Araki. Tokyo Lucky Hole in Bloomington, MN

It started in 1978 with an ordinary coffee shop near Kyoto. Word spread that the waitresses wore
no panties under their miniskirts.
Similar establishments popped up across the country. Men waited in line outside to pay three times the usual coffee price just to be served by a panty-free young woman.
Within a few years, a new craze took hold: the
no-panties “massage” parlor
. Increasingly bizarre services followed, from
fondling clients through holes in coffins
to
commuter-train fetishists
. One particularly popular destination was a Tokyo club called “Lucky Hole” where clients stood on one side of a plywood partition, a hostess on the other. In between them was a hole big enough for a certain part of the male anatomy.
Taking the
Lucky Hole
as his title,
Nobuyoshi Araki
captures
Japan's sex industry in full flower
, documenting in
more than 800 photos
the pleasure-seekers and providers of Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood before the February 1985 New Amusement Business Control and Improvement Act put a stop to many of the country's sex locales. Through
mirrored walls, bed sheets, the bondage and the orgies
, this is the last word on an age of bacchanalia, infused with moments of
humor, precise poetry, and questioning interjections.