Review: The Great Happiness Space
Note: This article is an edited version of the one I’ve written for my blog about my stay in Japan.
Yesterday I saw a screening of the Great Happiness Space, a documentary that takes place in Osaka, Japan and discusses the issue of male prostitution (and to a lesser extent, female prostitution) that take place in one particularly popular male host club (as they’re called), Rakkyo.
Each of the young men are interviewed, who live the lives of playboys and scam artists at the same time. An individual host can make up to the U.S. equivalent of $50,000 a MONTH, sometimes even over $10,000 in one night. Their regular customers, young women who spend gobs and gobs of money to get the attention of one man, are also interviewed. Both sides acknowledge the loneliness and emotional numbness that comes from frequenting such an environment.
The documentary does an excellent job by letting the interviewees’ actions speak for themselves. The crew, for the most part, stays out of the way–an occasional question is heard here and there. Ultimately, the young men and women in the film are strikingly honest, baring all for viewers to witness a side of Japan most would never even comprehend. The film is well-edited and cuts back and forth between various people in order to keep interest and show the different facets of sexualized Japanese youth. Overall, The Great Happiness Space does a great job keeping the film low key and straightforward, and you cannot help feeling for all of the men and women in this movie as part of a generation that is a bit lost.
I highly recommend it to those who want to see how confusing it is to grow up in this new generation of Japan, where young people grow up without really understand who they are. The male hosts often talk about wanting to “heal” or to help the women by doing what they do (comforting them, complimenting them, socializing with them, sleeping with them), which is a bit of a paradox because in doing so, the young men claim to lose their own sense of who they are.
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