{"id":15722,"date":"2010-12-22T12:04:43","date_gmt":"2010-12-22T16:04:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/?p=15722"},"modified":"2011-01-07T12:58:33","modified_gmt":"2011-01-07T16:58:33","slug":"wit-life-143-soho-host-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/2010\/12\/22\/wit-life-143-soho-host-club\/","title":{"rendered":"WIT Life #143: SoHo Host Club"},"content":{"rendered":"

WITLife<\/strong><\/em><\/a> is a periodic series written<\/strong><\/em> by professional Writer\/Interpreter\/Translator <\/strong><\/em>Stacy Smith<\/strong><\/a> <\/em>(Kumamo<\/strong><\/em>to-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei\u2019s newscast in Japanese, and here she shar<\/strong><\/em>es s<\/strong><\/em>ome of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations.<\/strong><\/em>\"\"<\/p>\n

I knew that there were a few hostess clubs floating around the city, but I was not aware of the existence of any host clubs.\u00a0 That is until I attended the Winter Solstice Wonderland event last night hosted by none other than New York’s very own SoHo Host Club<\/a>!\u00a0 I have never visited a host club in Japan, so was not sure what to expect, but this group is inspired by the Japanese anime Ouran High School Host Club<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 The six hosts present ranged in age from 18-31, and all were dressed in suits and looked quite dapper.<\/p>\n

The host taking care of our table was 25-year old Salvatore Torres, and he impressively remembered all of our individual tea selections and kept our cups filled.\u00a0 Evidently in the original anime most social events revolve around tea and sweets, but the event last night was catered so there was a delicious dinner as well as homemade desserts.\u00a0 Like most of the hosts, Sal had come to be acquainted with the club by word of mouth, and most of the hosts themselv\"\"<\/a>es are picked based on recommendations.<\/p>\n

Although interest in anime and manga is not a must it is highly encouraged, but more than anything the hosts must be “chivalrous, refined, and attentive [and] genuinely enjoy interacting with their guests.”\u00a0 Sal’s day job is in IT at Fresh Direct, and the youngest member of the group is currently a pre-med student who is also a dancer, a veritable modern-day Renaissance man.<\/p>\n

This group is fairly new (their birthday is listed as July 30th on their Facebook<\/a> page), so it remains to be seen how far this concept will go.\u00a0 They are available not only for special events but anytime their services are needed, and they promise to be gentlemenly 24\/7.<\/p>\n

Indeed they were.\u00a0 My three female friends and I interacted with almost all of the hosts, and they all had their own unique charm but shared the quality of being perfectly gentlemenly.\u00a0 Friendly but not overly so.\u00a0 Inquisitive but not prying.\u00a0 One friend said they made the general dating pool look really bad.<\/p>\n

However, there were slight drawbacks of having hosts’ attention being lavished upon you.\u00a0 The intensity of one host’s gaze got to be too much for one friend.\u00a0 Another declared that she had more fun just hanging out with her girlfriends.\u00a0 While it is nice to be the sole focus of a man’s attention (and to be served by one), it does get a bit tiring after a while.<\/p>\n

Unbelievably, the hosts showed no sign of fatigue.\u00a0 On the contrary, they seemed to get genkier throughout the night!\u00a0 Before the event came to a close they presented all guests with personalized Christmas cards, and saw each one off (holding the door for them of course).\u00a0 Even though they are playing the parts of hosts, they seem to genuinely be enjoying themselves and this made it a fun night of fantasy for all of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WITLife is a periodic series written by professional Writer\/Interpreter\/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei\u2019s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations. I knew that there were a few hostess clubs floating around the city, but I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[70,18,36,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food-drink","category-translatinginterpreting","category-wit-life","category-writers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkZ7m-45A","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15722"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15989,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15722\/revisions\/15989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}