Commodified Romance in A Tokyo Host Club by Akiko Takeyama Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (takeyama@uiuc.edu) Introduction My original paper title was “Queer Eyes For the Japanese Guy” but I changed it to “Commodified Romance in a Tokyo Host Club.” Based on 10 months of fieldwork in Tokyo host and hostess clubs that I’m currently doing for my doctoral dissertation, today I would like to talk a little bit about male hosts and their female clients, what kind of social context the female clients’ desires derive from, and finally what the host club phenomena means to the gender and heterosexual norms in Japan. Ultimately, I intend to demonstrate some aspects of how the Japanese host club simultaneously reinforces and destabilizes prevailing gender norms, and by extension heterosexual norms in Japan. Background of Host Clubs First, I am going to explain a little bit about what a host club is and who are the so-called hosts and their clients. First of all, host clubs are not new. The first host club opened in Tokyo in 1966, but it mainly targeted upper-class matrons, wives of company executives, wealthy widows and so forth. Back then the host club business was very exclusive and largely invisible to the public. However, in the last five years, host clubs have drawn a lot of media attention and become familiar to mainstream Japanese. The numbers of the clubs are also rapidly increasing particularly in big cities like Tokyo, Yokohama, and Osaka. An estimated 200 clubs and over 1