Boys
For Sale: Directed by Itako, produced by Ian Thomas Ash and Adrian Storey. Director of Photography- Adrian Storey. Animation by Jeremy Yamamura. Music by Kazaguruma. Running
Time: 76 minutes.
Rating:
4/4
For
all the progress we’ve made in recent decades raising general awareness of
marginalized groups around the world, the field of sex work still remains fairly
underrepresented and unexamined within cultures at large. This is especially the case for male sex
workers, who often have to deal with their own particular gender-related
stereotypes on top of the more general ones associated with selling your body
for money.
Boys For Sale, a new documentary
directed by Itako (his first feature film) and produced by Ian Thomas Ash
(previous winner of the Nippon Visions Jury Award and the Nippon Visions
Audience Award), directs its attention straight at the heart of these tangled
preconceptions surrounding an often-forgotten world. It is perhaps the first film to delve into a
particular subset of Asian gay culture within a particularly conservative
country still struggling with the idea of open homosexuality, and is one of the
best documentaries to air so far in 2017.
Within
Shinjuku 2-Chome (yes, there’s a reason the area is called that), considered
the gay center of all of Asia, specific bars and locales offer their (male)
customers the services of their urisen. This term applies to young “boys” (the
majority are in their late teens or early 20’s) sold off nightly to customers
and taken to specially-prepared rooms, where they are then expected to perform
whatever sexual acts that particular customer desires. Officially, prostitution is illegal in Japan,
but the laws as they currently exist define sex work as being between a man and
a woman. By ensuring that their
clientele are all men, managers of these establishments are able to thread this
fine legal loophole without facing any real legal threat. They further limit their own culpability by
insisting that the prices paid for their urisen
are only for drinks, dinner, and time spent together, and whatever may happen
(or not happen) between the boys and their buyers in the upstairs rooms is none
of their business.
The
finer points of this world- its rules and traditions, how it operates, how
these young men are selected and end up in this line of work- are explained to
us through a series of interviews with current and former urisen. They were all given
the choice by the director of having their faces and voices shown unaltered and
hiding their real names. Some hid
nothing, others wore masks to at least cover their faces and took a codename,
and others not only hid their faces, but also asked that their voices be
altered as well. Their respective ages,
backgrounds, and views on what they do vary widely, and for the most part the
film simply lets their astonishing tales speak for themselves.
Sex
workers in general have an endless variety of motivations and reasons for
getting into prostitution- many choose it willingly and are happy doing it,
some are pushed into it through chance, circumstance, or even tragedy, and some
are actively tricked and/or enslaved- and urisen
are no different, although the “hush-hush” nature of how the industry
operates means there is often an extra level of deception in pulling the boys
in. Many admit in their interviews that
they had no idea beforehand what was expected of them, or were actively lied to
when they first interviewed about what, exactly, they were getting into (one
bar manager, interviewed in the film, obviously denies this).
Perhaps
one of the most fascinating details provided in the film (for me, at least)
touches on Japan’s still-considerable discomfort with the very idea of
homosexuality, at least compared with Western cultures. Being openly gay in any setting, even within
the world of male prostitution, is still considered so strange or taboo that,
while many gay men do work as urisen (and
most of their clients are clearly either themselves gay, or at least not
entirely straight), it’s still silently frowned upon to work as a urisen and be openly gay; most managers
(and clients) expect you to at least pretend that your straight, which opens up
a whole other realm of discussion about human sexuality, psychology and
behavior that I don’t have nearly enough room to get into here. Suffice it to say this is one of those films
loaded with enough material for hours upon hours of discussion after seeing
it.
Perhaps
the most inspired creative choice in the film was the decision to use drawings
to depict what sort of acts the boys do.
The film’s creators decided early on to not even attempt sneaking in
cameras to film actual customers with the boys, and this is crucial to the film’s
power; the use of drawing allows the movie to delve into frank, graphic detail about
everything the boys do in their rooms without running the risk of being voyeuristic
or pornographic. Given the importance of
hearing these stories, and all the problems and challenges raising awareness of
these people brings, being able to walk this fine line is essential to the film
succeeding as well as it does. Giving critics
fodder for accusations of exploitation could have easily derailed the entire
project.
The
film’s music plays an equally remarkable role in enhancing the feel and
atmosphere of the movie. It’s rare
enough for a documentary to have its own decent score, and even rarer for it to
be as powerful and noticeable as it is.
It’s a dynamic and energetic score that adds a great extra vibe to every
scene.
Another
particularly powerful aspect of the movie is its reminder of how major
disasters, both man-made and natural, have a particular ripple-effect in the
field of sex work. One of the
interviewed boys openly says that he only ended up as an urisen because he came to the city desperate for work after losing
his home in the tsunami/Fukushima catastrophe of 3/11. If that had never happened, he would never
have even considered getting into sex work, and he is certainly far from the
only person of his generation with similar reasons for becoming a
prostitute.
Even
after several weeks of thought following the film’s premiere, I find it
extremely difficult to quantify my feelings on this topic. Are these boys slaves? Victims?
Mere cogs in the machine? Would
better regulations and more government more oversight help? There are many former urisen working within Shinjuku 2-Chome who lament Japan’s severe
lack of general education regarding STDs and safe sex. Given the dangerous (and potentially deadly)
effect this can have within the field of male sex work, many of them work hard
to push back against the sort of ignorance that can allow diseases like HIV to
spread. More and more celebrities within
Japan are also speaking openly about being gay, and this could, perhaps, prompt
a larger cultural shift that will allow these people to be more open about
their work and get better government support.
But that, too, is far from a given.
Beyond
the very important worries about safety and health that viewers should take
away from this movie, what should I feel about the boys themselves? Yes, many of them were tricked or forced into
doing this work, don’t like it, and want out, but many are perfectly content to
be urisen- they have a community of
their own that binds them together, and many of them, even ones that aren’t gay
or bi, very much enjoy the work and are happy doing it. But how do we reconcile that with the obvious
and real exploitation that runs rampant within the industry? And what’s the proper response to this?
These
are hard questions with no easy or obvious answers to them, and that is precisely
what the best documentaries do- strike right at the heart of the thorniest
issues in human society, forcing us to grapple with contradictory thoughts and
feelings as we try to come to a conclusion about the best path forward. And feeling such a mixed jumble of feelings and thoughts you have no idea how ro reconcile, however uncomfortable it may be, is one of the clearest signs you've seen a truly great documentary. Boys
For Sale succeeds brilliantly in challenging its viewers to become part of
a conversation they may not have even known existed, and it deserves to play a
key role our cultural discourse about homosexuality and prostitution.
-Noah Franc
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