Archives for posts with tag: Yastaka Sasaki

THE DELICATE BALANCE

May 7, 2015 //
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Flying Free Like A Hawk

Haresh Shah

ballance
“You’re doing a good job if you manage to piss us off fifty percent of the time, and piss our partners off another fifty.” Our boss Bill Stokkan would often tell his managers, usually during one of his pontification sessions. More true of his international divisional heads who had not only to deal with the products but also with the cultural nuances of the people from several countries. In my case, it also worked to my advantage that I was not an American born American. Especially the people I worked with from the non-European and Asian countries felt that I understood them better just because I was born and grew up in India. That I brought a different sensitivity to our working together. Equally so with my American management, because by then I had spent as many years in the West. As difficult as it could be sometimes, I had developed a close rapport with the people on both ends and had earned their confidence and the respect.

Even more so for our Yastaka Sasaki, who handled Playboy account for our Tokyo rep Ray Falk. Not only was his job to interpret the language portion of our communications with the editors and executives at our Japanese partners Shueisha, but also of making sure that what one of us said or wanted didn’t upset the sensitive cultural differences. Sasaki, as everyone called him, spoke fluent English. Almost instantly, he had earned my respect and if not exactly having become close friends, us two had established a certain honesty and trust into each other that went beyond simply working together. Those five days we spent together crisscrossing Japan sealed our bond which never weakened till the very end.

The last I saw of Sasaki was at my home in Evanston, October of 1993. Officially, I had already departed Playboy, but had invited for one last hurrah the group that had come to Chicago to partake in that year’s International Publishing conference. Turned out to be so much fun that it had to be repeated at the tail end of the conference. No more cigars, bemoaned Jeremy Gordin, the editor-in-chief of about to be launched South African edition. I had cooked Indian food and had caterers supply the rest. Everyone was spread out across several rooms of my house. I remember Sasaki and I, along with the Japanese editor-in-chief, the suave Suzuhito Imai sitting around the glass topped breakfast table in the corner, Jan (Heemskerk) standing by the kitchen counter and looking on. As Jan remembers it, placed in the middle of the table is a bowl full of fire red and deep green ultra dynamite Thai chili peppers. Sasaki picks up the red one and is about to take a bite.

‘Be careful, it will kill you!’ I warn.

‘I don’t think so. I am used to eating hot food.’

‘Yeah, but this is not hot food. This is the killer Thai pepper.’

‘Don’t worry, I can handle it.’

Our hands on our chests and our breathing momentarily suspended, we watch him bite off a chunk bigger than even I ever would dare. As if pierced by a sharp arrow, suddenly his face turns red and then contorted shriveled up fig. Tears begin to roll down his eyes. He runs to the sink, but it’s too late. Like three sadists, Jan and Imai and I laugh our butts off. I told you so. I want to say, but I spare him that bit of insult to his injury.

Beyond that, we may have stayed in touch for a while, but nothing in particular that I remember. Six years later I am living in Prague and am now editor-in-chief of successful Serial magazine, which as the name suggests, is focused on the popular television series. Suddenly, not the prime time, but the Sunday morning cartoon series Pokémon is all the rage on the Czech television. We decide to do cover story on the show. But as with other shows, the information and the images available through the local television network is limited to the press material, which everyone else too has. But I want to do an in-depth, but entertaining and informative feature on the show. I am specifically interested in the character’s creator, the elusive, Satoshi Tajiri. There is not much known about him and there isn’t a single photo of him available to accompany the text. Sasaki somehow manages to send me an old black and white shot of the man. We have a local artist do a color illustration of him.

Sasaki is pleased and amused at us re-connecting: and I thought you had faded away in the sunset after Playboy! And here you are, well and alive and no less than are editor-in-chief of a successful magazine in beautiful Prague! I can’t help but sense a certain amount of pride he must have felt at my well being post-Playboy. I obviously feel flattered and pleased at the fact that how pleased he sounds at his Shah-san not having disappeared behind the clouds of the past.

