A Night At A Tokyo Strip Club
"When they open the pussy, you clap."
“Lina-chan, I’m telling you, the first strip show I went to — I cried.”
N, a Tokyo native, and I had met when she was living in LA before the pandemic, right before she came to her senses and moved back to Japan. When I went to Tokyo last month and found her and her new boyfriend sitting behind the Noren divider on the edge of the booth in a smoky Izakaya, it felt like no time had passed. It took mere seconds for us to fall right back into our horny shenanigans.
After asking us a few adorably invasive questions about our sex life, she told Mr. Dune and I all about her recent earth-shattering first experience at a strip show in Asakusa called “Rock-za.” It sounded a lot like my first experience with a strip club: seeing a woman naked and in command of a room really underscored for her the power we have in our bodies, and how captivating each of us is even (or especially) with no clothes on.
“Wait, wait,” Mr. Dune interjected, “do you tip the dancers?”
“Right,” I jumped in, “because there’s no tipping culture in Japan.”
“No tipping,” she confirmed. “But when they open the pussy, you clap.”
Cut to a week later and I’m sitting in a dark basement just blocks from the famous Shibuya Scramble, surrounded by guys that look like older salarymen and the elderly cab driver I’d had in Kyoto who, after a long pause, looked at me in the rear view mirror and proudly proclaimed — “Shohei Ohtani!” Onstage, a dancer in a fedora and sheer pinstriped collared shirt strikes poses on a rotating platform. She spins in slow motion, kind of like a car on The Price Is Right, holding a pose that can only be described as a supported side plank (top leg in the air) as the men in the front row adjust their glasses to stare directly into her vagina. Oh, and since it’s open, they’re clapping. Not a slow clap, but a synchronized, peppy applause of about 120 BPM. A way-too-recent Maroon 5 song is playing over the speakers at ear splitting volume. I recall the vending machine I passed in the lobby and immediately u-turn to get myself a Jim Beam highball in a can for 300 yen. I’m not a big drinker, but I’m not ready to fully raw dog this particular slice of reality.