Hostess Bars : For Asians, a Ritual Sip of Home

Ever the proper businesswoman, Yuka Sakamoto is poised for that moment late in the night when the bankers and international trade executives who are her regular customers fish into their pockets for business cards.

Dutifully, Sakamoto produces her own: “Yuka Sakamoto--Mama.”

It is the appropriate job description for her line of work. Sakamoto is mama-san, manager and part-owner of the Bamboo House, a Little Tokyo nightclub with a clientele made up almost exclusively of Japanese businessmen.

The Bamboo House is a hostess club--one of about 200 establishments in Southern California that minister to the singular drinking habits of Asian businessmen and immigrants by providing female drinking companions and an intimate atmosphere replicating the watering holes of their homelands. Ushered each night by Sakamoto into a darkened room, Japanese executives sip drinks from $200 bottles of liquor and mingle with hostesses hired to pass the hours with them in ritualized flirtation once common only in the nightclubs of Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong.

Growing Presence

Over the last decade, the growing presence of Asian businessmen stationed in Los Angeles has spawned re-creations of Tokyo’s famous Ginza nightclub district in more than half a dozen commercial strips in Southern California. Hostess bars now cluster in miniature districts in Little Tokyo, Koreatown, Torrance, Garden Grove and scattered through the San Gabriel Valley, offering familiar havens to patrons eager for a taste of home.

“It is like going to get a mental massage,” said Yoshihiro Sano, president of the Los Angeles-based U.S. Japan Business News and a regular patron at the Bamboo House. “It is a way of unwinding that Americans are not used to. If we didn’t have these places, we would explode from all the internal pressures.”

Clubs Monitored

The clubs are seen by many businessmen as the best places to cement deals and impress clients. But while they cater to drinking habits deeply rooted in Japanese and Korean culture, some have had difficulty meshing those traditions with American attitudes and laws. Law enforcement officials closely monitor the clubs to keep them in line with state liquor codes. Customers and hostesses sometimes have trouble adapting to American standards of behavior. And the families of businessmen who patronize the clubs are often not as tolerant of the old ways as they were in their native lands.

Jimmy Chea, a wiry jazz musician who owns the Galleon, until recently a Korean hostess bar on Vermont Avenue, was so overwhelmed by the pressures of adjusting that he fired all his hostesses last month. Despite making a good living, he had grown weary after three years of undercover operations by state liquor agents and frequent quarrels with his hostesses.

“Too much hanky-panky,” Chea moaned. “Just too much hanky-panky.”

For every Jimmy Chea trying to get out of the hostess bar business, though, there are dozens happy to get in. A 1987 survey by the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control found more than 75 Asian hostess bars in the bureau’s Los Angeles district, which stretches from Long Beach to the San Fernando Valley. ABC officials estimate that 200 clubs now operate in Southern California, a vast increase from the first dozen clubs that appeared in the late 1970s.

To the uninitiated, hostess clubs appear to operate like classic “B-girl” joints, where bored bar girls hustle patrons, plying them with house liquor. But ABC agents who regularly monitor the clubs report that most are “clean” operations with satisfied customers. “We have our problems with them,” said Daniel P. Toomey, an ABC investigator, “but if you compare them to the hard-core places we have to deal with, the hostess clubs do a pretty good job of policing themselves.”

Attractive Hours

For a prospective owner, the hours are attractive. Hostess bars are open each night from 9 p.m. until 2 a.m., mirroring the hours of clubs in Tokyo and Seoul. There are easy profits to be made. Executives on expense accounts routinely spend up to $300 an hour for drinks, the company of several hostesses and $30 plates of peanuts, pickles and fruit.

The densest concentration of hostess clubs is in Koreatown, where more than 40 bars called “room-salons” have transplanted the atmosphere of Seoul’s crowded Young Dong drinking district to central Los Angeles.

Their names hint at privacy and pleasure: The Escape Room. Temptation. Secret Palace. Tomorrow Night Club. Others are less exotic: Annie Hall Nightclub. Chatter Box. Club Mac. Some older clubs, bought from American owners, have kept their original names and exteriors, as if the ownership had never changed. Newer bars open in the area’s maze of mini-malls, their Korean-language signs blending in with those of the markets and restaurants surrounding them.