Barely little over a year has passed when I receive a mail from Mary (Nastos) in Chicago. It brings the sad news of Sasaki’s passing on March 20th, 2002. A shock to say the least. I immediately write to his wife Miki and to Ray Falk. Even though I remembered having briefly met Miki once, her husbands’ death prompts long email correspondence between us two. In the correspondence, she describes in poignant details the last days and the last moments of his life and death. In-between the lines I could see how much love there must have been between the two. And yet, their relationship could not have been without ups and downs, in which unbeknown to me, they must have been divorced. The response that came from Ray Falk reporting on the funeral service for the man who had joined him right out of college and worked for him practically till the end, ends with: Mr. Sasaki’s wife who used to work in our office remarried her former husband before his death—-to ease his days—-a wonderful gesture.

As I re-read Miki’s e-mails sent to me soon following his death, there is more than just a wonderful gesture. There is genuine love and an enviable closeness.

In January of 2001, Sasaki is diagnosed with the cancer of esophagus. He is subjected to six weeks long chemo and radio therapies, which helps kill the bad cells along his esophagus. He goes on camping and fishing trips over the Golden Week in April-May holidays. Miki and him take another trip to the mountain lake in June. He suffers a relapse in July. The cancer has metastasized to his liver in multiple areas.

The real battle begins. He submits himself to a new drug in its first phase of the clinical trial. He continues to work and manages his day-to-day life. Going out to eat, going to the movies. And most importantly continues indulging in his passion of fly fishing. With some hopeful moments here and there, on February 28th, 2002, he is told he only has a month left to live. The decision is made to admit him to St. Luka’s International Hospital to receive palliative care to ease his pain instead of seeking a cure. He is moved to the hospice ward on March 7th. The last days of his life ticking off. And yet he fights tooth and nail. When not sedated, he is able to eat soft food, drink juices and water, suck on the ice cubes and go to the bathroom on his own. No needles or tubes sticking in or out of his body.

Flanking his bed are Miki and his childhood friend Ted Teshima, with whom he went to the elementary school in his hometown of Kobe. Only thirty minutes to go, he asks Ted to give him a back rub. Sensing that the end is very near, Ted calls Sasaki’s younger brother Yasuhiro in Kobe. And also calls a close colleague Mike Dauer, while Miki and Ted hold his hands on the either side of the bed and thank him for all he has given them and to wishing him the peaceful journey, his brother and Mike fill his ears with their soothing voices. Tears are rolling down Sasaki’s eyes as he slowly and peacefully retreats in the beyond. It’s Wednesday, March 20th, 2002, the time 19:15. His earthly journey has lasted for 45 years, 3 months and 1 day.

The funeral follows. He is cremated and he came back home in a small box in my arms, writes Miki. Months later in August, Miki along with her uncle and Yastaka’s friend Mike travel to  lake Nikko, where Yastaka and Miki used to go fishing. They scatter some of his ashes around one of his favorite spots in the river. At other time, Miki and Mike spend hours fishing at a smaller lake nearby, and sprinkle more of his ashes. They don’t catch any fish. They begin to raw back to the shore. There is a hawk hovering up above their heads. Just as they are about to reach the shore, they watch the bird dive down to the surface of the water very close to them and snatch up a big fish in its claw and fly away. Stunned, Mike and Miki decide the hawk is a better fisherman.

On a different stretch the next day when Miki is fishing alone, she notices another hawk lingering up above and then suddenly diving into the river in front of her, passing just above her head, the bird catches a brook trout and off flies up, up and away. It must have been Yastaka. Thinks Miki. The thought of him turning into a hawk and flying freely in the skies of Nikko from the mountain to mountain and to the lake to the river is really soothing and nice to me.

Fittingly, Ray Falk wrote to his friends in his brief report about Sasaki’s funeral. The picture of Sasaki at the funeral featured a big fish—-Lake fish were his favorite. There was a fishing rod near the coffin and a guitar at the other end.

Shah-san, I remember my husband talked about you sometimes. Very recently (like early February). The episode that I remember well that he told me was the trip that you and my husband went to Kanazawa city in northern Japan many years ago. You two had no interest what-so-ever to the touristic spots like the very famous historic Japanese garden which most tourists usually visit when they go to Kanazawa, but you two headed straight to the local market where they sell all the fish and vegies and interesting stuff. Shah-san loves market hopping anywhere he goes, that’s what he said, if I remember correctly, reminisces Miki.

