Araki’s Journey through the Erotic Underworld
It all began in 1978 in an ordinary café near Kyoto. Word spread that the waitresses wore no underwear beneath their miniskirts nor transparent panties. Similar establishments sprang up across the country. Men lined up to pay three times the usual price for a coffee served by a young woman without panties.
Within a few years, a new trend appeared: the "massage" parlor without underwear. The battle to attract customers resulted in an increasingly extravagant range of services, from caressing clients through holes in coffins, where they lay naked pretending to be dead, to interiors designed for commuter train fetishists. One particular destination was a Tokyo club called Lucky Hole. Its modus operandi was simple: clients stood on one side of a plywood partition and a girl on the other; between them was a hole large enough to fit a certain part of the male anatomy.
Nobuyoshi Araki, with the title Lucky Hole, captures the Japanese sex industry in full bloom, showing in over 800 photos both those seeking and those offering pleasure in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district before the 1985 law for the improvement and control of the leisure industry shut down many of the country’s sexual venues. With mirror walls, sheets, cages, orgies, bondage, and moans, it is the last cry of an era of bacchanals, brimming with moments of humor, precise poetry, and questioning exclamations.
