[Shibuya Contact Tokyo] What's Strange About Clubs in Japan's Galápagos Scene [Keep Gropers Away]

Quite some time has passed, but there was a molestation incident on Friday, May 24 at Contact Tokyo in Shibuya, Tokyo, a club hosting quality techno and house events.

Over this incident, saying it had “failed to stop a customer from being molested by someone who was heavily drunk,” Contact Tokyo officially apologized on its website.

*For details, see the tweet below and the NEWS section of Contact Tokyo's website.

[An apology from Global Hearts / Contact concerning our response to the molestation inside the venue on Friday, May 24] We also apologize here for the delay in responding to everyone. https://t.co/R6e0DjkeIA

— ContactTokyo (@ContactTokyo) May 28, 2019

With this in mind, this time I'd like to discuss the types of customers at Japanese club events and festivals “with plenty of my own opinions” and “sometimes without mincing words”.

A Club Shouldn't Have to Apologize for Being Unable to Police Molestation Sufficiently, Should It?

Contact Tokyo's response to this incident is very sincere, but I feel they're “apologizing for something they don't need to apologize for,” and it makes me very uncomfortable.

The reasons are very simple:

That's why.

An inconvenient truth.

Every Accident Is Your Own Responsibility

Not just in clubs, but on trains or in public facilities too, as long as control relies on human resources, it is impossible to watch constantly to prevent molestation or eradicate it.

Some may say, “But clubs have security (bouncers), don't they?” Yet the fact that crime doesn't disappear from the world despite the police makes the flaw in that logic obvious, haha.

In other words, you can't depend on a safety net, so you have no choice but to switch to the mindset that you must protect yourself.

I live abroad (in Southeast Asia) now. Although I haven't specifically chosen dangerous countries or areas, it's quite common for there to be no rules.

This time molestation received dramatic attention, but pickpocketing, small collisions and countless other things can cause trouble.

The operators won't take responsibility for every one of them, and cannot be expected to prevent them.

It's the same as saying: if you can't take precautions to avoid badly cutting your hand, don't hold a knife and cook.

I went to clubs in London around 18 years ago, and the girls out at night firmly said NO to men who seemed troublesome.

Girls going to Japanese clubs also need that kind of assertiveness.

The Tragedy of Freedom and Openness Being Abused

Dance music culture is inherently free and open, but in recent years hopelessly misguided idiots have entered it, and tragedies happen frequently.

For example, picking someone up.

Picking someone up is an exchange in which a man and woman who would otherwise have had no connection meet through a man's creative approach and rapidly grow closer.

It certainly does not mean a man, fueled by alcohol and wanting to vent his weekday frustrations, abusing clubs' free and open culture to sexually harass or molest people.

Exactly the same can be said of Halloween in Shibuya.

Costumes are inherently creative, and as people showed them off, crowds grew enormously and formed a distinctive scene. But a Halloween event is certainly not a place to secretly photograph the girls who gather or overturn trucks.

However, I don't think that's the essence of the problem.

Japanese Clubs' Status Has Fallen So Far That Even People with Poor Civic Standards Can Casually Walk In

Just as the heading says.

When I was in my early twenties, I made sure to dress properly before going to a club.

Clubbers then had a strong awareness of “I have to fit into the atmosphere on that floor!” Clubs and the culture itself also seemed to demand this of customers, almost as an unspoken pressure.

There were noticeably attractive girls in the clubs too, which I think inspired the desire to become someone who could befriend them or attract their attention.

For a young man, that's a very normal motivation.

But in recent years, people looking shabby—or bluntly, “fucking creepy men”—routinely enter top clubs and look smug.

There are “fat, ugly women” and people with terribly strong body odor too, and customers coming with a hostess-club mindset just to meet good-looking female DJs or dancers are no longer unusual.

Club floors have often felt as shabby and poorly behaved as packed trains just before the last service.

People drinking as though it were a cheap bar also stood out.

It's a world full of goblins and monsters.

In recent years, clubs everywhere have struggled to attract customers, inevitably creating a feeling of begging for business and lowering the barrier to entry.

I think things wouldn't have come to this if clubs had maintained spaces where customers were deeply knowledgeable and passionate about music, creative exchanges happened throughout, and ordinary office workers merely looking to vent felt out of place...

Clubs should select customers carefully.

AI Will Save Japan's Frequently Empty Clubs

To borrow Donald Trump's slogan, “Make Japanese club great again” or “Make the dancefloor great again”, perhaps.

Clubs and dance floors should be able to reach a high position again in terms of quality, business and branding.

So, since I also normally work in management consulting, haha, I'd like to suggest a solution.

The key is AI.

In other words, collect personal information comprehensively and use it fully for marketing and security.

Of course, this solution can't be activated immediately and won't have instant effects. Some readers will probably say, “Stop spouting fantasies!”

But at least implementing it could produce a certain level of sales. As things stand, there are no clubs in Japan even using DRM (direct response marketing), a reliable technique that attracts only the customers you want to deal with.

Even if “marketing and security making full use of AI” looks like a distant goal, methods to collect as much personal information as possible and use it effectively should be possible to start immediately, and accumulating it as big data should bring you much closer to the goal at once.

I think simply differentiating customers first would raise status again and improve all sorts of factors.

Conclusion

There are other things I'd like to suggest, but I'll leave it here this time.

To summarize the points:

I sincerely hope Japanese clubs come back as cool, exciting places that lead stylish young people again.

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