In response to my mail to Ray Falk, he writes back:

Dear Haresh,

Thanks for your interest in Y. Sasaki!

If you had not left PLAYBOY, this might not have happened. He was a great Haresh Shah fan and would have listened to your advice on life and living.

That’s a heavy cross to bear, but flattering nevertheless.

© Haresh Shah 2015

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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On Friday, May 22, 2015

TO HELL AND BACK

When I was fired for the second and the last time from Playboy, included in my severance package was a stint with one of the most expensive outplacement firms. Not knowing exactly what the hell they did for you, I plunged into it head first, to the extent that I must have been the only executive to have a unique distinction of being fired by an outplacement firm. And the rage that erupted. Thinking of it still gives me shivers 🙂

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Categories Friendship, Japan, Memoire, Playboy, Profile, Yastaka Sasaki

THE NAIL THAT STUCK OUT…

November 20, 2014 //
1

Haresh Shah

Daring To Be Different

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When our Japanese partners were reported what Shah-san was up to all through the week, flabbergasted, the executives and the editorial team are in awe of the fact that an executive of Playboy Enterprises was in their country expressly for meeting with them and yet they would not see him for an entire week. They were equally astonished when heard from Ray Falk’s office that Mr. Shah, nay Shah-san, accompanied by Sasaki-san, was crisscrossing  their country and visiting places in an attempt to glean first hand some understanding of the land  and its culture, its people in general and the young existing and potential readers of the Japanese edition of Playboy in particular.

Even though they didn’t know what to make of this Shah-san, they were positively impressed and intrigued, not to mention amazed. And then approved of my itinerary as was set up by Ray’s office. The places I would visit and the people I would be exposed to should give me a fair idea of some of what they had hoped to communicate to me when Lee (Hall)  had originally conveyed to them what my mission would be working with the new team.  That my role would go beyond giving them pep-talk,, turn around and then catch a plane back home. That I would roll up my sleeves and work hand-in-hand with them, not only in making and re-defining the magazine itself, but also talk about and make possible ancillary publishing activities as an extension to the regular issues.

I have returned to Tokyo that Friday night from our six day long exploratory trip through the country. On Saturday morning, I am met by Yuko Kato of Shueisha. American educated, Yuko is not a part of the creative editorial staff. She is more of an “it” girl who is assigned to expose me to the bustling with colors and the neon lights in the high decibel city of Tokyo. Yuko is in her mid-to late twenties, moon faced – sort of an attractive girl who is brimming with energy and enthusiasm to add and to finish up what Yastaka Sasaki had started out. It’s a rainy and a crowded day. Not that Tokyo is ever without crowd, but it’s Saturday and the people are out in troves, further cramming the space with their colliding umbrellas. Yuko and I huddled under a large umbrella loaned by the hotel, we negotiate the streets and alleys of the city. Duck in and out of the various places that I would visualize years later when I began to read works by Haruki Murakami. Neighborhoods clustered with cafes and jazz clubs and the cozy little bars and down home compact and crowded mom and pop eating places. The dark and narrow alleys, dingy little public establishments, the smallness of everything that would eventually define Tokyo and Japan for me.

After having stuck to the typical Japanese eating places through the week, Yuko takes me to the Italian Toscana and French Ile de France.  At night we end up at the Tokyo branch of the discotheque  Maharaja. We spend most of the Sunday roaming about the all alluring neon signs bedecked Ginza. That night I have a date with uncle Jaman’s publishing associate Frank Watanabe accompanied by Mrs. Watanabe and his son Nori. They take me to Zakuro, an exclusive and expensive Shabu-Shabu restaurant. Sort of like Swiss fondue, cooking your own food in the boiling water in a larger pot, instead of in smaller fondue pot sizzling with oil. We are seated on the floor and are served by traditional Geishas. They prepare the spread for us, making sure that the water is properly heated and spiced and then bowing, reverently walking backwards, leave us to prepare and enjoy our meal. Popping in now and then to make sure our Sake cups are filled and if we’re in need of anything else.

