Boy's town: Documentary examines under side of Tokyo gay quarter

Nov 24, 2017 | News On Japan

Nov 24, 2017 (tokyoreporter.com) - At the opening of the documentary "Boys For Sale," a look at the underside of the trade in young boys in the 2-chome gay quarter of Shinjuku Ward, a former male prostitute, says, "I guess if you'd never experienced this, it would be hard to understand."

Such a summation could not be more accurate.

The film, which will make its Japan premiere at the Tokyo AIDS Week 2017 this weekend, includes interviews with urisen, who are young guys who engage in sex with men. The film presents a rare view of this underground business through the unsettling stories of the boys in candid interviews.

"I think, in general, people are surprised by it," said executive producer Ian Thomas Ash during an interview in Tokyo earlier this month. "I think especially because the guys are so frank, they are so frank."

That is clear from the start. The aforementioned former prostitute, who later went on to manage an urisen bar, says that boys seeking work at his establishment would ask him how he could get an erection. He answered, "Money. Making money will get you hard."

The film introduces the 2-chome area, the biggest gay quarter in Japan. The district includes about 800 businesses catering to homosexual clientele: gay and lesbian bars, dance clubs, adult shops and the urisen parlors.

A customer arriving at an urisen business will have his pick of about five boys, many as young as 19, standing behind the counter. Should one be to his liking, he will invite the boy to his table for a drink. If a mutual interest develops, they will then disappear together to a special room or hotel for sex in exchange for money. (Japan's Anti-Prostitution Law does not prohibit non-coital intercourse.)

"Ostensibly, this is supposed to be a sexy kind of industry," said Ash. "And yet, when you just get a little bit deeper into it and have a conversation with these guys, any veneer of sexiness just completely disappears, and you are just feeling disbelief about what is going to happen - that we were going to bring these guys back to their bar, and 20 minutes later, some 70-year-old guy was going to try to rape them. That was really hard for us to think about."

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