‘Feel at Home’

The concentration of clubs is smaller in other immigrant communities, but they are still visible. From the well-established clubs of Little Tokyo, Japanese executives shuttle in limousines to newer haunts in Torrance. Hong Kong merchants can choose from among San Gabriel Valley clubs, and ABC agents have found bars catering to Thai and Vietnamese clients.

“Deals depend on these places,” said Jay Yoo, an attorney who often takes foreign clients to Koreatown clubs . “It’s the way business gets done abroad, and now that deals are being made here (in Los Angeles), the businessman needs to feel at home.”

To further the cozy mood, the clubs decorate their interiors with sofas and armchairs, then add disco surplus items such as rotating mirrored chandeliers. Elaborate sound systems abound for customers eager to sing karaoke- style to recorded accompaniment.

All share a common feature--the “bottlekeep,” where bartenders display row upon row of liquor bottles “owned” by their customers. Costing $120 and up, a single bottle can be finished in one sitting or partially drained and stored for the next outing.

Bathed in soft light and tagged by the name of the firms that bought them, more than 300 bottles of Remy Martin, Chivas Regal and Crown Royal are stored in glass display cases at the Bamboo House. The more exclusive the club, the more lavish the “bottlekeep.” At the Marquis, a Japanese restaurant that doubles as a nightclub, a massive display cabinet holds hundreds of bottles, each sparkling in the glow of wrought-iron chandeliers.

“It’s a status thing,” said Thomas Burger, a Mitsubishi employee who was a regular client of Little Tokyo’s hostess bars until he recently transferred to San Francisco. “When a Japanese businessman breaks out one of these expensive bottles with his name or the name of his firm on it, it’s his way of saying: ‘I’ve arrived. I’ve made it.’ ”

Though liquor is in plain sight, the hostesses are not. The women join their clients in rooms set off from the entrance to ensure privacy. The hostesses sit by the drinkers, pouring when their glasses are empty, flattering them, dancing, making small talk and telling jokes. Some hostesses work on salary, but at many clubs, they are dependent on tips.

“We try to provide a family-like environment,” said Tomoko, 23, a hostess at the Bamboo House who would only give her first name. A secretary by day, Tomoko works five nights a week to pay for rent and “luxuries that I could not pay for on my day salary.” Like most of the club’s 15 hostesses, she is a recent immigrant from Japan; two are Americans fluent in Japanese.

Taking pains not to appear too provocative, Tomoko and the other hostesses dress in evening wear or business attire. Yuka Sakamoto instructs her staff that “our philosophy is to help the customer relax. Here, they can speak their true minds in their own language.”

The concept of honne, “true mind,” is integral to the hostess bar. Freed from the daytime shibboleths that bind them at work, businessmen take advantage of the intimate bar atmosphere to learn about the character of their clients and criticize their bosses and colleagues to their faces--risky acts that might lead to demotions or wrecked business deals if committed during the day.

It is a mind-set developed in the drinking districts of Tokyo, where hostess bars proliferated by the thousands in the boom years after World War II. David Plath, an urban anthropologist at the University of Illinois who studies Japanese mizu shobai (night life), said that hostess bars first appeared in Tokyo in the 1920s as inexpensive alternatives to Japan’s famous geisha clubs.

“In Japan, there has always been the ideal of the serving girl, that someone should pamper the weary traveler,” Plath said. “The thought is that there is something lonely about a man pouring his own drink.”

Similar attitudes among Koreans popularized hostess clubs in that country by the 1960s. Chea, who worked in Seoul nightclubs before emigrating, said: “We copied the Japanese bars. Now, all the businessmen go to the clubs.”

Ann Allison, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Colorado, worked as a hostess in Tokyo’s Roppongi drinking district for four months in 1981 in preparation for a doctoral paper she wrote on Japanese women and society. As she made $60 a night in tips, Allison learned that hostess clubs had become a vital component of Japanese society.

