The Broken Dreams of the Blond Geishas : WESTERN WOMEN ARE FLOCKING TO JAPAN TO ENTERTAIN MEN IN CLUBS CALLED HOSTESS BARS. MAKING $1,000 A NIGHT IS EASY. BUT IT'S NOT SO SIMPLE TO TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN.

By Karl Taro Greenfeld

Nov. 8, 1992 12 AM PT

<i> Karl Taro Greenfeld is the Tokyo correspondent for The Nation. He's currently working on a book about Japanese pop culture</i>

JACQUELINE BURKE SITS WITH HER LEGS CROSSED on a gray foam sofa in her Tokyo apartment. Sunlight streams in through two windows and bathes her slightly tanned skin and golden blond hair in rich, creamy yellow. She’s conscious of the effect. For 18 months now, this gold has been her fortune.

California-girl looks that had been a dime a dozen when she tried to break into modeling in Los Angeles are exotic here. And exotica, she has found, commands a price. In Huntington Beach, Jackie, 20, had been a $300-a-week waitress. Here, she’s a first-class hostess. For five hours a night five nights a week, she pours drinks and makes small talk with Japanese salarymen at Casanova, a hostess bar in the Roppongi night-life district. And because of her coloring, shapely physique and pouty lips, her salary is at the top of the scale for foreign hostesses in Tokyo: 5,000 yen (about $39 U.S.) an hour. She earns an additional 10,000 to 20,000 yen a night in tips, and her customers give her gifts. All kinds of gifts.

She is dressed for work in a black Moschino dress, black tights, red Alaia jacket, pearl-shaped gold necklace, Cartier watch, diamond ring, emerald ring and pearl earrings. All of it, excluding the tights, was given to her by customers.

“Once your regular customers start to like you, you can get them to keep giving and giving,” Jackie says as she opens a pack of cigarettes. (Her name and those of other hostesses and patrons have been changed to protect their identities.) “But if you want to get stuff you like, then you’d better start telling them exactly what you want or you’ll end up with five Chanel handbags.”

She smokes and looks at one of her rings in the dusky light. A diamond as big as a peanut. “But it’s funny. You don’t really like wearing the stuff. Some diamond worth five grand and you only wear it when you go to the club so the customer thinks you really like him and then maybe he’ll get you another one,” Jackie says with a laugh, “and you’ll probably not even like to wear that either.”

It’s a fast life, with fast cash, wardrobe and world-weariness by Jackie Collins. Tales of the hostess trade have turned Tokyo into the world’s hottest young-expatriate boom town. The word has already gone out along the low-budget, student-travel and get-rich-quick grapevines: Come to Tokyo.

Women like Jackie pour into the city swearing they’ll milk the natives and leave wealthy and unscathed. “My dream is to make a big deal and get out of hostessing,” she says earnestly. “To be a good hostess, you’ve got to be a good businesswoman. I have to resist the temptation to go to Thailand or Goa or some tropical paradise and blow my money. I’ve got to be a businesswoman.”

She wiggles her fingers, the fat diamond and emerald glittering, and smiles. “This stuff is for beginners.”

WITH HOSTESS BARS IN EVERY COMMUNITY, THERE’S BIG MONEY TO BE TAPPED in the Japanese hostessing industry. There are no official numbers of how many women work in hostess bars, but Lisa Louis, author of a new book about the hostessing industry, estimates that hundreds of thousands of women throughout Japan work in the multibillion dollar industry. For the salaryman, hostess bars, with their posh atmosphere, steady flow of drinks and beautiful women, may help close a business deal.

“It’s where we let our guard down,” says airline executive Takeo Hideoka, a regular hostess-bar customer in Tokyo. “We have some drinks and can speak frankly. I do as much business at the two or three bars I frequent as I do at my office. I don’t see the bar as a particularly sexual place--although I have met two mistresses at hostess bars. But it’s a business place.” He laughs. “If you eliminated the hostessing industry,” he says, “the Japanese GNP would probably decline by 50%.”

