Consistent indulgence is enabled by one of the perks of mid-level corporate positions, the open expense account, allowing low-salary executives to enjoy a Cadillac lifestyle on an otherwise rickshaw budget. This friction between responsibility and debauchery creates a certain urgency in society, a tension that nourishes what is quite possibly the most hedonistic civilization on earth. Nurtured by a loose religious structure that happily endorses sex and a government that has traditionally viewed various forms of prostitution as necessary evils for maintaining social stability, the Japanese are no strangers to gettin' their freak on.

Signs of cultural horniness can be seen not just in early Japanese literature such as The Tale of Genji (about a fictional Casanova who seduces as he pleases) and in Sei Shonagon's still-famous tenth century novel The Pillow Book, but in their mythic characters of folklore as well. Tengu, mountain bird-men with elongated, penis-shaped noses, remain a winking symbol of bawdiness, while statues of tannuki, the badger, often stand outside restaurants, usually with potted plants strategically stationed in front of their legs. Moving the foliage reveals a scrotum that drapes like a hanging skirt; legend claims the tannuki could tighten it and beat on it like a drum or smother its enemies under its tent-like folds.

Japan's sex-for-money circuit has flourished since time immemorial, eventually reaching its proverbial climax in the Yoshiwara, the "Rush Field," Tokyo's licensed quarters of the 17th century. Walled in and surrounded by a fetid moat, the Yoshiwara was a product of the new Edo shogunate's moralistic Neo-Confucian reforms and fear of insurrection -- displaced and dissatisfied samurai, ronin, were known to haunt brothels, and anti-government forces were thought to use them as base camps. Restricting all prostitution to one area made surveillance easy: All visitors had their names registered in ledgers and were prohibited from remaining in the Yoshiwara for longer than 24 hours.

Relocating in 1657 after the Yoshiwara burned to the ground in one of Tokyo's great fires, the sophistos and lowlifes of the new Yoshiwara spawned a cultural renaissance with kabuki theater, the high fashion of geisha and an outpouring of literature and art describing this brave new "floating world," the ukiyo, a metaphor for the transient and unreal nature of life in the pleasure district. The classic woodblock prints of this era take their name similarly: ukiyo-e, pictures of the floating world. Despite periodic government crackdowns, for the first time in Japanese history a pleasure lifestyle had become the realm of the townsman, and culture was trickling up from the commoners rather than down from the aristocracy.

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