Geisha guys” Japanese women’s newest accessory

TOKYO, Japan (CNN) -- At first glance, the man and woman at the nightclub look like any other couple on a date. He flirts and pours champagne. She looks at him and laughs.


Businesswomen in Japan pay up to $50,000 a night for male companionship from "hosts" like Yunosuke.

This isn't a date, though. It's business.

The woman, a successful executive, has joined a growing number of professional women in Japan in forking out from $1,000 to $50,000 a night for male companionship.

They meet their "hosts" in hundreds of clubs that have sprung up around Tokyo - the industry says only compliments are exchanged. The women pay for a man to lavish them with undivided attention.

"There's nothing wrong with a woman paying to be entertained by a man," one female client says. "It's just another step in equality."

It's a dizzying reversal of traditional gender roles in a country long known for geishas pampering male clients with conversation, singing and dancing. Now a new breed of entertainer has cropped up -- think of them as male geishas.

"I give women things that men normally don't do, like complimenting their appearance," says one host, 24-year-old Yunosuke, who only goes by his single host name. "I make women happy."

And they make him happy: Yunosuke says he earned more than $200,000 last year, enough to let him visit a salon once a day to have his hair dyed and blow-dried.

"Women see us as one of their accessories," he says. "They like to wear nice things, so I try to look prettier for them all the time."

What drives the business boom is an increase in the earning power of Japanese women, according to Air Group, a company that owns a chain of "host" clubs.

"Japanese women are now working hard and making more money," says Yuko Takeyama, a woman in her early 30s who manages Air Group. "They see this as a way to de-stress."

Women love being treated well without the pressures that come with dating, she says.

Yunosuke's customer from the nightclub agrees.

"This is a gift for myself," she says. "It's the same as spending money on a trip or buying


Parade banner, Brazos County, Texas, “Stop-Loss”

Two new films set amid the disorder of the United States' military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan transcend politics.

“Stop-Loss,” a major studio production with youthful actors and a celebrated director, and “Fighting for Life,” a graphic documentary on combat medicine, have something in common. Both are troops-centric, troops-supportive.

These films care more about human beings than about exhorting one side or the other or the should-we-be-there debate.



EARNIE GRAFTON / Union-Tribune
Kimberly Peirce screened "Stop-Loss," inspired by her brother's Iraq service, for local members of the military.


In the documentary "Fighting for Life," focusing on combat medicine, a wounded soldier gets personal attention.


FRANK MASI
"Stop-Loss" troops: Channing Tatum (left), Ryan Phillippe, Alex Frost, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Rob Brown.
In the wake of such Hollywood missteps as “Rendition,” “Redacted” and “Lions for Lambs,” “Stop-Loss” and “Fighting for Life” play it, if not strictly down the middle, then honest. War is hell, for sure; these are our young people fighting it.

“Stop-Loss” stars Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as buddies from a small Texas town. After 9/11, they enlist in the Army and are sent to Iraq. It's hot and nasty duty, brutal and bloody.

Phillippe, a squad leader, loses some of his men in an ambush, the consequences of leadership and his country's unclear mission engulfing him. It's not confusing to best pal Tatum, who tells a hometown welcoming crowd, “We're over there killing 'em in Iraq so we don't have to kill 'em in Texas.”

Back in the Lone Star State, tours apparently over, the military suddenly informs them of a redeployment, utilizing a policy called stop-loss, which allows the extension of a soldier's enlistment and duty in Iraq.

Sensitive director Kimberly Peirce gets to the core of friendship and patriotism. She also poignantly finds rural America and the burgs that supply so many naive recruits for the armed forces.





The action in “Fighting for Life” is real; the wounds, physical and emotional, are real; the medical personnel are real.

The movie opens in Iraq with four men carrying a wounded soldier on a stretcher. Then another image: a group of doctors taking the oath at Maryland's Uniformed Services University, the West Point of military medicine.

DETAILS
“Stop-Loss”
Rated: R

Opens today




Running time: 1 hr., 53 min.
“Fighting for Life”

Unrated

Opens today




Running time: 1 hr., 29 min.

