That would be the last time art and the sex trade collaborated on such a grand scale in Japan. Tokyo's modern Kabuki-cho area is a much coarser version of the Yoshiwara, where dark-suited pimps corner demure Japanese girls in the street trying to convince them to work at one shop or another. African émigrés pretending to be New Yorkers pass out handbills in accented English, and crewcut yakuza mafia thugs bark into cell phones. Besides owning or offering protection to many area sex parlors, yakuza run sham bars that serve Budweisers but surprise customers with bills of 50,000 yen or more, beating them up if they don't pay.

Kabuki-cho's draw is further diluted by lax licensing laws that no longer restrict sex-oriented businesses to one neighborhood, meaning most of its sex trade is dedicated to the sleaziest of services for wide-eyed foreigners.

The floating world is now the mizu shobai, the water trade, possibly in reference to unlicensed prostitutes who worked from boats during the Edo period or the alcohol that flows just as freely today in massage parlors and Soaplands as it did in the Yoshiwara. Gaping loopholes in the Western-influenced prostitution ban of 1956 have ensured that whatever its name, the Japanese pleasure business floats happily along, even enjoying periodic boosts such as the government's approval of Viagra for legal prescription this year. Before legalization, Bob Dole's erection pill sold black-market style from the same underground vendors who peddle ground rhinoceros horn and other illegal aphrodisiacs. Ever familiar with contradictions, the Japanese are still waiting approval for the birth control pill as something other than a hormone-heavy prescription for controlling uneven ovulation. Abortion is still the country's favored method of birth control.

From the clingy short shorts and ultra-high heels of younger women to the criers in long fluorescent coats hawking strip clubs and sex shops, the call to coitus is strong, lingering as pungently near the side-street love hotels as it does near the erotic bookshops on the main thoroughfares. Public phones are plastered nightly with pinkku bira, easy-peel "pink flyers" advertising barely-legal escorts with "personal" phone numbers, or phone clubs and date clubs that allow anonymous partners to set up dinner and hopefully a quick shag as well. Host clubs draw housewives and young girls desperate for conversation and possible sexual favors from young Asian gigolos; their counterpart, hostess clubs, succor men looking for the same attention. Once called Turkish baths, Soaplands offer a sensuous, bubbly evening in which clients are soaped up and washed down by Sopu-reedi, Soap-ladies, massaged while they soak in a bath, and then skillfully serviced with shakuhachi, a term derived from the Japanese bamboo flute, before sex. More pragmatically, little edifices called "blowjob-yas" post their prices on the street, offering their namesake for 10,000 yen each, or about $80.