Nightwork

In popular culture, the imagination of the typical Japanese male is that of a “salaryman” (or “sarariiman in Japanese) or a “corporate warrior”. As usually represented in film and literature, the figure of the salaryman is a neatly groomed, middle-aged, grey-suited, briefcase-carrying, white-collar male office worker who leaves his home in the suburbs early each morning, commutes in an overcrowded train to some faceless downtown office block, spends long hours at the office, and ends the day by lurching drunkenly back to the suburbs on the last train after a drinking session with colleagues or clients. These are the realities of a salaryman’s everyday life, and studying this figure and his realities may provide information about how the salaryman has come to embody all Japanese masculinity in Japan. Along this line, Anne Allison’s book Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (1994) attempts to shed light on this important figure.

Nightwork is an ethnography on the production of masculinity and the corporate Japanese elite. As a participant observer, Allison spent four months in 1981 working as a hostess to learn what goes on in a hostess bar, and why. The setting is a high-class club in Roppongi, Tokyo, where Japanese men go to relax and unwind with their corporate colleagues. In this book, Allison investigates the conflation between work and entertainment among Japanese salarymen. She analyzes how the masculinist behaviors practiced at the hostess clubs strengthen internal and external corporate relations. Specifically, Nightwork explores how Japanese cultural and ideological structures shape and support these behaviors.

In this book, Allyson goes beyond the functionalist explanation that “nightlife serves corporate needs for male bonding and male relaxation” (p. 150), and she presents an insightful account of the power relations encoded in the interactions inside the hostess club. According to the author, corporate entertainment is a complex relation somewhere between total manipulation, male privilege, and Japan-ness. In applying Marxist theories, Allison sees corporate nightlife as a ritual of male dominance that depends on and uses the hostess to achieve its end. According to her, in this highly commodified form of entertainment, Japanese companies buy the fiction of masculine privilege and superiority for their salarymen, which results in the loss of intimate personal relations and the loss of identity outside of work.

According to Allison, in paying money for a service provided by a woman, “Men are not only buying a commodity but putting themselves into the commodity too (p. 22). The “service that is purchased. . . is an eroticization less of the woman than of the man-his projection as a powerful, desirable male” (p. 22). Moreover, Allison contends that sexuality in the interaction between the male employees and the hostesses not only structures the identity of women but that of men.

However, one problem about the book that must be noted is the very informal way in which Allison treats the information obtained from interviews. While it appeals to many readers, others are frustrated that the author does not even state in her book may how many persons were interviewed altogether. In addition, some demographics and attributes of interviewees that seem relevant in the research, like age, occupation, and the type of workplace are not often specified. Furthermore, although Allison makes the point that corporate entertainment constructs male desire and sexuality, her treatment of it somehow lacks depth and development.

Overall, despite minor flaws, Nightwork makes an important contribution to the anthropological and sociological literature on the construction of gender and sexuality, as well as Japanese corporate culture. It introduces the readers to a dimension of Japanese white-collar male workers’ lives hardly ever considered seriously even by Japanese scholars themselves. I would recommend this book for courses on Japanese studies, gender and sexuality, anthropology, sociology, for scholars interested in culture and the workplace, and for anyone interested in life in contemporary Japan.