Women working in the Japanese sex industry provide deeply gendered affective labor to male white-collar workers. Their services center on iyashi healing , a carefully constructed performance of intimacy that commingles maternal care with sexual gratification.
Sex workers value this labor as providing socially necessary care to men who work in valorized sectors of the Japanese economy. Yet their own labor is produced within conditions of economic precarity. Moreover, intimate encounters in the sex industry are never divorced from the terms of a gendered economy. Sex workers use gendered discourses of productivity that reflect hierarchies of the value of labor to shape their performances of intimate care.
These discourses demonstrate the centrality of gendered assumptions to conceptions of production and the economy. My friend and I had spent the evening touring a local sex-industry district whose history spans four centuries of operation, and we struck up a conversation with the taxi driver, a sexagenarian native to the area. The taxi driver was conjuring up normative images of male subjects laboring under an excessive work ethic.
Whether he was speaking from personal experience or his observations of the countless male customers who had climbed into his cab perhaps heading toward or leaving this particular sex-industry district , he was suggesting that being a productive worker is incompatible with having romantic relationships.
Male workers did not have the time for emotional investment, yet there was something they apparently needed to be successful: iyashi healing from sex workers. A few weeks earlier, Shiori, a veteran sex worker, had offhandedly told me something similar about the men she encountered in her work:. They put all their effort into their work and when the exhaustion and stress become too much, once in a while they go to the sex industry and refresh themselves.
