Dr. Akiko Takeyama, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Kansas, "Staged Seduction - Selling Dreams in a Tokyo Host Club"

In Tokyo host clubs, ambitious young men seek their fortunes by selling love, romance, companionship, and sometimes sex to female consumers for exorbitant sums of money. Takeyama reveals a world where all intimacies and feigned feelings are fair game and theorizes the aspirational mode: seducing one another out of the present and into a hopeful future, in Japan’s service-centered economy.