Submerged in all things Japanese for an entire week, now I feel ready to face the Shueisha crowd and hopefully be able to ask and answer and defend a group of them sitting across the long conference table, with me alone on the other side, albeit Sasaki or Kayo Hayashi interpreting by my side.

Even though I have already forgotten about the hot water I had found myself in five years earlier over Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song,  however faint the memory, it still plays out in the front of my eyes.

As I face about ten of them, sitting across the table from me, the showdown about to erupt, conjures up the image of a hundred Kauravas to my lone Arjuna with Krishna as my chariot driver on the battle field of Mahabharata. Me having to fend off my hundred step-brothers, the bows tensed and the arrows ready and pointed at me like in a modern firing squad, over something I had presumed settled between them and the rights manager Jean Freehill in my office. The Japanese language rights to the excerpt  of the Mailer book. That was 1979 and to the best of my memory the beginning of splitting of the rights to the text that was bought by Playboy. Up until then, the rights to the text would normally be available to all of our editions around the world. But not in the case of The Executioner’s Song. The foreign rights were sold separately. Playboy wasn’t even given an option to bid on them.

I no longer remember exactly, but to add an insult to the injury, the Japanese rights were sold to Shueisha’s arch rivals, Kodansha. I knew our rights department had fought and negotiated hard for our international editions, but to no avail. I remember some clever literary agent summing it up for me. There is no such thing as exclusive rights any more, that the rights now could be infinitesimally divisible. Whew!!

Soon the pattern followed when Playboy bought a bunch of short stories by Gabriel García Márquez, our internal table of contents started showing up with NO FOREIGN RIGHTS stamps in the bold type face. In my naiveté, I show up at García Márquez’ agent Carmen Balcell’s office in Barcelona.  I offer her $10,000.00 for foreign rights. She all but laughs me out of her office. But considering that after all I was a señor de Playboy, gives me as a gift, the original first edition of the master’s El Amor en los Tiempos de Cólera. The book I still cherish and from which read a paragraph now and then and be in awe of how fluid his original words in Spanish are.

Even though this phenomena of  NO FOREIGN RIGHTS  by now is more of a norm than an exception, I am still prepared to face the “squad” with whatever grill worthy issues they may have to confront me with.

But wonder of all wonders, this time around, not only they don’t have any bones to pick with Chicago, there are absolutely no group meetings planned. My whole week of already being in Japan and not wanting to see them so that I would have a better feeling of things Japanese, have thrown them off balance. Instead they have decided to meet with me individually or in pairs to discuss with me section-by-section of how they envision the future editorial direction of the magazine and are eager for my input. And even more astonishing is: other than a perfunctory quick visit to the editorial department, they have arranged to meet with me informally at cafes and bars. In restaurants and talk over lunches. Absolutely un-Japanese thing to do.

I guess I have earned my stripes over the five years since my last visit to Tokyo by collaborating closely with them and having facilitated several mutually profitable special projects. My week long trip through their country expressly designed to get know them better has added to the PR rhetoric from Lee and Ray. It has become clear to Shueisha, that Shah-san is not there to lecture them. That honest to God, as communicated to them, I am indeed there to roll up my sleeves and become a part of their team  in Tokyo and their solid ally when back in Chicago. They are appreciative and welcoming in the way I would have never imagined the Japanese would ever do.

I am overwhelmed by the biggest honor bestowed upon me one evening by the top Shueisha executive Mr. Tadashi Wakkana by hosting a dinner for me at the garden restaurant Happoen. Invited are about twenty of the company’s top executives and the editorial staff of Playboy.

It’s a traditional Japanese affair in which we are all seated on the floor in a large circle and are being entertained by a group of Geishas. What I remember fondly of that evening and with a smirk on my face is: as we settle down, an aging and experienced Geisha kneels down in front of me. She is holding a platter full of little ceramic Sake cups surrounding the tokkuri (carafe), ready to be filled . The polite most and the traditional thing for me to do would have  been to motion her to fill the cup and then wait for all the glasses being served and for Mr. Wakkana to propose a toast.