The film visits graduates working in M*A*S*H-like battlefield conditions (wearing body armor during surgery). Like the young people in “Stop-Loss,” they experience the carnage of war firsthand.

At the Air Force Theater Hospital in central Iraq, there are more than 10,000 patients a year, from critically burned Iraqi children to a soldier's finger amputation.

Observes a doctor who has seen a lot: “Many of the soldiers who'll be coming back home are 19, 20, 21 years old. They'll have these impairments the rest of their lives.”

Filmmaker Terry Rodgers, who co-produced the 1995 Oscar-winning documentary “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision,” finds in these doctors, nurses and medics profound dedication, gifted professionals who tell him, like one intensive-care nurse did, “It's a great mission to be on the life-saving end of things.”

And it's the personal side of their work that lingers. A surgery is complete and a doctor happily utters, “I think he'll have full function of his legs.”

A surgeon ponders, “You wonder if they want to have a life like this, two legs and an arm amputated, the other hand mangled.”



AdvertisementA seasoned nurse: “The families are always on our minds. We call them. The wives want to know, 'Can my husband still have a child with me?' ”
The movie follows the travails of Sgt. Crystal Davis, 23, who loses a limb but not her spirit. “The things I miss the most are driving and dancing,” she said. “Whenever there's music, I be-bop.”

When “Fighting for Life” is over, you might just be-bop knowing these persevering men and women take care of our sons and daughters.





“Stop-Loss” director Peirce was settled in a stark room the other week at the Gaslamp's Ivy Hotel, chatty about her first movie in eight years and how it was her soldier brother who inspired her.

In 1999, she directed “Boys Don't Cry,” based on the true story of transgendered Nebraska teenager Brandon Teena. That role won an Oscar for Hilary Swank. It's taken Peirce, 40, all this time to find a second project for which she felt passionate (she was offered and turned down “Memoirs of a Geisha”).

Bright and articulate – she has degrees from the University of Chicago (English and Japanese literature) and Columbia (film) – her material is not traditional Hollywood fodder.

“Stop-Loss,” she explains, is about “the camaraderie of guys fighting together and defending each other.” And it's about the impact of 9/11 on a generation (Peirce watched the towers fall from her residence in New York City's Bowery district).

One person those events keenly affected was her 18-year-old brother, Brett. “After my brother told us he was enlisting, it ushered me deeply into all of this,” said Peirce. “I was scared for him, his emotional well-being.”

From the day he went to Iraq, said Peirce, brother and sister communicated by Instant Message. “He'd come back from a mission,” she said, “and I'd see what they'd experienced in combat. They'd also use their camera phones and add Toby Keith patriotic music.

“It was like letters from home, like journal entries. My brother and his friends were little filmmakers.”

As tonal research, Peirce studied such films as “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946), “Coming Home” (1978), “Apocalypse Now” (1979) and “Platoon” (1986).

“I wanted the intensity of those films focused on these guys going on missions,” said Peirce, wearing jeans and a Bob Dylan “A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall” T-shirt. “I wanted to tell a story from their point of view.”

There's a devastating opening vignette set at a checkpoint. A car runs it and the American soldiers take off after the vehicle. An explosive device takes out their Humvee. There's an ambush. Through Peirce's lens, this is the reality of combat, not the romance of “An Army of One.”

While in San Diego, Peirce screened the film for an organization called Wounded Warriors, those in the service living with injuries. At the event, said Peirce, “the guys came up to me and said, 'It's accurate' and, 'I'm really glad you didn't disrespect the soldier.' ”

In research, she videotaped returning servicemen and women and took a raucous bar scene in the movie from one of the stories.

Phillippe, whose savvy career has included “Crash” and “Gosford Park,” is a revelation as a former football hero and gung-ho soldier with a bronze star for valor, now on the road, AWOL, contesting what he feels is this unfair stop-loss policy.

In one scene, Phillippe's mom says she'd drive him to Mexico if he didn't want to go back to Iraq. “The truth is, that was my mother,” said Peirce. “She was prepared to take my brother to Mexico. He would just say, 'Leave me alone.' ”





“I'm going to miss blowing (expletive) up.”
– A soldier back from Iraq, “Stop-Loss”