Araki's Journey Through the Erotic Underworld
It all started in 1978 in an ordinary café near Kyoto. Word spread that the waitresses wore no underwear under their miniskirts or transparent panties. Similar establishments appeared throughout the country. Men lined up to pay three times the usual price for a coffee served by a young woman not wearing panties.
Within a few years, a new trend emerged: the "no underwear" massage parlor. The competition for customers led to increasingly extravagant services, from caressing clients through holes in coffins, where they lay naked pretending to be dead, to interiors designed for commuter train fetishists. One particular destination was a Tokyo club called Lucky Hole. Its modus operandi was simple: clients stood on one side of a plywood partition and a girl on the other; between them was a hole large enough to fit a certain part of the male anatomy.
Nobuyoshi Araki, with the title Lucky Hole, captures the Japanese sex industry in full bloom, showing in over 800 photos both those seeking and those offering pleasure in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district before the 1985 new law on the improvement and control of the leisure industry shut down many of the country’s sexual venues. With mirror walls, sheets, cages, orgies, bondage, and moans, it is the last word of an era of bacchanals, brimming with moments of humor, precise poetry, and questioning interjections.