As much as I love Japanese food, raw fish as in sushi and sashimi and all, I just haven’t acquired taste for the two of their most traditional beverages. Green tea and Sake. And what I really feel like having is and normally drink with the Japanese food is one of their great beers – fresh and chilled.  Either Kirin or Sapporo. But at the time, I am in my newly acquired taste for the crisp and cold Asahi Dry phase. I almost accept the cup of Sake, and then thinking to myself, that would mean an evening full of drowning the potent liquor that I didn’t care for in the first place, why not be honest and have a beer instead? After all, I am the guest of honor! I also know that by then I have accumulated fair amount of capital in the goodwill, perhaps I can risk just a little bit of it and dare order a glass of the thirst quenching beer instead.

So I ask the Geisha, whether they had any beer? For a moment, just for a split second, there is a palpable hush in the room. I have knowingly committed a faux pas. But then, without missing a beat, from the opposite side of the circle, Mr. Wakkana commands: ‘I’ll have a beer too!’ And guess what? Everybody in the room orders biru. Very Japanese thing to do. Deru kui wa utareru. Literally: Nail that sticks out, gets hammered  down!

It turns into a lovely evening. Along with the exquisite food, first the beer and than the Sake also flows. Rest of my stay goes well. The discussions, the agreements, the concrete plans and the time table for their execution of editorial changes and the promotion to follow.

But there still had to be a group meeting. Not the kind I remember from my earlier visit, cooped up in a windowless corporate meeting  room, sitting around with a group of editors at a long conference table with me alone on the opposite side with Kayo or Sasaki sitting next to me to interpret.

This time around, they have another surprise waiting for me. On Thursday afternoon, Sasaki and I board yet another bullet train and head for the resort town Hakone, known for its hot springs and picturesque Mount Fuji, about sixty miles (96 km) south of Tokyo. After having checked into yet another Ryokan, Sasaki escorts me to the inn’s spa featuring its own private hot tub. Sitting around are all the editors I have worked with through the week, naked as jaybirds and sipping on their Kirin beers, the bottles resting by them over the rim. The splashing in the tub and drowning of beer and an elaborate dinner that follows makes for a wonderful farewell. Mission accomplished, I am touched at finally being admitted to their inner circle.

© Haresh Shah 2014

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, November 28, 2014

UNDERNEATH HER CLOTHES

You might think that the glamour photographers who shoot the nudes would be devoid of any such male fantasies. After all, what would remain to fantasize about when you see the most beautiful women in their most seductive attributes through your lens and watch them prancing around the studio in the nude, day in and day out?

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Categories Corporate Matters, Culture, Food & Wine, Japan, Social Customs, Travel

SEX EDUCATION À LA JAPONAISE

April 18, 2013 //
0

Haresh Shah

Lessons In Interactive “’Bout The Birds And The Bees”

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My brain is still busy processing what I had just seen, when I see flailing hands of the several young men in the front row. Yastaka Sasaki explains to me that they are playing rock, paper, scissors. The winner would then get to climb up the stage and get to fuck the girl who has just concluded the “second act” of her striptease routine and is now waiting in front of the sparse post-lunch time crowd of young “salarymen”. Completely naked, she is squatted there on the stage floor on her knees, legs spread wide apart, the spotlight still focused on the exposed glistening inner layers of her vulva peeking through her dense and dark, artfully manicured patch of pubic hair. Her face wears a contemptuous frown with a forced smile on her lips. Staring intensely at the faces of the men in front of her, as if daring the one who would take her as a prize right there on the stage with everyone in the audience watching.  Having eliminated the rest, about six of them, the winner eagerly climbs up the stage, and honest to God, there they are, just a few feet away from our eyes – her lying down on her back, opening her legs wider, her knees pointing upward like a dead duck on a kitchen table waiting to be stuffed. Her hands resting on sides, as if preparing to lift her slight frame into a bridge position for a gym routine.

