Another lost his job due to the nuclear meltdown. One of them lost his house in the tsunami.
Two of the boys in the film who are currently working as urisens came from the disaster area. Others were there because of the Fukushima disaster in 2011.Īfter the disaster, there was an influx of people coming to Tokyo to do sex work. Many didn’t have great relationships with their families. That’s a big part of the urisen experience. In these moments - bathing with someone, being held by someone, having them wash their back and stroke their hair - customers are made to feel like everything is okay. So a large portion of what these boys are doing is more than just a sex act, which may only last for five minutes. Many carry with them a great deal of shame, self-hatred and other negative feelings. Japanese men can’t traditionally live openly as homosexuals. I recently spoke to him about how one in five urisen he encountered began sex work as a direct result of that disaster why we shouldn’t call them “hustlers” and how they consider themselves to be part of an army unit, each bearing shared battle scars.Įxplain what Hayami meant about “comforting the souls” of customers. but has lived in Japan for 17 years, where he directed two award-winning documentaries about children living in areas of Fukushima contaminated by the 2011 nuclear meltdown. Ian Thomas Ash, executive producer of Boys for Sale, was born in the U.S. “Our work is to solve this problem and comfort the souls of our customers.” “Generally, it’s considered inappropriate that men openly have sex with other men,” explains Hayami, who manages one of the urisen bars in Shinjuku 2-Chome, the biggest gay area in Tokyo.