Tokyo swingers' clubs

When I told people about it afterwards, they always said the same thing: 'I didn't know you could get gonorrhea from a blow job.' Yeah, no shit. Neither did I. You learn all kinds of stuff when you go to a happening club.

The crazy thing is that it looked so normal from the outside. It was in Shibuya, on the road I always walked up to get to Club Asia, and it just looked like some kind of members-only club. You never would've known that there was wall-to-wall fucking going on inside. Okay, I exaggerate: it was more like a few total strangers getting it on while a load of people dredged up from the cesspit of humanity sat around waiting for their turn and masturbating.

Sorry, did you think I meant 'happening' as in 'cool'? Not that kind of place. I'm talking swingers' clubs, and in Japan they've been raised to the level of fine art. This place was insane: they had wipe-clean cushioned floors, they had a pole dancing area, they had boxes of tissues and condoms in all the corners, they had cosplay outfits, they had cages, they even had a zone where you could do rope bondage. Like I said: insane.

The funniest part was that they even had a masturbation room. There were two rooms where you could go to have proper sex, but one of them was just for couples… only there was a one-wave mirror inside, so if some guy wasn't going to get his rocks off that night, he could go sit on the other side and stroke the salami while he watched someone else screwing. Always gotta give the customer what they want, right?

To be honest, I don't know what I was expecting when I went there. I'd heard about the fucked-up stuff that goes on in Japanese sex clubs, but I always found it hard to imagine all these salarymen going at it like they were in Caligula or some shit like that. And in the end, it wasn't at all. It was more like playing strip poker at a slumber party, I guess. I think a lot of the people there were nervous as shit, and didn't have enough confidence to go all-out.

Anyway, I went there with another gaijin friend of mine. If's funny, because we were 100 percent sure they wouldn't let us in, but this didn't even seem to be an issue (I guess the fact we spoke Japanese helped). There was a changing room when you went inside, and you weren't allowed to take any cameras or phones into the main section of the club, which made total sense: you don't want someone having a Kodak moment you when you've got a woman shoving her finger up your ass.

Sorry, I'm skipping ahead here. But that happened. I was sitting at the bar, talking to this girl who said she went there all the time, by herself, just because it was 'fun'. (And this girl wasn't even 20 yet. It must take some really progressive parenting to raise a kid like that.) Anyway, we were shooting the shit for ages when she asked if i was into 'ecchi', and suddenly she and one of the women who worked there were busting out the rubber gloves and lube and going at me from both directions. Solid attention to detail there: rubber gloves and lube, right at hand, just when you need it.

So… later on, my friend and I got talking to this girl who spoke pretty good English, and who told us she used to be a pole dancer in the States. She seemed pretty slutty, and when I looked down I realized my friend was fingering her while we were talking. Smooth customer, that guy. She was obviously game, so we went into one of the designated rooms-for-fucking, and my friend started taking her from behind while she sucked me off.

Now, you'd think this would be great, right? It wasn't. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it was pretty fucking gross. There was a window where other people could look in, and we had these guys laughing and shouting encouragement from outside. My friend was doing really well, but I could barely even get it up, so after a while we sort of gave up. I didn't see the girl at all later in the night, and I suspect she left as soon as we'd finished.

Us? We stuck around for a few hours after that. My friend got lucky again with another girl, but I just couldn't get in touch with my inner animal. There was always something stopping me, probably that little voice in the back of your head that says 'this is too weird'. And it was weird, really fucking weird. Later on, I sat downstairs at the bar and watched this middle-aged guy get stripped naked by the staff, jerked off, and have a dildo stuffed up his ass.

Seriously, I can't imagine what it's like if that's your regular job.

When we went home at the end of the night, I couldn't really have told you if we'd had a good time or not. I guess it was what you'd call a learning experience. Whatever the case, I wasn't expecting to wake up a couple of nights later with puss oozing out of my junk. When I told my friend about it, he freaked out because the condom had broken when he was banging that other woman in there. He took a test immediately and he was clean, though, thank Christ.

This all happened a few years ago now, and I never went back to the club afterwards. I don't even know if it's there any more, but if you like the idea of random sex with strangers and the lingering threat of venereal diseases, you know where to look.

Paul Brambridge is a pseudonym for a former Tokyo resident who doesn't want his parents or potential employers reading this