It started in 1978 with an ordinary coffee shop near Kyoto.
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..
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.
In between them was a Hole big enough for a certain part of the male anatomy.
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.
Increasingly bizarre services followed, from fondling clients through holes in coffins to commuter-train fetishists.
Within a few years, a new craze took hold: the no-panties "massage" parlor.
Men waited in line outside to pay three times the usual coffee price just to be served by a panty-free young woman.
Similar establishments popped up across the country.
Word spread that the waitresses wore no panties under their miniskirts.
It started in 1978 with an ordinary coffee shop near Kyoto
