Araki. Tokyo Lucky Hole

Japan’s sex industry in full flower. In more than 800 photos, Nobuyoshi Araki captures the sex shows, orgies, and bizarre crazes of Tokyo’s Shinjuku red light district. From no-panties massage parlors to the notorious commuter-train fetishists, this is the last word on an age of bacchanalia, infused with moments of humor, poetry, and questioning interjections.It started in 1978 with an ordinary coffee shop near Kyoto. Word spread that the waitresses wore no panties under their miniskirts. 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. Increasingly bizarre services followed, from fondling clients through holes in coffinsto commuter-train fetishists. One particularly popular destination was a Tokyo club called “Lucky Hole” where 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.Taking the Lucky Holeas 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, the bondage and the orgies, this is the last word on an age of bacchanalia, infused with moments of humor, precise poetry, and questioning interjections.