Hostessing is rooted in the geisha tradition and is, in some aspects, an ingenuous modern incarnation of that more artful manner of entertaining men. Where the geisha embodies old Japan with rigorous training, sake, kimonos, samisen playing and fan dancing, the hostess is modern--no training, bourbon, Gaultier outfits, karaoke singing and disco dancing.

In male-dominated Japanese society, the business of child-rearing and managing a household is relegated to the wife. But the sprightly, coquettish and sexy aspects of femininity have traditionally been left to the geisha, and now to hostesses, who emerged in the 1920s as the “jokyo,” or cafe-girls. Since then, the hostessing industry has thrived.

A hostess pours drinks, cajoles her customer into ordering overpriced snacks and generally panders to his ego by laughing at jokes or attentively listening to laments. Sex might or might not be part of the package. For a hostess to sleep with a client, says manager Michiko Nagisa of the Yamazakira hostess bar in Roppongi, “is totally up to her and is totally her business.”

The Asian Laborers Solidarity organization, an advocacy group for foreign workers in Japan, estimates that there are 70,000 to 100,000 foreign hostesses in Japan. Of these, about 10,000 are non-Asian and 2,000 are American. The average American hostess stays in Tokyo for about two years, saving some money before moving on to see the rest of Asia or returning to the United States.

Since the early 1970s, as Japan’s fixation with Western trends and imports extended to Western women, Europeans and Americans have increasingly replaced Japanese hostesses in the plush booths beside tipsy corporate executives, gangsters, politicians, art dealers and the scions of some of Japan’s oldest and wealthiest families. “Blond women are a status symbol for Japanese men, who have long been intimidated by foreign women,” says hostess-turned-journalist Rie Sekiguchi. That the women now serve Japanese men, she says, can be taken as a symbol of Japan’s ascendancy.

BECAUSE SO MUCH BUSINESS IS TRANSACTED IN HOSTESS bars, women like Jackie get a firsthand feel for deal-making Japanese-style. Although Jackie isn’t fluent in Japanese, she has picked up enough of the language to follow a conversation.

“I watch, I listen and I think about a way to make it work for me,” Jackie says. “I want to start my own business.” She speaks in the careful, clipped syllables of a shrewd businesswoman, but her nature is warm and trusting. “What I really want is to get one of my customers to finance a hotel in Cancun. Right on the beach. Beautiful. With bungalows, white sand, palm trees. Paradise. I know the exact hotel--I stayed there for the first time with my mom when I was 13. I’ve got pictures.”

She shuffles across the tatami floor to her bedroom and returns with a few dozen photographs of clear blue water, cloudless blue skies, deserted white sand beaches--the environmental opposite of murky, smoggy, congested Tokyo.

“We’re talking about miles of exclusive, private beach. I can buy the whole thing and renovate the rooms, add stables and horses, make it more like Club Med or something, only groovier. I can do everything I want with $250,000.”

Jackie shares a four-room apartment in the upper-middle-class Setagaya ward with two other hostesses, Liza and Deborah, and Steve, an Englishman who tends bar at a hangout for gaijin (foreigners) in Roppongi.

Jackie and Liza grew up together at the Ashram commune in Oregon that was headed by the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. The two friends moved to Los Angeles when “The Ranch,” once home to 3,000 faithful, dissolved in the mid-’80s. “We had a great time at The Ranch,” Jackie says of her girlhood. “But we never learned to do some pretty basic things--”

“Like spelling or long division,” interrupts Liza, walking into the room. Liza is a strawberry blonde about two inches taller than Jackie, who is 5-foot-3.

