Subscribe They were cool - and cute too
By Admin
They were cool - and cute, too."Cute and cool are to OLs what tough but fair were to John Wayne - the alpha and omega of the OL universe. Entire consumer industries are based on them: holidays (cute: England; cool: California), cars (cute: Minis; cool: sports cars). The gays of Ni-chome were cool, because they were so different from the boys in the offices (where a whiff of homosexuality would guarantee a speedy tumble from the career ladder). But they were cute, too, because they presented no sexual threat, because they seemed to offer a mirror of the girls themselves. Sexy, but safe; naughty but nice.This kind of gender blurring crops up all the time in Japan.
There are "host" bars in Tokyo where women pay by the hour for the company of young women dressed as young men. They would talk to you about who they fancied, what boys liked to do You could flirt and get drunk They weren't dangerous. The smell was different, too, at least from the clubs I was used to Kind of .. soupy. But the guys were so friendly, so different from the salarymen my mother always wants me to go out with.
Megumi first came here with friends; Rika says she read an article in a women's magazine At any rate, fag-haggery became all the rage. There were more magazine articles and, a couple of years ago, a witty movie, entitled Okoge, about a girl who becomes involved in an emotional menage with a gay couple."The first time, it felt so strange," says Mieko. "I came with a couple of girlfriends and we were the only girls here. Back then there would have been scores of Mieko clones in a club like this, and strolling tipsily outside on the streets of East Shinjuku, Tokyo's great neon city within a city.A couple of Mieko's friends finally arrive: the okoge greet one another, swap gossip and menthol cigarettes (it's impossible to slip off to the ladies' - there's only one loo here, and it has a queue of boys in front of it). Mieko is suffering from another disadvantage, too: in the narrow basement club of maybe 500 drag queens, transsexuals, S&M artists and pelvis-pumping pretty boys, she is (as far as one can be certain) the only woman."Okoge-chan! Konnichi-wa!" smirks a muscly boy in jeans and nothing else. "Good day, Little Miss Rice Dregs." Mieko smiles and looks away.An implied insult such as this didn't matter two years ago when the okoge phenomenon was hot. Before gays and transvestites began to feel patronised by their little, sticky grains of rice.
All around are similar prodigies.Mieko taps her foot gamely, but no one pays her much attention "It's fun!" she chirps, when you ask how she's doing. Mieko is small, round- faced, boyishly slim, with the classic handbag and little-black-dress combo, but this other lady is built on altogether more epic lines: fishnet stockings and G-string, Raquel Welch breasts, and triangular features - 6ft tall in thigh-high leather boots. Okoge is a culinary term, referring to those irritating grains of rice that stubbornly glue themselves to the bottom of the pot.Like Mieko, for example, here in the Bar Delight.Mieko is very pretty But here in Bar Delight she's just not pretty enough Look at the siren standing next to her. With no rent to pay, OLs have money in their handbags, and time to spend it.From the ranks of the OLs (although no one in Ni-chome seems quite sure when or why) a new phenomenon emerged: the okoge.The closest English translation is fag hag, but this doesn't do justice to the expression. Recruited from the same universities as their male colleagues, they are required to do little more than pour coffee, photocopy and giggle demurely.