A multi-tenant building in an entertainment district, a reception desk past the elevator, small lockable rooms lining the corridor, the spines of adult videos on a shelf. A space dimmed until late at night where a male customer spends time alone: this format, the private booth video shop, took broad hold across urban Japan from the 1980s onward.

Koshitsu video, the private booth video shop, rents lockable private rooms by the hour and lets customers view adult video (AV) and general film provided by the shop. This entry covers a business type that emerged in the 1980s as a derivative of the rental video trade and that, while not classed as a store-type sex-related business under entertainment-business law, occupies its own institutional position as a late-night viewing shop.

Overview

The basic service combines the hourly rental of a lockable room (a two-tier rate of a short “short” and a longer “night pack”), viewing of the shop’s holdings of AV and general film, 24-hour and late-night operation, and a membership-based operation aimed mainly at solo male customers.

The rooms are simple spaces of roughly two tatami mats, fitted with a reclining seat, a monitor, tissues and a wastebasket. In the urban rates of the 2010s, a short (two to three hours) ran 1,500 to 2,500 yen and a night pack (eight to twelve hours) 2,500 to 4,000 yen, cheaper than a love hotel or an ordinary business hotel.

Legally it is not classed among the store-type sex-related businesses under entertainment-business law, because it provides no sexual service and limits itself to providing audiovisual equipment and the hourly rental of space. Depending on the structure, hours and locality of the shop, it is subject to various regulations under building, fire-service and inn-business law.

Etymology

“Private booth video” is a Japanese coinage that settled among the trade and users in the 1980s, abbreviated colloquially. Formal trade names include “private booth video shop” and “private viewing shop,” and shop signs often add English such as “VIDEO,” “Cinema” or “Theater.” “Private booth” indicates the lockable small space and “video” the audiovisual software the shop provides. Even after digitization from the 1990s the trade name “video” remained fixed. There is almost no equivalent business abroad, and overseas media describe it as a “private video booth” or “individual video viewing room.”

History

The direct precursor was the home VHS and rental video trade that spread rapidly in the early 1980s. With the surge in home VCR ownership from 1981, chain rental shops spread nationwide, and AV makers were founded one after another, supplying home-viewing AV in volume. Home viewing, however, was difficult under Japan’s urban housing conditions of co-resident families and cramped dwellings. A business that let men view AV inside a shop emerged to absorb the demand of those who could not view at home.

In the late 1980s, “private booth video shops” appeared in multi-tenant buildings in the entertainment districts of Tokyo and Osaka, splitting off from the viewing booths set in a corner of existing rental shops. In the 1990s, 24-hour specialist chains began nationwide expansion, concentrating around major stations and pleasure quarters and establishing themselves as a business for solo late-night male customers. Karaoke boxes expanded nationwide in the same period, and the two developed in parallel as “private-room hourly-rental” businesses.

As to standing under entertainment-business law, the shop falls under none of the store-type sex-related categories, because it provides no sexual service, places no sexual service workers, and does not broker sexual acts in the rooms as a business. Late-night operation between midnight and 6 a.m. may fall under prefectural ordinances, and many shops handle this with the same late-night notification as ordinary eateries and karaoke boxes.

From the 2000s the trade entered a slow decline. The spread of home broadband normalized AV viewing on home PCs and smartphones; manga cafes (internet cafes) rose, absorbing customers with wider space, PC use and food service; and AV viewing itself was made free through illicit and grey streaming sites, eroding the economics of paid shop use. In some areas, by contrast, the business “upgraded,” with flat reclining seats, en-suite showers, free drink bars and Wi-Fi blurring the boundary with manga cafes.

On 1 October 2008, an arson fire at the “Cat’s Namba” private booth video shop in Naniwa Ward, Osaka, killed sixteen customers. The cause was arson by a visitor, but the structure of upper floors of a multi-tenant building, narrow corridors and lockable rooms enlarged the toll. The Fire and Disaster Management Agency and the Osaka City Fire Bureau strengthened fire-prevention regulation of these shops, mandating sprinklers, securing escape routes and tightening fire-alarm standards nationwide, applied retroactively to existing shops; many small shops could not bear the refit cost and closed.

Use in practice

The main clientele is varied: male office workers on business trips or who missed the last train; single residents for whom home AV viewing is difficult; men passing late-night time; and homeless or housing-deprived people. Solo male customers form an overwhelming majority; female and couple customers are almost nonexistent.

A considerable share of use is for masturbation while viewing the shop’s AV, an open secret in the trade, signalled by the standard tissues and wastebasket in each room. Shops nonetheless maintain a front of “film viewing” to avoid being classed as a sex-related business.

From the 2000s, because the low “night pack” rate, the use of booths as a substitute for lodging by men who had lost housing became a social issue. A business that let someone spend eight to twelve hours from late night to early morning for around 2,500 to 3,500 yen became, alongside simple lodging houses and net cafes, an important refuge for “housing-deprived, unstable workers.” Press coverage of this period frequently reported on young male workers living in private booth video shops and manga cafes, and the phrase “net-cafe refugee” came into wide circulation, with the private booth video shop discussed in the same context of poverty and housing.

Boundary with manga cafes and net cafes

The private booth video shop and the manga cafe (internet cafe) share the hourly rental of private or semi-private rooms, 24-hour operation and a mainly solo male clientele, making them continuous as business types. The boundaries run along several lines. The video shop centres on viewing the shop’s AV holdings, the manga cafe on reading manga and books and using PCs and the internet. The video shop is often run under a “performance-venue” or “goods-rental” notification, the manga cafe under a “restaurant” or “internet-terminal” notification. The video shop’s rooms are often lockable and fully closed from inside, while manga cafes favour doorless, open-topped “semi-booths” for security and fire safety, corresponding to each type’s main purpose.

Cultural notes

The private booth video shop has been a subject of sociology and urban studies as an intersection of postwar Japanese urban housing conditions, sexual culture and low-cost lodging, discussed as a business situated in the contexts of poverty, labour and housing. In literature and film it is depicted as a space symbolizing the late-night city, the solitary man and anonymous sex, used as a device to represent a character’s “placelessness” and urban anonymity. After the 2008 Osaka fire its social image hardened as an “urban underclass landscape” and a “dangerous enclosed space.” Even so, scattered across the multi-tenant buildings of urban entertainment districts, the private booth video shop continues to operate in modest numbers as a distinct lodging-and-viewing business where postwar Japan’s housing, sex and solitude intersect.

Related terms

• Love hotel
• Fuzoku (sex trade)
• AV genre
• History of AV
• Entertainment-business law
• Masturbation