Product Description

Welcome to The Great Happiness Space: Rakkyo Café. The club's owner, Issei (22), has a staff of twenty boys all under his training to become the top escorts of Osaka's underground love scene. During their training, they learn how to dress, how to talk, how to walk, and most importantly, how to fake relationships with the girls who become their source of income. Join us as Osaka's number one host boy takes us on a journey through the complex and heartrenching world of love for sale in the Japanese underground.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48462 in DVD
• Subtitled in: English

Customer Reviews

[3.5]--I will call this "Pimping Japanese-style."
I don't know much about the Japanese industry on this but I thought it was a interesting outlook. Throughout the world almost everyone that visits strip clubs or even brothels enters the exchange with the understanding that it's just flesh for money. "The Great Happiness Space," is a documentary by director Jake Clennell. Clennel profound us into the world of Japanese host clubs in after hours Osaka. Here, young men spend their nights providing physical but mostly emotional attention to women - or clients as they're referred to. In the early evening men pace the streets and woo women into a club in hopes of scoring a wealthy girl in needs of lip service.

Upon first visit the woman selects a "host" from a book, and he becomes the person that she will always spend time with. Often multiple women spend time with the same host. Competition, more accurately financial competition, ensues for the host's attention. A talented host can find themselves making thousands of dollars per night. In the U.S. women have the upper hand in nightlife entertainment. They are handed free drinks and always command attention from men individually or in groups. Even strip clubs, once considered blighted trash accessible only from neon lit back alleys, have become more acceptable as entertainment venues for both men and women.

The opposite exists at 'Cafe Rakkyo' in Osaka. The men of this and other host clubs seduce women with sweet talk, understanding, champagne, and large stuffed teddy bears. These women pay out the nose for the attention and companionship of the hosts. And they know that the attention and companionship is an act, but conversely they admit that an emotional connection exists. If the women suffer emotionally then the men suffer equally as much physically. Owner Issei explains that the trickiest part is keeping female clients "in the dream," - that is the host must continue to sell the dream that they could be together and in love at some point. When reality hits, as it did for one client, the game is done.

My only fall out about this film is that it dragged a bit long and not really develop into any profound conclusions. Both sides are brutally honest in discussing their realities, to the point it makes everyone else in the world seem like an opportunist just like them. The truth is, this is what everyone else is doing in every relationship in their lives. Telling people what they want to hear, going along with what happens at work because you need the paycheck and compromising your virtues to the point of denial. The gigolos convince themselves what they're doing is justifiable. Strangely, the men seemed more effeminate than the women. Putting a lot of effort into their hair and jewelry, to the point of becoming freakish. Another interesting analogy is that these gigolo boys seem to be "pimps" to the females in the movie. The females sell their bodies to make money to spend on the males. I certainly don't believe Osaka as a whole is nearly that seedy. But strange subcultures exist and are fascinating.

Life as it is
It is a really nice doco of a Japanese-style "normal" heterosexual male escort business extorting money from young women supporting their dreams of love by prostituting themselves.

Extremely handsome young males disclose much of a Japanese culture in general.

Must to see.

The Strange World Of Japanese Host Clubs
This is an excellent documentary about a host club in Osaka called Cafe Rakkyo. The owner is an energetic, charismatic guy named Issei. Issei and his fellow "host boys" spend the evening talking, singing, flirting, drinking and sometimes having sex with a variety of women who pay big money for their company.

I expected the majority of the female customers to be older and perhaps unattractive. But instead most were as young and good looking as their male hosts. In fact, about 70%-80% were prostitutes and others who worked in Japan's vast and very kinky sex industry. This explains how these women could afford to pay so much for an evening's entertainment. Issei claimed to be able to make as much as $50,000 a month while one of the female customers said she had spent as much as $7,000 in a single night. The host boys' favorite technique of manipulation was to create the "illusion of love" and thus get the infatuated girl to keep returning in hopes of an eventual relationship outside the club. As another reviewer mentioned, there also seemed to be an element of pimping involved. Many of the women in the sex industry tried to rationalize their jobs by saying they needed to keep making the big bucks so they could afford to "support" their beloved host boy.

Trying to understand the pyschology behind all this is a complicated task and I am certainly not the one to do it. But one thing I did notice, while travelling in Japan, is that none of the 4 women I dated would allow me to pay for anything, even dinner, and so all costs were shared. My only explanation is that traditional Japanese society is so sexist that perhaps these "modern" women are determined to escape the bonds of male domination by using their newly acquired economic power. That certainly seemed to be part of the "turn on" for the female customers at Cafe Rakkyo.

In any case, I found the subject matter to be fascinating and would recommend this doc to anyone interested in human sexuality and gender identity.