Strong Relations

Relations between Allison’s club and its business customers were so strong that when regular clients stayed away for long periods of time, the mama-san would telephone them at their offices to “tell them she missed them. They would always show up that night.”

Entertaining colleagues and clients at home is impossible for most white-collar workers because of the diminutive size of Japanese houses, Allison found. Families are accustomed to a strict division between business life and the home, leaving hostess bars their only outlet for socialization.

“Women there are mostly resigned to the system,” said Allison, who casts her conclusions in strong feminist tones. “The wives never go to these places. They are male preserves. Even the few men that I found who didn’t want to go felt that they had to or their careers would suffer. The No. 1 commitment was not to your family or yourself, but to the company.”

‘Very Disconcerting’

Settled into their booths, Allison’s clients expected to be pampered. Once, she was scolded by her mama-san for not lighting a patron’s cigarette. Businessmen would respond with vague sexual compliments, “careful never to go overboard,” Allison said. “They would go on and on, talking about international trade relations or other subjects, and then one of them would suddenly turn to me and start talking about my body. Then they would return to their conversation as if nothing happened. It was very disconcerting.”

Overt affairs between the hostesses and their customers were rare, Allison found, discouraged by club owners. Prostitution was prohibited, though known to occur. “There were other bars and places where they could go for that,” Allison said.

In Los Angeles, as hostess bars grew in numbers in the mid-1980s, law enforcement authorities began receiving regular complaints of prostitution. ABC officials discarded some as the efforts of club owners trying to harass their rivals. But there were also genuine tips from the wives of Asian businessmen no longer willing to tolerate the hostess clubs’ intrusion into their lives.

Wives complained that their husbands were “spending too much money and paying too much attention to the hostesses,” ABC investigator Toomey said. “I guess they decided that this is America and they don’t have to accept what other American women wouldn’t take.”

Attitudes toward heavy drinking have also showed signs of change. Though patrons still drink to excess at the clubs, some have become concerned about getting home safely. Taxis now make late-night rounds to the clubs and one Koreatown bar keeps a van on the premises to drive home intoxicated clients.

Don Cho, the organizer of a 30-member Koreatown Alcoholics Anonymous chapter, said he has counseled dozens of club patrons. “We try to persuade these people that they can do business without drinking,” Cho said. “Back home, drinking is forgiven. But we cannot continue these ways in our new land.”

Undercover operations at the clubs led to a few prostitution arrests. During the raids, ABC agents found that many bars had built warrens of locked private rooms for their customers and hostesses. “We’d pound on the doors and when they opened up, the hostesses would run out and these guys would be wriggling into their shirts and pants,” Toomey said.

Negotiations between the clubs and the ABC resulted in an agreement by owners to keep the private rooms open. But newer clubs still test the ABC’s resolve. During a walk-through last month, Toomey and fellow agents issued a warning to one club that shielded its private rooms with log-like obstructions and potted plants. Soon after a stranger entered a second Koreatown club, bouncers peeked repeatedly out the front door to look for investigators--who were parked in the shadows across the street.

After three years of similar cat-and-mouse games, Chea has had enough. The owner of the Galleon has seen too many ABC citations. Though Chea says he discouraged prostitution at the Galleon, credit card firms kept questioning the club’s exorbitant charges. “They tell me, ‘What are you selling there, Jimmy, gold?’ ”

Chea bought the Galleon in 1984 as an American-style nightclub to showcase his jazz band. But the club remained empty night after night. “People would come in and say, ‘Do you have hostesses?’ ” Chea said. “Then, when they don’t see any, they leave. Well, I’m no fool.”

Hiring two dozen hostesses, Chea’s business improved overnight. The women took in $300 a night in tips. Chea himself admitted to making “lots of money.” But it spun out of control. When Chea installed a time clock to discipline the hostesses, they ignored it. One night, not a single hostess showed up. “I got sick and tired of the girls,” Chea said. “I had to treat them like queens.”

A month ago, he fired them all and tore out the club’s gaudy private rooms. There are fewer customers at night and mounting bills. But Chea has peace of mind.

“When they come in and ask for girls, I tell them: ‘You want girls? Not in my place,’ ” Chea said. “This is an American bar.”