Tourist visa hostesses cashed in at Tokyo clubs back in the day

Third in a five-part series

TOKYO — By the end of the 20th century, the Roppongi-Akasaka area had changed dramatically. Gone were the big band hostess clubs. The New Latin Quarter had fallen victim to a fire that gutted the Hotel New Japan and caused the deaths of many people, while the Mikado, with its 1,200 beeper-carrying girls went bankrupt after the owner died and his daughter took over. (Local residents still remember the bizarre sight of the cabaret's hostesses, many in hair curlers and scarves, staging a huge daytime protest outside the Mikado, over unpaid wages — which, unfortunately, would never be forthcoming.)

In place of such clubs would come smaller, more intimate ones as well as discos. 

Although Akasaka still maintained a kind of quiet elegance, home as it was to the back street, high-walled geisha house hidden behind towering new 5-star hotels, the entertainment quarter of Roppongi once noted for its class and identified by the shiny limousines parked on its main drag, was now a neon-lit center of sleaze more famous perhaps for its sidewalk pimps and touts, bearing placards appealing to all carnal appetites — cheap recession-induced karaoke bars and seedy clubs that featured strip shows and back room lap dancing and other such places.