Two ethnographies by Michelle H. S. Ho and Marta Fanasca offer fine-grained explorations of cross-dressing café-bars and escort services in Japan. Both studies illuminate how gender performance, emotion, and economic precarity intersect in Japan’s night-time economy, revealing the subtle forms of labor, desire, and identity that sustain its niche markets.

Services are the largest sector of the Japanese economy, at roughly 70% of gross domestic product (GDP) and 75% of employment. This is a broad category of which a small but significant part encompasses bars, cafes and restaurants. In 2023, food services accounted for over 31 trillion yen (over 205 billion US dollars) in the economy.

There is a vernacular term in Japanese for bars, cafés, and night-time entertainment—the mizu shōbai, or “water trade.” This includes hostess clubs where a mostly male clientele is served by hostesses who engage in banter and encourage the consumption of food and alcohol, and equivalent host clubs where usually female clients are served by male staff. In Shinjuku Ni-chōme in Tokyo and similar areas in other urban centers, there are also businesses catering to gay and lesbian clientele. There are maid cafés, where predominantly male clients are served by young women who dress as maids and address the customers with exaggerated polite language. In butler cafés, usually female clients are served by male staff in butler-style uniforms who employ exaggerated polite language. There are also businesses described as iyashi-kei (healing genre) like “cat cafés” where customers can defuse stress by petting cats while drinking their coffee. “Soaplands,” which provide explicitly sexual services, also come under the category of mizu shōbai. The clients and staff in these industries are segmented according to ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation. These businesses thrive by identifying and catering to ever-more specialized niche markets.

The books under review here focus on very specialized niches. Michelle Ho is interested in josō café-bars, where the staff are male-to-female (MTF) cross-dressers, and dansō café-bars, where the staff are female-to-male (FTM) cross-dressers. Ho carried out ethnographic observation in one josō bar and one dansō bar.

Marta Fanasca is interested in dansō escorts and their clients. These escorts are paid to spend time with mostly female clients in date-like scenarios. Fanasca carried out participant observation in an agency which handles bookings for escorts. She trained and practised as a dansō escort and conducted interviews with escorts, clients and managers. Each chapter of Fanasca’s book opens with a brief autoethnograpic vignette.

The style and presentation of the dansō hosts and escorts may be informed by manga, anime, BL (boys’ love), and the Takarazuka Revue musical stage shows where male roles (otokoyaku) are played by female performers. Both studies were conducted in Akihabara, the area of Tokyo which is identified with otaku culture. Akihabara was originally the place to go for electrical appliances, but is now the mecca for the “nerdish” culture of local and international fans of anime, manga, computer games, and character goods.

Both studies are based on fine-grained and partially autobiographical ethnography. Their ethnographies, however, are grounded in an understanding of the economics of these niche industries. Michelle Ho describes what she calls “pink economies.” Marta Fanasca refers to “affective economies,” the “business of emotions,” and “commodified intimacy.”

Important reference points for studies like this are Arlie Hochschild’s work on “emotional labour” in her book The Managed Heart (1983), Jack Halberstam’s book Female Masculinity (1998), and Judith Butler’s notion of “performativity” in her book Gender Trouble (1990). Butler argues that genders are not innate or natural but are produced through repetitive acts. Marta Fanasca also draws on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s discussion of “immaterial labor” in their book, Multitude (2004). An international audience was introduced to the existence of dansō bars through Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams’ 1995 documentary, Shinjuku Boys.

Hosts, hostesses, and escorts work in irregular, gray economic sectors. They work on a casual basis, usually paid by the hour, but sometimes supplemented by bonuses for encouraging their clients to consume food and alcohol in café-bars. They might also receive gifts from their clients. There is no security of employment and little sense of career progression. Most informants for these studies seem to be in their twenties or thirties. It is likely that the only chance of improving their economic situation as they age would be to set up their own businesses and exploit others in turn. Although some popular hosts, hostesses, and escorts are able to make good earnings while they ride waves of popularity with their customers, others leave the industry due to economic precarity or due to emotional burnout from the strain of the constant performance of emotions. Nevertheless, their work generates profit for the bar owners and the managers of the escort agencies.

