Entertaining Women is My Job

Host - Thor WILLIAMSON

At age 26, Thor Williamson seems to enjoy the kind of job most men could only dream of. His office, if you can call it that, looks like a bachelor's paradise, filled with gold-colored chandeliers, red carpet, mirrored ceilings and walls, and a well-stocked liquor cabinet. His work brings him into contact with thousands of female clients, some very beautiful and wealthy, for whom he is paid a handsome commission to entertain. His salary averages between four to eight million yen a month - enough to make the average Japanese salary man green with envy.

But unlike the salaryman, at the end of a long, hard day Williamson can't take off his suit and tie. In his business, there's simply no time for breaks. Williamson is a "host," one of thousands of young Japanese men making a living entertaining Japan's increasingly restless and well-heeled women.

Walk anywhere at night in Tokyo's famous Kabuki-cho sex district, the largest in Japan, and you can't miss them. Hosuto, as they are called in Japanese, prowl the streets, making every effort to draw the attention of females. With their fashionable dark suits, tanned skin, and perfectly set medium-long hair, they show off their assets like peacocks preening for the attention of potential mates.

Success depends on making a strong impression, and in that respect, Williamson, who is Canadian-Japanese, stands out in the crowd. With the help of his prominent western features and memorable first name, he has vaulted himself into the top ranking at Club Ai, one of the oldest host clubs in Kabuki-cho and perhaps the best known in Japan.

Hosting is strenuous duty
Williamson's choice of occupation could hardly have been predicted from his upbringing. Born and raised in Hiroshima, his father is a former protestant missionary from Canada who sent his son to international schools in Japan. After graduating from high school in Kobe, Williamson went on to study at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

But after one year he dropped out, he says, because he felt he wasn't learning anything. He stayed in Canada for a couple of years toiling in low-paying, service-sector jobs, and eventually came back to Japan in 1999. A few months later he was living in Tokyo, and at the urging of some friends, entered the hazy underworld of the hosting industry.

"Everything in this business is liquid," Williamson says, referring to the Japanese term mizu shobai. "There is nothing solid in the hosting business." On the surface, hosting is fairly concrete. Customers-mostly young women-come to the host club during evening business hours for "professional companionship," much like men do when they go to hostess clubs.

They order food and drinks, have conversation, and pay the bill when they leave. Designated hosts and their helpers get roughly 40 percent, the club gets the rest. Both sides get rich. Hosting is easy, right? "Only in dramas, not in the real world," says Williamson.

For most, hosting is strenuous duty. In Williamson's case, he works seven days a week and sleeps an average of two to three hours a day. Last year, he took six days off for the whole year. Those weren't vacation days: "I was too tired, too hung over, too sick to come to work," he says with a laugh. Because he is the only bilingual host at the club, he sometimes has to come in for foreign guests at a moment's notice. "The hours are crazy," he says.

One time last year, Williamson went on a 60-hour drinking binge with a group of customers who spent nearly 3 million yen on him. He threw up five times, and completely lost track of time, he says. The lack of sleep and alcohol abuse, in addition to his cigarette habit, is taking a toll on his health.

What happens in this business is just fantasy
But like many hosts, he is trapped between the demands of the club, which penalizes hosts who don't meet sales targets, and his dreams of financial freedom. "Either way, if you make a lot of money, you can't take days off, and if you don't make much, you can't take days off, either."

Despite the stress, Williamson insists he's having "too much fun doing this job to get burned out." For one, he enjoys showing customers a good time. "I look at it [hosting] as a hospitality business. We are there to make sure that the customer has fun."

He likes the performance-based pay system. "You can be 20 years old and have 10 people working under you. You can't do that in regular Japanese business." But it's the casino-like nature of the job that fascinates him most. Williamson is a gambler, and says that luck plays a big part in the hosting game. "There's a lot of cases where in one night you can get really rich or really broke."

Williamson says one time a customer walked into the club and turned a bottom-ranking host into the "number one" host, spending over 100,000,000 yen. Three months later, the host quit because the woman had bought him everything he wanted. Such customers, called futoi kyaku, are relatively rare.

On the other side are the lonely, needy types who either want to sleep with hosts or order expensive bottles of Dom Perignon but don't have the money to pay. Williamson has been stalked by such customers, and ripped off by others. "Anywhere there's a bright light, there has to be a dark shadow," he says.

"A lot of what happens in our business is just fantasy," Williamson says. "This job takes everything out of perspective, so I try to keep perspective on life. As a career, I don't think I'll be doing this at 60."

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