Ai

Ai is a host-club chain founded by Takeshi Aida and established as a prominent business in Kabukicho. At the time Jake Adelstein visited, Aida employed about three hundred men across five clubs; he presented Ai as a long-running, regulated operation, in contrast to unlicensed venues vulnerable to yakuza influence and debt exploitation.

Establishment and Growth

Ai’s founder, Takeshi Aida, was born in Niigata Prefecture, the sixth of nine brothers, and left for the city at twenty. He first became a top salesman at a bed company, then tried a crime-prevention-goods business that went bankrupt and opened a wig business, which introduced him to a women-oriented market. He moved into hosting, was hired away by successive clubs, and eventually started Ai after joining the city’s largest host club. The chain became what the account describes as the gold standard of host clubs. Aida expanded beyond the original club into a small empire of host clubs, pubs, and bars. Ai became such a fixture of Kabukicho nightlife that it was included on a bus tour for middle-aged women visiting from the countryside. Aida had also written a book on business management, while his wife wrote about the joys and perils of marriage to a professional host.

The Club and Its Work

Ai stood in the back alleys of Kabukicho, near a stand-up shot bar and not far from the Furinkaikan. Its entrance combined a gold-leaf “LADIES’ CLUB” sign and statues with decor that mixed Art Deco elements and 1950s diner style. Inside were chandeliers, a dance floor, and round couches. These details establish the club as a deliberately designed commercial setting for an evening of attention and entertainment, rather than simply a place to dance. Aida described the host’s work as listening, entertaining, and counseling as well as pouring drinks. In his account, some women came because they felt lonely or wanted someone to listen; others wanted to dance, laugh, or talk about television. He argued that popularity did not depend on looks alone: a successful host had to read the client, know when to pour her drink, and understand what she could afford. This service model offered an evening of attentive company without the obligations of a relationship, which Aida characterized as simulated romance.

Regulation and Organized Crime

Aida distinguished Ai from newer, unlicensed clubs. He said Ai kept accurate accounts, paid taxes, and registered with the police so that yakuza could not extort it. He warned that unlicensed venues were easier to blackmail and could be turned into sources of profit for organized crime. In his account, some such clubs used low advertised prices to draw in customers, then left them in debt and exposed them to loan sharks; the worst were fronts for criminal operations that sought to make customers prostitutes or debt slaves. That distinction placed Ai within a broader nightlife economy where legitimate entertainment and organized crime could occupy adjacent territory. The book describes the Sumiyoshi-kai’s income from protection in the sex industry and its operation of adult-goods shops and a talent agency supplying women to porn producers. Aida’s claims about Ai’s records, taxes, and registration therefore function not only as a description of business practice but also as his explanation for how the chain sought to keep criminal pressure at bay.

Aida’s Account and the Reporting

Adelstein visited Ai after a police investigation into host clubs revealed a sharp increase in their number: seventy-one were operating, compared with twenty three years earlier. Aida agreed to discuss the industry and invited Adelstein to work a night as a host. The visit gave the reporter access to the club’s premises and its owner’s account of the business, which framed host-club popularity around attentive service and a controlled fantasy of intimacy. Ai thus appears both as a substantial entertainment enterprise and as Aida’s example of a club attempting to separate itself from predatory, criminally entangled operations. The contrast is not presented as proof that the wider industry was safe; rather, it shows how licensing, accounting, and police registration mattered in a market where apparently ordinary clubs could become instruments of extortion or exploitation.