Jackie and Liza, 20, woke up at 1 p.m. Deborah, from Vancouver, Canada, who is studying at Tokyo American Community College, had been up and out of there by noon. (“Dawn patrol,” Jackie had moaned when Deborah’s alarm went off.) Jackie and Liza had partied the night before at a nightclub near Roppongi, doing lines of coke off the toilet tank and eating hash brownies baked in the nightclub’s kitchen. They didn’t get to sleep until well after dawn.

The first thing Jackie did after she looked at the mirror was to rouse Liza, the makeup specialist in the apartment, who supervises the long makeup process essential for hostesses. They start with Clinique day cream, eye cream, loose transparent powder, black Chanel eye pencils and matte eye shadow from a theatrical makeup company. When the eyes are done, they use Elizabeth Arden Lip Fix and a Lancome lip pencil--brown for Jackie and pink for Liza. Then Shu Uemura lipstick for Jackie. Chanel for Liza.

They finish with the Pill.

Jackie, made up as the blond bombshell Japanese men pay so much to sit beside, leans against the kitchen table and flips through her address book, as she does every night, for selected customers’ phone numbers. For each customer who comes into the club and “nominates” her--asks for her by name--she is paid an additional 1,500 yen. For a dohan --a dinner date--where the customer takes the hostess to dinner and then to the club, she receives a 5,000 yen bonus. The more nominations and dohans she accumulates, the more likely she can demand a sizable raise.

She punches the digits and speaks in halting Japanese to the customers’ secretaries or in English if the customer himself answers on a cellular phone. She alternates from a low sexy voice to a more girlish tone depending on the patron, but she asks them all to come tonight. “There’s a party,” she assures them. Every night is a “party” at Casanova.

Jackie calls her best customer, Junichiro Shigematsu, last, laying it on especially thick for him.

“For three months since I started working at the club, this guy Shigematsu--he’s in construction--has been coming in maybe two nights a week and always asking to have me at his table,” Jackie says as she closes the address book. Liza stands by the stove, putting on a pot of water for tea.

“He has given me, so far: one Chanel bag, one Cartier wrist watch, a Tiffany diamond pendant, a diamond bracelet and two diamond rings. He’s good with the brand names.”

Liza asks if she wants tea. Jackie says yes.

“Each gift has been a little more valuable than the last one,” she says with a smile. “And the duration of his hand’s stay on my thigh is a little longer than the last time. But this is a game, with rules, and he knows them and I know them. If he goes too far, I get up and go to the bathroom.”

Japanese customers know the rules: No groping. Junichiro Arai, manager of the Grand Mois hostess bar in Ginza, lays down the law: “It’s the girl’s job to handle the situation politely. But if that fails, she can get help and one of the waiters will talk to the customer. But that kind of problem is rare.”

Shigematsu is a real estate speculator who specializes in buying undervalued properties from landlords. Jackie estimates his net worth at “something with a wagon-train of zeros.”

He is 57, married and has two children.

Shigematsu has brought a few of his associates into the club and introduced them to Jackie. He shows Jackie off at times like that--pats her on the thigh, tries, for the benefit of his business associates, to make it look as if theirs is the traditional mistress-patron relationship.

“The Shigematsu situation is going critical,” Jackie says. “The size of the next gift is going to require more than just a peck of gratitude on his cheek; I’ve told him about my hotel plan. He knows what I want. And to get it, he wants me to become his mistress, which grosses me out, because the guy is, like, repulsive. It’s not an ethical thing--the guy’s just gross.

“But I want to do it. I have to,” Jackie says. “At least for a while, at least to get the company off the ground.”

Liza sips tea and says as though she’s heard it a million times: “Jackie’s Hotel by the Sea.”

JACKIE AND LIZA CAME TO TOKYO BECAUSE THEY HAD HEARD, from a hostess who had just returned from Japan, there was big yen to be made on the west side of the Pacific. They met the woman at a swimsuit model audition for a calendar company, and when the model found out the job paid only $500, she told Jackie and Liza that if they really wanted to cash in, to go to Tokyo. “It sounded crazy,” Liza says--the woman described men paying $800, $900 just to talk to them. “But she gave us a phone number and the name of some clubs. She also said we could get some modeling work. But since we’ve been here, the hostessing has kept us busy.”