The man, having hastily removed his clothes wedges himself between her open legs, tugging at his penis, possibly to give it an extra  bit of hardness, slips on a condom and then plunges it into the girls’ already waiting and well lubricated vagina and begins to pump. He doesn’t last long. A minute, two at the most, before falling by her side. What I remember still the most is the cryptic smile crossing the girl’s thin lips. Her little fish eyes fluttering, her getting up, picking up her discarded clothes  from the stage and walking away.

I am in Japan on behalf of Playboy. One of the enticements my boss Lee Hall had dangled in front of me to tear me away from the sunny Santa Barbara, California to the cold and cloudy Chicago, was an assignment in Japan.

Lee made good on his promise and sent me on a short exploratory trip to Tokyo within the first months of my moving back to Chicago in 1979. But it wasn’t until the mid 1985 that he actually  assigned me in earnest to the project. In his opinion, though the Japanese had started out wonderfully well ten years earlier, now the sales had began to go south and something needed to be done. On their part, our partners Shueisha had brought in a whole new editorial team and Lee felt that I could form a part of that team, and help them lead in a fresh editorial direction, thus helping them  gain back some of their lost readers and hopefully find some new ones.

Flattered as I was, technically I was still the division’s Production Director. Perhaps because I had proven my editorial impulse, working with Playboy in the Netherlands, two years earlier, he must have felt that I could do the same with the Japanese. But Japan was not little Netherlands. Plus I had lived and worked in Holland for several months and had some idea of what the country and its people were like.  But Japan seemed like a completely different planet. The two times that I had been there for short visits, I couldn’t say with any certainty that I even had a least  sense of what the Japanese were all about.  Even those two short trips had made me realize that the Japanese were like no other people I had ever known. I needed to know more about the country, the people and its culture before I would take on the challenge.  Lee didn’t only understand but totally concurred with me

He  recommended that I read Edwin Reischauer’s The Japanese – in his opinion, one of the most defining books ever written about the country and its people.  My first sense of Japan came from reading Ek Zalak Japan Ni (A Glimpse at Japan)  by the most prolific Indian artist and writer, Aabid Surti, who has since become a close friend. I had also read the Japanese novelists that included Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima. I added to them, Behind the Mask by Ian Buruma and Pictures from the Water Trade by John David Morley. Several months later, I felt prepared enough to board the Northwestern flight to Tokyo.  But I still wasn’t ready to be face-to-face with the Japanese editors and the executives of the giant Shueisha Inc., who held the license to publish the magazine. What I wanted to do first of all was to get to know and experience Japan on my own.

●●●

I arrived in Tokyo on Monday night. Checked into the Imperial Hotel. Got a good night’s sleep, dumped my baggage in the hotel’s storage.  A duffle bag slung over my shoulder, I ventured out accompanied by our Tokyo rep Ray Falk’s assistant Yastaka Sasaki. We boarded the outbound Hakusana #1 – Japan’s famed  Shinkansen – the bullet train, that would take us  from Tokyo’s Ueno to Kanazawa.

There we checked into an old world charming inn, Miyabo Ryokan.  And for a week crisscrossed  the country, visiting campus in Kanazawa, hanging out at student cafes and bars, eat at all night Japanese restaurants, browse bookstores, interview students in their club, go discoing in a place called – of all things, Maharaja.  Visited Meiji Mura – the open air architectural museum and also spent some time watching middle aged housewives amidst the deafening clanging of Pachinko Parlors, their gazes fixed on the pinball machines and their hands frantically pulling the handles as if on auto pilot.  Absolutely amazing! Staying always at Ryokans, the  traditional Japanese Inns with tatami mattresses on the floor, with the center of the tiny room serving as the spot where you lounged, slept and dined. Eating dried fish, sticky rice and green tea for breakfast which tasted awful, but still! On the trains we ate box lunches and in towns stuck to eating at down home sushi, yakatori and tepanyaki restaurants.

The idea was to observe, experience and absorb as much as one humanly can of  the country, its people and their lives within six short  days.  Also to see places and people where our readers are most likely to be. Perhaps even glean some insight into them. Basically, experience first hand the smells, the sounds and the sights of the land of the Rising Sun.

‘There is something else that you must know and see about the Japanese young men,’ Sasaki said, if a bit hesitating.

