”It pissed me off” host tells police.

It’s an absolute requirement, obviously, that the staff of Japan’s host bars be handsome. However, industry insiders and enthusiastic customers alike routinely say what separates the top tier of hosts from their lesser colleagues isn’t their physical attractiveness.

Instead, successful hosts are the ones who can make a lady feel special. Through some mix of suave sophistication, roguish charm, and/or sensitive emotional attentiveness, they have personalities that make women enjoy spending time around them. Well, more accurately, they’re able to project a persona that women enjoy being around, but one woman found out, in a violent way, that a host she’d been cozying up to wasn’t as nice as he’d seemed.

On October 17, 23-year-old host Hiro Kawakami was out in Tokyo’s Kabukicho bar district with a younger coworker host and two women they’d met when they’d come to their club as customers. While the two hosts weren’t officially working at the time the group of four was out on the 17th, pseudo-socializing with customers outside of the club they’re employed at (on the customers’ dime, of course) is a fairly common, and often encouraged, practice in the host/hostess industry in Japan.

The group booked a private karaoke box and began singing, but apparently one of the women didn’t care for Kawakami’s musical stylings, and began making fun of him for his off-key vocal performance, calling him “tone-deaf.” Kawakami and the woman then got into a verbal confrontation, prompting the other woman, aged 25, to step in and try to intervene. Having had his vocal cords mocked, Kawakami then decided to show off what he could do with his cranium, headbutting the second woman and otherwise striking her, fracturing her orbital floor (essentially the bone at the back of the eye socket).

▼ Video of Kawakami’s arrest

Kawakami was subsequently arrested and taken into custody by Tokyo Metropolitan Police officers. During questioning, he admitted to the charges, saying “[The woman] was making fun of me by saying I sucked at singing, and it pissed me off.” Meanwhile, the woman’s injury is expected to take approximately one month to heal.

Sources: Nitele News 24 via Livedoor News via Jin, FNN Prime

Top image: Pakutaso

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