Others hear about hostessing while they are on vacation in Thailand or India and encounter women returning from Japan who tell stories about the big Tokyo money. Although there is currently a glut of job seekers in modeling and hostessing, women of all nationalities--including American, English, French, German, Swedish, Finnish, Australian, New Zealander, Dutch--still fly into Tokyo daily looking for work as hostesses. (Hostesses must have working visas, but the actual enforcement of that rule varies.)

Women who answer employment agency ads in American newspapers to work in Japan as “dancers” or “entertainers” frequently find themselves hostessing. Some complain and return to the States. Others decide to stick it out. Laura, a dark-haired woman from Warren, Mich., came to Tokyo four years ago to work as a “dancer” in an Akasaka club, 15 minutes from Roppongi. “I walked into the place and saw it wasn’t big enough to swing a cat,” Laura says as she waits on a subway platform for an Akasaka-bound train. “So I knew I wouldn’t be dancing. At first, the job freaked me out, but I got used to it. And the money is sweet.”

Some women never get used to it. The U.S. Embassy becomes involved in one case a year of a woman finding out that her job description was not entirely accurate and then lacking the funds to get home. In one of the worst cases, a woman was flown from San Francisco by unsavory employment agents, put up in a pricey hotel and encouraged to order room service. When she wanted to quit, her club manager informed her that she owed $7,000 for the hotel bill and plane ticket. The consular section of the U.S. Embassy arranged for her ticket out of Tokyo.

“It can be very hard on the girls,” says manager Arai. “If they don’t get regular customers or good tips, the job is not that lucrative. I’ll help a girl find a place (to stay) occasionally. But Tokyo is expensive, and they have to start practically from scratch. I wouldn’t want my daughter to be a hostess.”

Complaints about the emotional hardship of the job are more common than complaints about mistreatment or bad management. “I began to really hate men,” says Laura, 24, hanging onto a strap in the subway. “I was repulsed by them, especially by Japanese men. They were so pathetic and sexist, thinking they could have everything because of money. It’s degrading.”

It’s no wonder that she and other women begin to see men as fat wallets from which to extract as much money as possible. (She asked, unsuccessfully, to be paid by the hour for interviews for this article.) Expensive dinners, designer outfits, jewelry and even trips abroad to Saipan, Hawaii or Paris with customers are each measured in terms of value.

As the value of gifts escalates, the customer is more likely to demand carnal satisfaction. At that point, the job enters a gray area bordering on prostitution. Every hostess, at some point in her career, is tempted by a combination of entreaties and swanky gifts to sleep with a customer. As Jackie says, “some guy offers you an apartment, money and basically will subsidize your whole life. And if he’s not bad looking, you’d have to be the prudest girl in the world not to consider it.” Every hostess has a story about the largest gift she has heard about: condominiums, $200,000 in Mitsubishi stock, Porsche Cabriolets.

Nina, from rural Devon in England, received the Porsche. The car was the final installment in a long seduction by a real estate developer obsessed with the short, lithe, sharp-featured Briton. He had already given her a diamond pendant and a membership in an exclusive health club. And he made it clear she would have to sleep with him to get the car. Nina describes him as “too weedy, a thin old man.” But she lusted after the black 911 Targa. And now she has it. In the evenings, parked outside trendy Tokyo nightspots, she is conspicuous; she’s the only 20-year-old blonde in Tokyo driving a $70,000 car. But it didn’t get her out of the game: She still works at the Shy in Roppongi.

There are a few hostesses who’ve gotten out. Penny, 26, has made a successful transition from hostessing to working as an art dealer. She is curating a show by a young, promising, British painter for her stark, modern gallery near Roppongi.