These ethnographies were carried out before the COVID-19 pandemic but the monographs were finalized postpandemic, providing a sobering context for thinking about the precarity of this industry (Fanasca: 26, 29, 45–6, 100, 164; Ho: 22, 169–176). The food services section of the services economy bottomed out in 2020. It is recovering, but has not yet returned to pre-2020 levels.

While most of the businesses mentioned in these ethnographies do not officially provide explicitly sexual services (i.e., sexual intercourse), there are undoubtedly gendered and sexualized dimensions to the services provided: the spectacle of gender ambiguity to be gazed at, the provision of food and drink, the entertainment of conversation and company, and the performance of karaoke. Clients seek out hosts, hostesses and escorts who do not conform to mainstream ideas of gender identity in their cross-dressing practices. Ho refers to these forms of gender presentation as “emergent genders.”

As has been pointed out by feminist and queer theorists, the categories of sex, gender, and sexual orientation do not line up neatly. There are also local taxonomies of sex, gender, and sexual orientation which do not easily map onto categories developed in Euro-American scholarship, as has been argued by Peter Jackson in his study of sexual subcultures in contemporary Thailand (Intersections, 2003). The complexities are compounded when working across languages, so Ho and Fanasca each choose to use the local terminology of josō (dressing as female) and dansō (dressing as male). Their work is informed by gender studies, feminist theory, queer theory and the literature on ethnographic and autoethnographic methodologies. On the evidence of their texts, both are fluent in the Japanese language and have deep understandings of Japanese culture, society, and its place in globalizing cultural flows.

Josō and dansō involve modifying the presentation of the body through the choices of dress, hairstyles and make-up and, in the case of dansō, chest-binding. Choices are made with respect to bodily deportment, the pitch of the voice, intonation, gendered pronouns and gendered communication styles. Fanasca relates that, in preparation for working as a dansō escort, she had her hair cut short and tried to present a leaner look through exercise and dietary choices (p. 54).

There are corresponding embodied experiences of the purchasers of these sexualized services. This was clear in Anne Allison’s pioneering ethnography of hostess clubs (Nightwork, 1994), where she considered the embodied interactions between male clients and female hostesses in a Tokyo hostess club. Because Fanasca interviewed the clients of the dansō escorts, she provides insight into their choices of feminine dress, hairstyles, and make-up that contrasted with the masculine presentation of the dansō escorts.

Spending time in josō and dansō café-bars, or purchasing time with dansō for dates, costs time and money. Fanasca’s interviewees range from the wealthy, to those who work and save for time with escorts. She relates one poignant anecdote about a woman who worked in a “soapland,” so she could afford to spend time with her favourite escort (p. 154). While at least some of the entertainment in more mainstream hostess clubs can be treated as a business expense, clients of josō and dansō café-bars use their own private funds, in an economy with significant wage differentials for the average earnings of women and men.

All the informants distance themselves from LGBTQIA+ political movements. Rather, they have found ways of negotiating the sex-gender system in an individual and almost private manner. Nevertheless, these choices and negotiations are embedded in an existing gender order and political economy. Individuals seek sociality in businesses which are part of the capitalist system. Clients are purchasing services which take the form of emotional or affective labor.

Both of these ethnographies are carried out in the commercial entertainment sector. There are, no doubt, many more individuals who are quietly carrying out josō or dansō lives apart from the entertainment sectors. Such individuals would undoubtedly be difficult to locate, but they could provide further insights into the complexities of the systems of sex, gender and sexual orientation in contemporary Japan (see Ishii and Miyata in Culture, Health and Sexuality, 2025).

The actual numbers of those working in these industries are small, but they do have a presence in the media and popular culture. If we are to understand the structures of the sex/gender/sexual orientation systems in contemporary Japan, then these josō and dansō practices and imaginaries are part of the puzzle, and can shed light on the system(s) as a whole. They also stimulate reflections on the place of emotional and affective labor in the contemporary Japanese economy. By seeking emotional connection in commercial transactions, these clients also challenge concepts of public and private.