On the server clubs away from Tokyo’s Kabuki-cho yellow-white section, committed men seek its fortunes of the promoting love, love, companionship, and frequently sex to females customers getting too much figures of cash. Staged Attraction reveals a scene where all intimacies and you will feigned ideas is reasonable online game toward hosts exactly who use feathered fucks, polished fingernails, fine Eu suits, additionally the awareness of the greatest salesmen to create a fantasy to possess wealthy people looking to an escape from the informal.
The fresh club try an area in which desires try pursued in addition to artwork off seduction isn’t only regarding the romance; an intricate gang of transactions is offered. Takeyama reveals the fresh aspirational setting not merely of one’s host pub, and in addition out of good Japanese neighborhood built on the commercialization out of ambition, attracting its customers from the establish and you can with the another in which aspirations is possible-and you will billions of bucks can be produced.
“An exquisite ethnography out-of server nightclubs within the Tokyo, Staged Attraction refers to the brand new day-after-day products out-of commodified love for consumers and you may providers. It offers a social kaleidoscope on lives regarding youngsters confronting an effective precarious labor market, lady in addition to their ageing insecurities, and consumption in later capitalism.”
“Seductions performed from the male hosts, purchased by the lady consumers, and you may entwined to currency and you will attention: here is the surface off Akiko Takeyama’s interesting publication. Set in neoliberal The japanese in the event the upcoming are fraught, Staged Seduction catches this new anxiousness of your own minutes when you look at the a keen affective ethnography immediately worrisome and you may committed.”
“Staged Seduction was a powerful ethnographic study of commodified romance, aspiration, and you can attract inside neoliberal Japan. Having riveting reports regarding men hosts and their female customers, Takeyama elegantly tends to make this new complex moving off thoughts, passions and you will has an effect on inside a sense out of inequality and veiled deals. “
“Such is really a lot of interest in Staged Seduction, which will interest toward a number of account. Takeyama argues one to host clubs try a symbol from good neoliberal, post-commercial Tokyo: see just what do you think. The lady data indeed offers an interesting insight 
into a lately greatly lengthened part of its night life.”
Akiko Takeyama’s investigation regarding the beguiling below ground “love business” will bring an intimate screen into Japanese machine clubs in addition to life out of computers, website subscribers, club owners, and managers
“Akiko Takeyama’s Staged Seduction try a remarkable entryway about surprisingly crowded world of ethnographic portraits of your gender/mate industries into the Asia. [A]s a work you to definitely sheds light on deals ranging from commercial stress, libido, and you can dream, Staged Seduction centers unusually on men computers and their females clients in Tokyo. As the book draws, once the would be questioned, from scholarship to the intercourse relationships inside the modern The japanese, Takeyama’s real purpose will be to sign up for clicking discussions within the anthropology and you can social theory from temporality, affective labour, and cultural consequences out-of neoliberalism.”
Instance a casino away from love, brand new machine bar was an internet site . from desperation, ambition, and you can guarantee, in which both hosts and you will clients are wanting to move new dice
“Staged Seductions was an extremely fun and you can, sometimes, unsettling discover, ultimately causing a sensational exemplory instance of a keen affective ethnography. Takeyama will bring strong facts toward state-of-the-art ways influences was accused from inside the, and you will constitutive off, the production of neoliberal subjectivities.”––Emma Age. Create, Royal Anthropological Institute
“[O]ne becomes all the also effortlessly interested on life of the some one [Takeyama] introduces. This is simply not since they are ‘fascinating’ victims whoever outlandish lifestyles and you will beautifully salacious pursuits host, but alternatively it has far to do with the newest affective ethnographic means Takeyama actively found to employThis low-moralistic, but uncondescendingly emphatic, rendition from the girl fieldwork and you may interviews then attracts discussion regarding how anthropologists is also try to duplicate whatever they started to discover in the, out-of, and you may through by themselves when you are avoiding the downfalls away from mirror, the need for unquestioned surface level political correctness and you may ethical high-horsery”––Mira Malick, Personal Research Japan Log