“Hostessing was how I made my connections,” says Penny, a dark-skinned Lebanese-American whose hair flows in long, dark waves. “When a friend called and told me he had some Warhols for sale, I decided, why not? Ask the customers. I sold three in a week. My commission was 15% of $150,000. You do the math.”

After a few deals like that, she built up a clientele of undiscerning buyers eager to please her. “I’ve had ambassadors, foreign ministry officials, top guys from Fuji Bank, all kinds in here. And they’ll pay top yen for almost anything. They like the tax write-off.”

AT 12:30 ON A SATURDAY morning, the house band at Casanova has launched a cruise-ship cover of the B-52’s hit single “Love Shack.” The dance floor is lighted from beneath and a mirrored ball glitters overhead. The band, not even bothering to feign enthusiasm, keeps its music quiet so as not to interrupt the conversations in progress. The waiters are officious, asking every four minutes if a patron would like another drink. The cost to the customer for 90 minutes, plus all the liquor he can drink, is 35,000 yen (about $270), but that’s before extras like buying the hostesses drinks ($50 for a soda) or a snack of popcorn or potato chips. When a customer enters and is given a table, one or two women are chosen by the manager to sit with him.

The final cost for a few hours of entertainment can easily reach thousands of dollars, but the customer will most likely write the evening off as a business expense.

Jackie sits with her patron Shigematsu, whose mottled skin, thick glasses and gauntness make him look almost elderly. His two bodyguards sit one booth over with two other hostesses. Shigematsu has ordered his regular bottle of Glenlivet Scotch and the Island Paradise snack platter--two sliced, grilled chicken breasts floating on a sea of blue, flavorless gelatin. Connecting the breasts is a bamboo rope-bridge strewn with tater-tots. The monstrosity is topped off by miniature golf pin flags on each breast. It costs $200.

Golf is a common icebreaker between foreign hostesses and Japanese customers, but Jackie and Shigematsu are beyond that kind of small talk. Shigematsu keeps professing to Jackie that he is in love with her and that he wants to consummate this love. Jackie is eager to consummate the financing for her hotel. They have made a date for a lunch appointment next Saturday.

“We made everything clear,” Jackie says when she returns from lunch with Shigematsu. “The whole deal. Bank transfers. Lawyers. I have to start looking into Mexican water rights. That guy is in love with me. He couldn’t stop telling me over and over again. He’s even going to put me in his will.”

Liza, sitting at the kitchen table trying to decipher a financial-aid application form from Pepperdine University, says, “You need a lawyer.”

“He is a lawyer. But you’re right, I need a lawyer. I have to begin researching the amount of beach access required per guest and the amount of square meters required per horse. It’s a maze.”

Shigematsu has agreed to capitalize Jackie’s development corporation at $250,000 if she will become his mistress. They will meet for dinner this Thursday and then retire to a pied-a-terre Shigematsu keeps in the tony Aoyama section of Tokyo.

Later, Jackie gives this account: Shigematsu picks her up in his Mercedes at 9 on Thursday night. Jackie had arranged with the club to take the night off. She and Shigematsu dine without his bodyguards at a French restaurant in Tokyo’s most famous hotel. They chat. After dinner, in Shigematsu’s car, Jackie asks to see the papers certifying that a bank transfer had been made into the Mitsubishi Bank account she had established for her corporation.

Instead, he hands her a small box wrapped in gold paper. She unwraps it and finds another diamond ring. When she thanks him and asks him about the bank transfer, he laughs and waves her off, saying she shouldn’t take things so seriously. They would, after all, know each other for a long, long time.

Jackie split 10 days later to Ko Samui, a tropical island in Thailand, for three months, taking $15,000 she had saved in tips and salary. She hawked her diamond rings before leaving Tokyo.

While Jackie was in Thailand, Liza received her letter of acceptance from Cal State Fullerton. She started there in the fall.

Jackie returned from Thailand broke and, once again, is hostessing in Tokyo.