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Married to my beeper
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Just after dusk (and earlier on weekends), men in lean black suits and women in latex minis people the neon arteries near Japan's train stations. They aggressively solicit clients from packs of beery businessmen (whispering "sexy, sexy") and enlist young women for work by grabbing them hard round the shoulder, "inviting" them for a chat.

They hand out condom packets, half-price discount tickets for services topless or nude. They tote signs displaying cartoon drawings of nymphets with enormous breasts and wayward skirts, often clothed in schoolgirl attire, listing the ages of their staff. They tell the men about well-earned pleasures and the women about easy money, filling their heads with dancing visions of Prada bags and holidays overseas.

These are "the soaplands," Japan's red-light districts, named for the most hygienic of erotic massages: A nude female rubs the length of her soap-lathered body over a man's pokémon, and he comes clean.

Service reigns supreme. The air is filled with a prerecorded, chirpy female voice that greets you in the same breathy tone at the bank or the porn shop, enveloping your world in an aura of kawaii -- cuteness, prettiness, harmlessness. Full-color fliers in your mailbox feature lingerie-clad or topless models posed compromisingly and demurely. A variety of options are laid out on the order-in "menu": fellatio, 69, sadomasochism and straight sex, with prices, locations and phone numbers demarcated clearly.

To understand anything in Japan, you must know about tatemae and honne. The former indicates the embarrassment-saving rituals of the public sphere -- the deferential bowing, the litany of apologies and the polite banter of mutually assured repression. The latter is loosely defined as your true feelings as an individual, mysterious sensations and impulses and desires that are reserved for private domains. In a land smaller and less habitable than California but with a population half that of the combined United States, the strict codification of public and private space is no minor concern.

Last year, for example, at the peak of the globally syndicated series about the president and his intern, I sat alongside a 50-ish Japanese linguistics professor at a sake bar in Osaka. We watched Bill Clinton's clown-nosed face on the screen and nodded at one another.

"Why does America embarrass itself?" the professor asked me.

"Sex," I replied. "America is confused about sex and love. We talk about it a lot."

He nodded: "In Japan, maybe he would be fired or he would resign, but the worst thing would be this news everywhere." He shook his head: "Here, no one would talk about it to the rest of the world."

Sex happens and is talked about almost exclusively in the sphere of honne. On the face of it, and certainly amid the then-depressing din of White House hysteria, this lends an admirable air of dignity to the daily dance between spirit and flesh. But finding where the lines are drawn can mystify a Westerner, to whom Japan might seem at once both a pleasure dome of guilt-free perversions and a hyper-prim, overpopulated dystopia of plastics and pollutants.

The uniformly blue-suited businessmen who frustrate foreign counterparts with elaborately formal agreements that amount to elaborately polite evasions (or outright lies) sit in overstuffed subways, riffling through newspapers featuring half-naked women and manga (comic books) displaying graphic sex and violence. They appear unconcerned with the eyes of fellow commuters pressing over their shoulders and elbows.

The office ladies, secretaries and elevator-operators greet their bosses and customers in pristine white gloves and high-collared suits, their hair tied back into tight ribbons. But later that night, they don neon micro-minis and breast-clinging halter tops as they gyrate in nightclubs or rendezvous in "love hotels." Context, in other words, is everything.

Even so, what's tolerated with little fuss or moral hand-wringing in Japan remains striking. Hiro Fujiwara, a man in his 30s who helped produce pornographic videos before manning his parents' noodle stand in an Osaka neighborhood, tells me that "pornography is sort of seen as a good outlet for men, a sign of a healthy man, like drinking a lot of alcohol." His friend, Kazuyo, a woman in her mid-20s, concurs, adding that "women don't mind so much because it means the man is normal. He watches when he is alone."

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