Girls' Night Out (My Adventures in a Japanese Club)

My best Vanna White.

In November I went to Club ID in Nagoya with a great group of gals.  The boys who get left behind may be wondering what goes on during so-called "girls' nights."  Well, we get all dressed up to go dance together, and we get hit on by pervy guys who don't have girlfriends because they're awful people.  That part is pretty well-known.  What makes this night special is all the Japanese touches we enjoyed throughout the evening.  Beware!  What follows is not for the faint of heart.

Club ID is pretty large.  It had at least 4 upper floors and 1 or 2 basement levels.  Nicely, they provided lockers for our things, which was great since we'd all worn heavy coats and scarves to the club.  Each level of ID is differently decorated, and the poor bartenders are made to dress up in all manner of costumes.  Case in point: somehow Ronald McDonald and Marilyn-Monroe-done-Andy-Warhol-style go together?  Other levels included darkly-painted, bikini-clad girls writhing in cages while dubstep and reggae blasted, and a super-buff black man stripping while Asian girls dressed all in white screamed and played with customers from raised platforms.

See?  I didn't make it up.  That's the super-buff black man.  Yes, you can see someone dressed as Mario and someone else dressed as The Joker.  I believe they may be the DJs for this level.  It was absolute mayhem and I didn't stay long.  As soon as we went in, people crushed around us and we couldn't move or breathe.  Not something I suggest for the claustrophobic.  It was a disturbing level in any case, as it seemed to be all about watching, and rubbing up on, your favorite fetish object (be it the black man or the pure Asian beauties lining the walls).

Rachael and me, looking like sisters.

Most of the levels were boring, filled with cigarette smoke and drunken men who didn't want to drop their amorous suits.  Although there were many signs on the walls with the message "don't harass the female customers," in several languages, we were all still harassed quite regularly.  One man who appeared to be Middle Eastern decided to try to cut me off from the rest of my friends so that I would... I don't know, stay with him?  Dance with him?  Leave with him?  I'm not sure even he knew what his plan was.  Here's what I don't understand: if the object of attention isn't game at first approach, why do men who engage in this behavior think that upping the force factor makes them suddenly intriguing and palatable?  

Something of note: while I was approached by several men over the course of the night, none of the Japanese men tried to force me to go anywhere like that one guy did.  The Japanese men seemed less dramatic and more polite, and the ones who tried to hit on me treated me as a person, not an object for consumption.  One funny thing, though: because the music was so loud, I couldn't hear anyone when they talked to me.  So when these men tried to talk, I couldn't understand them.  Perhaps if I could have heard them I still wouldn't have understood their Japanese.  I don't know.  So three or four of them approached the Japanese friends I came with to ask about me, and ultimately got turned away by a second source.

Enough of that, then!  The most fun level was definitely the Bat Cave, where I stayed most of the night.  It was awesomely painted in all things Batman, and the bartenders were dressed as Catwoman, inmates, asylum residents, and The Joker.  I had my picture taken by someone whom I could only guess to be the club's official photographer.  He was a man of average height made taller by 4-inch stilettos, dressed entirely in a leopard-print spandex bodysuit that culminated in an Egyptian-style pharaoh headdress.  I suppose it was an honor to be snapped?  You can visit this page to have a look at the madness and mayhem.    

These are two sets (why they like to come in pairs, I don't know) of dressed-up girls we saw.  They love people taking pictures of them, it seems to validate their life choices (which I find questionable).

You can see the painted walls in the background of these pictures, and in the one above the leopard girls there's a DJ dressed in a Batman costume if you look closely.  Once we settled in to the Bat Cave, it was pretty fun.  We all danced together (until one of us went off to make out with a random 20-something Japanese boy, I won't say who, you know who you are).  Audrey, Joanna, and I also thought our coats might have been stolen from the locker for a time, but it turned out to be Miho, who had wandered around the club and decided to get all our things before we returned to the lockers as a group. Eventually we met up with her outside, retrieved said coats, and went to McDonalds (eww, I know, it was the only place open) for late-night coffee.  To put the cherry on a crazy night, a random 30-something Japanese guy followed us there and spent some (non-sleazy) time with us.  While I enjoyed the night as a whole, I have no desire to go again.  One trip to a Japanese toy-land filled with revenant beings is more than enough!