Araki. Tokyo Lucky Hole

Nobuyoshi Araki's "Lucky Hole" captures Japan's sex industry in full flower before the 1985 New Amusement Business Control and Improvement Act, documenting pleasure-seekers and providers in Tokyo's Shinjuku neighborhood with over 800 photos.

Format: Hardback
Length: 704 pages
Publication date: 16 June 2020
Publisher: Taschen GmbH

In 1978, a coffee shop near Kyoto gained attention for its waitresses who wore no panties under their miniskirts. This trend quickly spread across the country, with men lining up to pay three times the usual coffee price to be served by panty-free young women. However, this craze soon gave way to a new phenomenon: the no-panties "massage" parlor. These establishments offered increasingly bizarre services, such as fondling clients through holes in coffins and catering to commuter-train fetishists. One particularly popular destination was a Tokyo club called "Lucky Hole," where clients stood on one side of a plywood partition and a hostess on the other, with a hole big enough for a certain part of the male anatomy. Taking the "Lucky Hole" as his title, Nobuyoshi Araki captures Japan's sex industry in full flower, documenting in over 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, bondage, and orgies, this is the last word on an age of bacchanalia, infused with moments of humor, precise poetry, and questioning interjections.

Weight: 1084g
Dimension: 201 x 155 x 48 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9783836556385