Producing iyashi: Healing and labor in Tokyo’s sex industry

Women working in the Japanese sex industry provide deeply gendered affective labor to male white-collar workers. Their services center on iyashi (healing), a carefully constructed performance of intimacy that commingles maternal care with sexual gratification.

Sex workers value this labor as providing socially necessary care to men who work in valorized sectors of the Japanese economy. Yet their own labor is produced within conditions of economic precarity. Moreover, intimate encounters in the sex industry are never divorced from the terms of a gendered economy. Sex workers use gendered discourses of productivity that reflect hierarchies of the value of labor to shape their performances of intimate care. These discourses demonstrate the centrality of gendered assumptions to conceptions of production and the economy.

One evening in late November 2011, a taxi driver taking a sex worker and me to a nearby train station in northeast-central Tokyo gave us his unsolicited opinion about the sex industry’s existence. My friend and I had spent the evening touring a local sex-industry district whose history spans four centuries of operation, and we struck up a conversation with the taxi driver, a sexagenarian native to the area. We had been talking about recent changes to the district’s physical landscape when he suddenly seemed to want to make sure that I, his young, female, and visibly foreign customer, understood the significance of the sex industry’s existence.“Japanese men,” he told us, as my friend nodded along, “work so hard that they just don’t have the time to spend on seducing a woman. It’s easier to just pay a woman to be healed [iyasareru] by her instead of investing a lot of time and money in a relationship.”

The taxi driver was conjuring up normative images of male subjects laboring under an excessive work ethic. Whether he was speaking from personal experience or his observations of the countless male customers who had climbed into his cab (perhaps heading toward or leaving this particular sex-industry district), he was suggesting that being a productive worker is incompatible with having romantic relationships. Male workers did not have the time for emotional investment, yet there was something they apparently needed to be successful: iyashi (healing) from sex workers.

A few weeks earlier, Shiori, a veteran sex worker, had offhandedly told me something similar about the men she encountered in her work:

“Most customers are sincere and completely ordinary individuals. They put all their effort into their work and when the exhaustion and stress become too much, once in a while they go to the sex industry and refresh themselves. I’ve often had customers show up exhausted who left saying, “Thank you so much. I’m really glad I came. Now I’m ready to face anything again!”

In our conversations about the sex industry, Shiori had often mentioned iyashi. Now, in referring to exhausted customers coming to the sex industry to “refresh themselves,” she was suggesting—as the taxi driver did—that her customers came for a “healing” that replenished their productive capacities as laborers.

These anecdotes are just two of many references to healing that I encountered while conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo on the sex industry. The sex workers I spent time with foregrounded healing—whether as iyashi (healing) or iyasu/iyasareru (to heal/to be healed)—as the central service of their industry. But healing from what? And for what?

Since the 1990s, a multivalent discourse of healing has become a focus of popular attention in many arenas of Japanese life. This discourse is modified in particular gendered ways in the sex industry, where it is a means through which sex workers conceive of and articulate both the nature of the intimacy they provide and its importance.

Women working in the contemporary Japanese sex industry value their care—or iyashi—for what they see as its contributions to the productivity of male white-collar workers. Recent political-economic and social transformations, especially neoliberal restructuring and shifting family forms, have put middle-class, white-collar masculinity in a newly precarious position. These political-economic circumstances lead sex workers to produce new understandings of the deeply gendered affective labor and care work they provide. Their services center on iyashi, manifest here as a carefully constructed performance of intimacy that commingles maternal care with sexual gratification. By helping men to achieve sexual release within a reenactment of a relationship of care and indulgence, women in the sex industry understand themselves as enabling men to renew their productivity. While sex workers see themselves as providing socially necessary care to men who labor in valorized areas of the economy, their own work is stigmatized, short term, and unprotected. This contradictory position demonstrates that intimate encounters in the sex industry cannot be separated from the gendered nature of conceptions of “the economy.” How sex workers talk about productivity reflects gendered hierarchies of the value of labor and shapes their performances of intimate care.

My analysis is based on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Tokyo from 2008 to 2013. My fieldwork took me to sites in and around the sex industry, including diverse establishments where female employees offer sexual services to male customers (e.g., sex parlors, strip theaters), training sessions for new employees, sex-industry exhibition shows for male customers, and venues on the peripheries of this industry (e.g., swingers’ clubs), where I observed and spoke with sex workers and others. In addition to spending time with adult Japanese women working in the sex industry when they were not at work, I conducted formal and informal interviews with female, male, and transgender sex workers, sex-industry business managers and support staff, customers, sex-industry journalists, police officers, and lawyers. My analysis is also informed by the prolific Japanese-language commentary on the sex industry.

Full research is available by this link

Research by GABRIELE KOCH Yale–NUS College

First published on American Ethnologist Magazine, Volume 43, Number 4, November 2016