TOKYO -- Anyone who believes that respectability is priceless has not been to Japan lately. Here it sells for $100 a month.
While the Japanese economy remains a mess, one type of business seems to be doing well: the alibi-ya, whose name comes from the English word alibi and the suffix ya, meaning a seller. In essence, they are conjurers who make people at the margins of Japanese society look dignified and respectable.The alibi-ya are the marketplace's way of reconciling a shame society with what are regarded as shameful industries. Japan, more than most industrialized countries, has strict bounds of propriety and plenty of minders to see that they are adhered to. As everywhere, they often are not.
Women in the sex industry are frequent clients of the alibi-ya, which enable them to tell Mom and even boyfriends about their fine jobs in a trading company. The alibi-ya provide name cards, pay stubs and an impressive position in a decent line of work -- all totally fictitious. If a caller tries to reach the young woman while she is at her nonexistent job, a polite receptionist will explain that she has stepped out but will return the call shortly. Then the receptionist passes on the message.
"Girls want to make their families feel better," explained Kenichi Seko, who runs an alibi-ya called Fuji Operating. "They want their families to think that they have a good, proper job."
Seko sat at a conference table in his comfortable ground-floor office suite with computers and black leather couches. On the door are the names of several companies Seko uses on name cards given to his customers. But there is no mention of Fuji Operating.
The alibi-ya business sector is, of course, a tiny one by the standards of Japanese industry, and it began only about a decade ago. At first it involved just telephone answering services, but now it supplies various phony employment references and pay stubs to help clients rent apartments or obtain credit cards. An alibi-ya can even provide a fake boss to make a wedding speech about what a wonderful employee the bride was.
Broadcasters are also entering the alibi-ya business. Japan's cable radio system, with its clear reception on dozens of channels, carries one called the "alibi channel." It broadcasts the honks and rumble of roadside traffic so that a subscriber can turn on the radio and make a call that sounds as if it were coming from a telephone booth on the street.
"I don't know how listeners use the alibi broadcasts," said Yasuhiro Urasaki, a producer for cable radio. "But I assume that they use it when they oversleep and miss a meeting with a client. Then they can put on the alibi program and then call and say, 'Sorry to be late, but I got lost on the way.' "
Major train stations also have the equivalent of alibi shops, selling specialty gifts from all over Japan. Thus if a businessman has forgotten to get a gift for a friend while on a trip to the southern city of Fukuoka, he can go to Tokyo Station and get a typical Fukuoka product like hot pickled pollack roe.
The sex industry is the main customer for the alibi-ya, reflecting one of the paradoxes of Japan: A society that puts a premium on traditional virtue (at least for women) also has a huge sex industry. "Japan has modernized in many ways, but mentally it's pre-modern," said Yoko Tajima, a prominent feminist who teaches at Housei University in Tokyo. "Even high school students sell themselves; even housewives sell themselves. But on the other hand, women are supposed to be virtuous."
While the United States tends to fill the ranks of prostitutes at least partly with drug addicts and a large underclass, Japan has almost no underclass or addicts. So massage parlors are staffed by middle-class women and girls who are frequently extremely uncomfortable with what they are doing -- and who are close enough to their families to want to stay in regular touch.