Nobuyoshi Araki
Tokyo Lucky Hole
Published by Taschen, 2021
Size: 14x19.5 cm
704 Pages
Hardcover
Languages: English, German, French
It all began in 1978 in an ordinary cafe near Kyoto. Rumor spread that the waitresses there wore no panties under their miniskirts and sheer tights. Similar establishments soon opened across the country. Men lined up on the sidewalk, willing to pay three times the price for a coffee just to be served by pantyless young women. A few years later, the Japanese became fascinated with pantyless massage parlors.
To differentiate themselves and attract customers, competing brands are offering a variety of additional services, from masturbating customers through a hole in a coffin in which they lie, feigning death, to catering for commuter train fetishists. One destination in particular attracts them in Tokyo: the "Lucky Hole" club. There, the principle is ridiculously simple: the customer stands on one side of a plywood barrier, a waitress on the other, and the wall is pierced with a hole large enough to allow a certain part of the male anatomy to pass through.
Nobuyoshi Araki chose to title Lucky Hole this book intended to immortalize the rise of the Japanese pornographic industry through more than 800 photos of the purveyors and seekers of pleasure who populated the red light district of Shinjuku, in Tokyo, until the February 1985 decree for the control and improvement of new entertainment industries caused the closure of a majority of the sexy places in the country.
Mirrors on the walls, crumpled sheets, cages, orgies, bondage and moans make up these final bacchanalian images, tinged with humor, precise poetry and perplexed observations.