Saturday, September 17, 2005

Coffee with that?



Man, urban Japan is awash in SEX, and odd little semi-seedy, semi-respectable streets litter this fine nation. Adjacent to a building housing a fetish underwear shop on the first floor and strip clubs on the second, you find a definitely non-fetish shoe shop run by a saintly white haired granny. In the dead center of a residential area, crammed with immaculate vinyl-sided homes and stucco apartments, a hard-core porn shop might open, right between the neighborhood 7-11 and the barber where mom gets her hair permed.

It was in a neighborhood such as this that I found the Starbox Image Club. It appears to be some sort of cosplay strip-joint, though I was not willing to risk my marriage by going in and confirming this. I’m not sure which aspect of the logo I liked best -the brazen co-optation of one of America’s flagship brands of hegemony, the double meaning of the word ‘box’, or the likelihood that the proprietor was oblivious to this double meaning.