Sometimes one can feel that one already knows everything there is to know about the world; but sometimes a film, such as this craftily revealing documentary, provides insights into another culture that seem wholly alien and strange. The subject of 'The Great Happiness Space' is Japan's host bar scene, where women pay for the company of men. At first, this intrigues because of the reversal of the sexes compared to the normal client-prostitute relationship. Soon, one makes new observations: that the hosts are very much "pretty boys", not the heaving hulks of unadulterated masculinity that are often held up as the female ideal, at least in the west; and secondly, that the women themselves are young and attractive, a long way from the stereotype of the average man who pays for women's services. Nor do they resemble the stereotype of Japanese women, quiet and demure; in the bars, they are drunken ladettes, and indeed, their relationships with their hosts seem more like those of groupies to rock stars than of punters to whores. In fact, in accordance with common opinions about female desire, but in contrast to normal practice in the sex industry, physical contact, while it often happens, is not what the women pay for; indeed, the men try to avoid it, as what keeps their clients coming back is the eternally unfulfilled promise of love. In one sense, the hosts are performing a con-trick, by selling this promise; but one also thinks, surely the women are willingly deluded. But when one learns the fantastic sums that the clients pay for this privilege, this phenomenon suddenly no longer seems so benign. But how can they afford to pay so much? The answer is, circularly, that most of the clients (at least, the high-spending ones), are also sex workers. In some ways, this makes sense: it explains their affluence, their craving for cathartic recreation, their floating of social norms, and also, perhaps, their willingness to pay for love not sex; yet in another sense, it seems wholly bizarre that those who practice the arts of illusion on their own clients should nonetheless fall so completely for the deceptions of their hosts. They also seem a little too like "nice girls" to be prostitutes, until it is implied that many actually take up prostitution to feed their habit; a healthier habit, perhaps, then heroin and the other drugs that prostitutes are stereotypically addicted to; but, it seems, one just as compelling.
There's something deeply sad about all this, and yet it never feels sordid: the mutually sustained illusion hides the shockingly expensive transaction that lies behind the party, and the dream. And the girls, though surely headed for a fall, seem strangely calm and contented with their delusions, while their playboy hosts are, in the final scene, shown exhausted and hung-over, physically and perhaps morally exhausted by their work. And relating this scene to anything western seems very hard, even though it has arisen in response to universal urges. Truly, we live in a strange, varied, and tragic world.
There's something deeply sad about all this, and yet it never feels sordid: the mutually sustained illusion hides the shockingly expensive transaction that lies behind the party, and the dream. And the girls, though surely headed for a fall, seem strangely calm and contented with their delusions, while their playboy hosts are, in the final scene, shown exhausted and hung-over, physically and perhaps morally exhausted by their work. And relating this scene to anything western seems very hard, even though it has arisen in response to universal urges. Truly, we live in a strange, varied, and tragic world.