one) — before sensibly realizing that the market for white male sex self-pity dried up around 2016, after mere centuries of it being the subject at the center of Western literary culture. (It remains plumb middle of other literary traditions, but that’s a discussion we’re not interested in having right now — yes, we realize this is a digression upon a digression.)
One last digression before we move on — yes, there also exists the gender-reversed version of the pay-for-chat model: host clubs, where attractive young men extract money from young women in return for conversation/ego-boosting.
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TELEPHONE CLUBS
In the mid-1980s, before home internet or widespread cellphone adoption, some fiendish genius conceived of the telephone club, continuing the tradition of euphemistically-named adult services.
Commonly known as “telekura”, it was (is) a store where men waited in private booths for women to call, then enjoy a conversation with her.
The nature of these calls can be inferred from the fact that tissues were thoughtfully provided for the convenience and hygiene of male patrons hogging the booths.
If you’re wondering why women would call into the telekura and provide their ‘aural services’, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper’s evening edition of April 3, 1986 has you covered:
It was, of course, mainly about prostitution. Women could call in on a free dial number and connect directly with men who by answering proved they were willing to spend cash on female companionship.
Mitani Sanjirou’s brilliant YouTube channel, Gairoku, features street interviews with outré Japanese individuals, AKA the invisible majority. One such interview is with Nichika Sakai, who explains how telephone clubs provided income for homeless women like herself. She also shares a pungent detail: how it was essential to keep a pot of yogurt or caramel pudding handy to plunge her fingers into, mimicking the sounds of female arousal.
There were also the prank callers: high school girls would call in and berate the men hunched in their booths -- but, as the newspaper pointed out — not uncommon for these same girls to eventually give in to curiosity — or greed — and arrange to meet the person on the other end of the line.
(This was the era when enjo-kosai — “compensated dating” — another euphemism, this time for underage prostitution, or to give it its real name, statutory rape — became a social phenomenon.)
Still from TV Tokyo’s recent special on telephone clubs: seasoned telekura pros mastered the art of holding down their phone’s hang-up button, releasing it as soon as it rang—ensuring they got the call, instead of one of the other sweating men in nearby booths. Image: TV Tokyo
It’s important to understand that the telephone clubs were not at all hidden — consider the appearance of the Shinjuku branch of RinRinHouse telephone club in Madonna’s music video (pictured at the top of the article). Comics marketed towards women carried 10-15 pages of telephone club advertisements per issue, while signs across Tokyo explained how women could make a free call and “have some fun talking to a stranger”. The ubiquitous Japanese marketing technique of handing out free branded tissue packets at major train stations was also employed.
By 1990, Tokyo’s Shinjuku area alone had around 100 telephone club businesses, which were doing a roaring (or should that be groaning?) trade.
Then the “King of the Sex Industry” stepped in.
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THE “KING OF THE SEX INDUSTRY”*
*not our term1
Keiichi Morishita began his career in Tokyo's infamous red-light district Kabukichō, working at a host club, using his conversational skills to impress female customers. When the telephone club phenomenon took off, he hung up his own shingle, a terekura named RinRinHouse.
Taking the market by storm with his aggressive pricing, charging less than half the price of competitors for hourly private booth rentals, quickly putting them out of business. Within a couple years RinRinHouse was a national chain, with branches in every major city in the country.
Recognizing a winning formula, he applied his model to manga cafes next. Manboo, launched in 1997, offered low price packages such as overnight stays for around the price of a McDonald’s Happy Meal, undercutting rivals just as RinRinHouse did — and going exponential as a result.
We return to the arson attack
As you’ll recall, in the early hours of March 2nd, 2000, a man hurled a Molotov cocktail into the RinRinHouse telephone club in Kobe’s bustling Motomachi shopping arcade.
Four people died — but here’s the thing: they weren’t, as you might expect, customers of RinRinHouse’s telephone club. In fact, by city ordinance, the telephone club business had to close at midnight.
Instead, the premises — the tiny booths — were rented out as makeshift flops for white collar workers who had missed their last train home, and couldn’t afford a regular business hotel. Another brilliant money-making wheeze from a company that knew how to maximize profits.
That’s why the men were asleep when the blaze started, and succumbed to the smoke before they could escape.
And the reason for the attack in the first place? The arsonist was the disgruntled manager of a rival telephone club which had previously occupied the premises, which was put out of business by RinRinHouse’s runaway success.
End of the Telephone Clubs
With the rise of new methods of communication, telephone clubs became an anachronism, a relic of the Showa Era that could not compete with the Internet. From a high of hundreds of branches across Japan, it is now estimated that less than 20 remain, as kitsch monuments to a begone age.
RinRinHouse’s Ikebukuro branch is one of those few remainers — but Keiichi Morishita has moved on to different modes of doubling-down on that kitsch appeal.
You may have heard of the Robot Restaurant. Known for its over-the-top robot-themed performances, plus rubbish food, it became a major tourist attraction in Tokyo, offering a very social media friendly experienced tailored to easily-impressed foreigners.
It was a Morishita operation.
Whatever your opinion of the Robot Restaurant, the COVID-19 pandemic spelled its end, but you can’t keep the irrepressible Morishita down (TokyoReporter has an article quoting a yakuza member saying ““He’s one of those guys who doesn’t budge an inch, even when it comes to paying ‘protection money'”2, which we presume means not paying protection money) — and he soon had Robot Restaurant’s successor up and running: Samurai Restaurant.
(Morishita is also famous for his annual company-wide party, at which he is the guest of honor, which features attractive young women from across the group companies putting on sexy dances, plus listening to him karaoke his favorite enka standards.
The 2017 edition of the Morishita Group shindig made the tabloid press for redefining the term “Nazi Party”.)
Keiichi Morishita’s annual party, 2017 edition. Flash reported the cost of the day-long extravaganza — including Panzer tank mock-up — at ¥300m (~$1.9m USD). Image: Flash
No, this did not lead to Morishita’s downfall. Nothing will, except time.
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The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same
Japan’s most prolific film director Miike Takashi once said in an interview that “everyone is lonely in Japan”. A lot of us are, for one reason or another. We can’t always be in love, or enjoying galloping professional success, or creative fulfillment, or contemplating a beautiful landscape or newborn baby.
Outside of those occasions, the male of the species often reaches for their credit card and seeks quick recourse in sex dopamine. In 1990s Japan the telephone club was one of the main ditches into which money (and semen) poured.
These days, we have the Internet and access to a galaxy of free pornography, and even fewer reasons to interact with, or learn to appreciate, potential lovers . But just remember, the “real Japan” people come to this country seeking is mainly found in the lonely suburb or behind closed doors amid the fluttering neon around your local train station.
Until next week,
The Kyote
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The Kyote is published in Kyoto every Sunday at 19:00 JST
https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/252
https://www.tokyoreporter.com/japan/robot-restaurant-founder-hosted-nazi-themed-event-in-17/