Araki: Tokyo Lucky Hole (Bibliotheca Universalis)

Pleasure parlors: Araki's tour of an erotic underworld It started in 1978 with an ordinary coffee shop near Kyoto. Word spread that the waitresses wore no panties under their miniskirts and see-through pantyhose. Similar establishments popped up across the country. Men waited in line outside to pay three times the usual coffee price just to be served by a panty-free young woman. Within a few years, a new craze took hold: the no-panties "massage" parlor. Competition for customers led to an increasingly bizarre range of services from fondling clients through holes in coffins whilst they lie naked inside playing dead to interiors catering to commuter-train fetishists. One particular destination was a Tokyo club called "Lucky Hole." Here, the premise was ridiculously simple: clients stood on one side of a plywood partition, a hostess on the other; in between them was a hole big enough for a certain part of the male anatomy to pass through. Taking the Lucky Hole as his title, Nobuyoshi Araki captures Japan's sex industry in full flower, documenting in more than 800 photos the pleasure-seekers and providers of Tokyo's Shinjuku neighborhood before the February 1985 New Amusement Business Control and Improvement Act put a stop to many of the country's sex locales. Through mirrored walls, bed sheets, cages, orgies, the bondage and the groans, this is the last word on an age of bacchanalia, infused with moments of humor, precise poetry, and questioning interjections.
Text in English, French, and German