‘Sure.’

So here we are in Toyota city of  Nagoya, sitting in a small dingy and dim lit place called Tsurumai Theatre Live Strip Show.  Its  no bigger than a large living room with a small round stage at the other end, in front of which are several rows of randomly placed individual chairs with vending machines on the wall behind the audience. Machines are stocked with Coke and other soft drinks as well as an assortment of Japanese beers. Unlike what one would expect in a place like this, the beverages are prized the same as they would in a company cafeteria. There is no bar, neither the girls coming out in the audience to hustle.  I remember, the entrance fee being an  equivalent of US$ 12.- which even by the standards of 1985 was cheap, very cheap by the Japanese standards.

Not much different from the striptease joints in Soho district of London, except the audience and no hassle ambience. Most every one here is plus or minus twenty five years of age, compared to  me at forty five and Sasaki a bit younger, we would be considered dirty old men. If not quite the middle aged geezers of London. Other than a bit of  commotion at the end of the performance, with the men in the front row playing scissors, paper and rock, audience is extremely well behaved, almost reverential. They are all dressed in their young “salarymen” uniform of dark western suites and mostly white shirts with appropriately somber ties.

But what is different is the show itself. No holds barred to say the least. The dance routine as mechanical. The girls would strip in the standard, one piece of clothing at a time till she is completely naked.  Normally, this is where the show must end. But no, it serves just a warming up for more routines to follow.

The spotlight is focused on the center of the girl’s wide open legs, she inches forward to the edge of the stage where the heads of the scissors, paper, rock crowd is bopping up and down to get a closer look at the innermost anatomy of the other sex. She puts her index finger and the thumb on either side of the skin surrounding outer lips and stretches them open even farther, looking over the heads of half a dozen or so men now hovering over her crotch. And then she moves her hand and extends it to take one of the men’s outstretched hand in hers. Has him fold rest of his fingers and let the index finger stick out. A pack of condom appears in her hand, which she tears open with her teeth and slowly sheaths the man’s finger with it, holds and guides it slowly inside her vaginal canal, guiding him to vacillate it in and out motion and then lets him do it on his own. It is no longer erotic for me. If I did feel aroused earlier in the act, now I could feel my arousal deflecting. And yet,  as outrageous as it is, its absolutely fascinating. The girl guiding the man’s finger in and then allowing him to explore on his own, as if handing your little kid the house key and teaching him how to open the door

The music changes and another girl saunters on the stage. This one is dressed like a nurse in starched white uniform, head piece and all, carrying a small emergency kit, a white box with the red cross  painted on the lid. The same routine. Removing of the clothing from the head piece down to the shoes and eventually the skimpy pair of panties. But even while the dance is in progress, I notice something in the background, which I presumed to be just a mesh screen to cover the wall.  Nope! Now the back of it is lit up and one could sense something else going  on behind the screen.  It now looks like back-lit silver threads, hanging from the ceiling down to the top of the stage and behind that is the silhouette of a couple frolicking in the nude. I give Sasaki a sideway glance.

‘One of the losers of the scissors, paper, rock can buy her services by paying extra.’

Set up in the background is a rudimentary bedroom with a full size mattress on the floor. The young man is lying on it on his back, the girl is leaning down and massaging his cock and when she has brought it up to its full glory, she pulls out a pack of condom from her little purse  lying by the side of the mattress, tears the foil open and slips it over his penis in what seemed like a ritual manner. She ties her hair in a pony and then plunges down her open mouth to engorge him and begins to oscillate, as if also to the rhythm of the music being played for the stripper in the  foreground. A smile breaks out on my face as I once again look sideways at Sasaki, amazed and shaking my head. What I am thinking is: So these are our readers!! And this is in the country where they hire kids to blotch out pubic hair in imported magazines?  

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

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http://www.downdivision.com

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TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGIN’

Next Friday, April 26, 2013

MOTHER KNOWS BEST

Playboy once ran a pictorial, Father Knows Best (February 1979), in which they ask: Would you let your daughter pose nude for  Playboy? How about mothers? Would you?

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