Instead of cruising bars for strangers, they can now hook up online and arrange to meet in a love hotel or apartment. Last year, artist Susumu Ryu tried to document the decline in a 276-page manga comic with the clumsy English title, "Vanishing Shinjuku Ni-chome – who severed the jugular of a flower garden of heretical culture?" Ryu blames gentrification associated with the opening of a new subway line, which has pushed up local property prices and made many of the tiny bars here unviable and the rise of the internet, which has given men with secret lives a way to navigate the world. "Now there are many other ways of communicating." "Are gays vanishing from Shinjuku Ni-chome!?," wondered one of the country's most popular magazines recently."This used to be a place for communicating with and discreetly meeting like-minded people," explains the organisation's head Mitsuo Fukushima. The once exclusively male gay clientele is filled out at the weekends with the straight, the female and the simply curious. The local commercial organisation that promotes Ni-chome estimates that the number of gay bars in the area has fallen by at least a third in the past decade. Amid the satyric excess, bilingual signs posted throughout telegraph the only constantly visible rule: "Gentlemen who chew gum" will be evicted from the premises.īut, roughly half a century since it emerged as a refuge for homosexuals in what was formerly a red-light district, the block is in decline. Wander around and watch the sights or lie back and wait for someone who fancies you, instructs one guide, which blissfully advises customers to expect "some mind-blowing tableaus". Soak in the sauna/bathtub then make your way up semi-naked through the floors, where porn flickers 24 hours a day in dimmed communal sleeping areas equipped with futons. Past the ticket machine – 2,600 yen (about £18) for a 13-hour stay – and pretty much anything goes, say guests who come from across Japan, and even abroad, to sample its treats.
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Only in the lobby, cheerily adorned with scenes from a sex movie that depict a portly company president being diligently serviced by a young apprentice, does it become clear that this is one of Asia's biggest gay landmarks. A steady stream of customers in the salary-man's uniform of dark suit, sensible shoes and winter overcoat files quietly through its innocuous doors. Tucked in off a back-street near the Shinjuku business and shopping district, the seven-story building could be an apartment block for retired civil servants. Nothing outside Tokyo's 24 Kaikan hotel hints at what goes on behind its grey concrete walls.