Chains of Desire, Night in Shinjuku - 1990s to early 2000s

Chains of Desire, Night in Shinjuku - 1990s to early 2000s

One of the most striking depictions of Kabukicho is a scene called "The Food Chain of Desire. In this scene, salarymen, prostitutes, hosts, yakuza, and police stand side by side like characters on a single stage. The businessman, exhausted from his daily work, goes to the sex industry to forget the depression of reality. The sex workers who receive their money pour it into the hosts to satisfy their need for self-expression and approval. Eventually, the hosts go to backroom casinos and sink into the depths of debt, dreaming of a quick turnaround. The yakuza appear as debt collectors, and the police further hunt them down in the name of the Violence Against Women Act. Here, the "eaters" and the "eaten" appear one after the other in a kind of chain reaction, and the entire town is projected as a human theater tossed about by greed.

Behind this scene was the shadow of the post-bubble society: from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, the Japanese economy sank into a recession, and the employment environment for young people became increasingly severe. It was not uncommon for young women to turn to the sex industry to earn a living or to satisfy their need for brand-name products and approval. The destination of the money earned by these women was host clubs, and in Kabukicho, it became a status to pour in more money than anyone else under the ritual of the "champagne tower. Those who found their dreams and approval there gradually lost their sense of money and often headed for ruin.

At the same time, hosts went to backroom casinos to make ends meet and sometimes to earn large sums of money. Dreaming of wiping out their debts in a single night, the hosts' debts snowballed, symbolizing the nightlife of this era. What awaited them ahead was the yakuza who would show up to collect. However, the Anti-Boryokudan Law enacted in 1992 began to be put into full operation, and in the 2000s, the activities of the yakuza came to be strictly controlled. The illusion that clamping down on gangs would purify the city was eventually shattered by the rise of the Chinese mafia and black touts, creating new chaos rather than improving public safety.

The police were also part of this chain of events. While they were the ones who hunted down the yakuza under the Violence Against Women Act, they were also monthly wage earners suffering from overwork. Their appearance was not much different from that of salarymen, and in the end they were bound by the same "chains of desire. This microcosm of Kabukicho is a mirror of society itself, showing the reality that no one can be free at the end of the chain of desires feeding on desires.

Thus, the "food chain of desire" is not a mere metaphor, but a record of reality backed by the background of the times. The sighs of businessmen, the vanity of sex workers, the impatience of hosts, the intimidation of yakuza, and the cold-heartedness of the police. Although the voices of these people are not directly recorded, we can certainly hear their conversations in the background of the text, which gives us a sense of reality as if we were reading a play.