Japan’s Male Geisha Emerges

With Japanese women paying to enter clubs where beautiful young boys dress and act as bashful schoolboys to please them, it was just a matter of time before the male geisha emerged. A new trend in Japan has gender roles reversed as successful women pay suave young men to spend an evening with them, flattering and entertaining them.

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In a scene that’s straight out of a geisha movie, the men – who are required to be well groomed and presumably, charming and witty — flirt with their paying clients over drinks at a host bar. Tokyo has seen a number of such host clubs with photographs of dashing hosts lining the walls for clients to choose from, sprouting up in recent times.

With their successful careers, Japanese women don’t always have the time to invest in real relationships, and prefer to pay to have a man for the evening doing all the things a date typically does — complimenting her, making her laugh and so on. The host clubs usually don’t encourage sex between hosts and clients (wink wink), but obviously there’s more than just flirting and laughing going on.

Meanwhile, business is booming for these male escorts. Some of the more popular hosts can make up to $50,000 a month!

Eliot Spitzer would be proud.

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