My Lonely Planet Tokyo guide told me that the main gay scene in the country was there in a district called Shinjuku Nichome (just “Nichome” to both its victims and its regulars, the two of which are often confused and frequently the same thing). The guide didn’t say a lot, but it named a few bars that were foreigner-friendly (an issue I’ll get to momentarily). Living outside the city, I decided to take the fifty-minute train ride in and scope things out for myself. I had a pocketful of money, so even if I couldn’t score I could check myself into a hotel.
As befits any epic quest, finding Nichome was like seeking the bloody Grail. I had maps, but in the maze-like streets of Tokyo getting spun around is easy, particularly if you can’t read Japanese. I circled the area several times before finally discovering this hidden Shangri-la, only to be severely disappointed.
Except for late Friday and Saturday nights, when the bars fill to capacity and start leaking out on the streets, Nichome looks like any other part of town. Used to the gay scenes in Manhattan, San Francisco, and Bangkok, I was expecting dance clubs brimming with topless Japanese hotties. What I found were tiny, hidden closets where subdued regulars huddled around bars too shy to make eye contact. I exaggerate…but just a little.
Like most aspects of Japanese life, the gay scene is separated, labeled, and neatly arranged into several tiny Type-A divisions. While hitting a bar in, say, the Castro met rubbing shoulders (and occasionally other body parts) with straight men and women, gays of all strips, and equally diverse specimens of lesbian. The bars in Nichome each seemed to cater to one specific variety of clone. Most didn’t open their doors to women, and most excluded foreigners. Each focused on one particular -sen.
A –sen is a type you are attracted to. For example, a gaisen is a Japanese individual attracted to foreigners, while a gebusen likes chubby boys. If you didn’t fit the profile, stepping into a particular bar could be a chilling and chilly experience.
“Arty Farty” was and is the major exception. Though it has moved locations since I first landed, it has always had a dance floor and let all types of people in. Granted, the entire freakin’ bar could fit on just the dance floor of a club elsewhere, but that’s life in Tokyo. The guidebook had mentioned the place as gaijin-friendly, so it was the first place I sought out.
What I lack in ripped abs and bulging biceps I more than make up for on the dance floor, and hoped to use that to my tactical advantage. Naturally, when I arrived no one was dancing. Even the gay bar I used to visit in Tucson saw more booties shaking than this one. This left me with little option but sit at the bar. This was, I would discover, standard operating procedure in the gay Japanese world.
I was soon joined by a young, extremely cute Japanese boy we will call “Hiroki.” In the dim lighting he looked twenty going on sixteen, but since the bars had age limits I figured he had to be older than he looked. I had just come from work, and was still wearing my suit. “Suits” were, apparently, Hiroki’s –sen.
When it became clear that he was going to just sit there until I made the first move, I gambled he spoke English and struck up a conversation. He did, and quite well. I told him I was new in Japan and that this was my first time in Nichome (he did not, however, grasp the meaning of the phrase “fresh meat”). He was from Kyushu, which I new was one of Japan’s major islands, and was attending university in Tokyo to become (he said) a doctor.
We flirted for about an hour. Strike that; I flirted and he sat there with a blank expression on his very attractive face. He offered to show me another bar I might like, and since I was making no noticeable progress with him in the confines of Arty Farty, I figured a change of scene might be advantageous.
He took me to GB, which, though I have never discovered what it stands for probably is just “Gay Bar.” It is the epicenter of the gaisen scene. Located in a single basement room, GB consists of (in no particular order) A) a single square bar in the center of the room, B) stools around said bar, C) a narrow shelf running around three other walls with stools for sitting, D) a tiny little men’s room, E) a horde of middle aged white guys with barely legal Japanese companions, and F) a few mounted television sets constantly recycling all the videos from Kylie Minogue’s Fever. No dancing, just drinking and trying to pick up the guy next to you.
Hiroki and I sat up against the wall, and he told me after the first round of drinks that he would leave soon for another bar, while I could stay and find a boy I liked. Taken aback (having had more than my share of Asian boys in San Francisco, did my charms suddenly not work in Japan?), I told him I had already met a boy I liked…him. With the same blank expression, not missing a beat, he set his glass down and said “let’s go to a hotel.” Success had never felt so anti-climactic. No worries. The climaxes would come later.
I had read about Japan’s “love hotels,” a topic that deserves its very own blog post and will get one at a later date. Suffice it to say now, they are cheap hotels that cater to couples having anonymous sex. Hiroki would have none of that, and wanted a “real” hotel. He walked me several blocks to one that he knew.
The room was a bit more than ten thousand yen, roughly a hundred dollars. For this you got a microscopic room, big enough for a double bed and not much else. For the entire evening Hiroki had been as lifeless and bland as a department store mannequin. On the walk over we had barely spoken, and I was beginning to think the only thing he had going for him was that he was hot. The moment I shut the door, however, Hiroki was all over me, moaning, rubbing, struggling to get my clothes off. It was a bit like flipping a robot’s “on” switch.
We had sex in the shower first. To save space, the toilet was also conveniently located in the shower, which at least gave us a place to sit. After, he told me he had to go. “But we just got here. Couldn’t you stay a little longer?” Instantly he was ready for action again and dragging me to bed.
This was to set the night’s odd pattern. We would have sex. He would say he had to go. I asked if he could stay until morning. We would have sex. Wash-rinse-repeat. He didn’t want to talk, he didn’t want to cuddle, he didn’t want to answer any questions. He just wanted to have intercourse in every way humanly possible, immediately switching to “bland” while we were catching our breath in-between.
The next morning he walked me back to the train station, again like a robot. We might have been total strangers rather than two people who just shared a night of amazing sex. At the station, he bowed, and told me he'd like to see me again, so we exchanged numbers, honestly for my part. But he never called me, and the number he gave me was false. On all subsequent forays into Nichome, I never saw Hiroki again.
This was my first intimate encounter with the Japanese "public" face and the "private" one.
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