Kabukicho: The Moment the Curtain of Light Comes Down: The Retirement of a Charismatic Young Lady, 2005-2015

Kabukicho: The Moment the Curtain of Light Comes Down: The Retirement of a Charismatic Young Lady, 2005-2015

In the late 2000s, the term "charismatic girl" took root in Kabukicho. Magazines and television irradiated the nightlife as a culture, and the stars of the magazines went back and forth to the stars of the stores, and the stars of the stores to the magazines. The core of the icon was a media trend that put nighttime beauty and self-direction at the forefront, and the signature magazine was reinstated in 2015 after a hiatus in 2014, reiterating its self-transformation for the times. The paper was a place where working women could simultaneously convey the how-to of self-transformation and the pride of the night.

Meanwhile, the city was shaken by the cleanup campaign and tougher regulations on touts that began in 2003, which transformed the atmosphere of Kabukicho and put pressure on the way people earned and presented themselves at night. The weeding out of bad stores and the ongoing redevelopment brought about a renewal of the look and feel, symbolized by the opening of the Shinjuku Toho Building in 2015. The stronger the light, the greater the behind-the-scenes load. Spaces that were once receptacles of clutter now demand a high degree of self-management and continuous performance from workers in a more controlled and brightly lit environment.

Economic headwinds also overlap. The cooling of personal consumption and sluggish real income growth after the Lehman Brothers collapse hit nightly sales hard, normalizing the tactic of piling up nominations and table numbers with last night's extensions. In order to bridge today's sales to tomorrow, rest time is shortened and the labor of maintaining relationships outside the restaurant, making announcements, and sending out photos to be seen proliferates. The more the boundaries between day and night, work and private, inside and outside the store, the deeper the physical and mental drain.

The proliferation of social networking sites has forced these women to manage their egos as brands. Sales, public relations, reservations, and fan communication are integrated, and the more the gravitational pull increases, the more the margins of life are reduced. Careers visualized in magazines and online certainly paved the way, but the stronger the signifier of success, the more the daily self retreated behind the signifier. The idol of the night reflected in the media and the true self encountered in front of the mirror in the morning. When the distance between them finally becomes unbridgeable, he makes a small announcement offstage: "I've already played my part. I've already played my part.

So retirement is not a defeat. It is a decision made by a professional in response to the sum total of the transformed city and consumption, the visualized labor, the expectations and fatigue of an ever-expanding self. On a street where the Koma Theater is transformed and Godzilla's head watches the sky, the light of the sign passes to the next generation. After the applause stops, there is a quiet darkness. That darkness is not an end, but a margin that deepens in proportion to the intensity of the light. She stands there, folding her costume and catching her breath. After ten years of moving back and forth between the front and back of the curtain, she finally chooses, in her own words, who she will be when she steps off the stage.