Tea Friends: New Japanese film about sex workers for the elderly

Tea Friends is a new Japanese film about sex services for the elderly.

A former sex worker called Mana (Rei Okamoto) runs the eponymous service, which she considers more like a community of “tea girls” who sleep with older men.

The clients answer vague ads asking for “tea friends” and this is how they meet the women involved with the service, who tend to be mature too. If this sounds twee, it’s actually realistic — we wrote about a similar service before.

Inevitably, their encounters involves trips to love hotels but the film suggests there’s more to this than just sex. Also inevitably, the male clients are given Viagra to help them perform.

As the positive review in the Japan Times says, “the film dares to suggest that a call-girl service for lonely retirees may not be such a bad thing.”

This is a topic that rarely gets shown in the movies — or anywhere.

“While never gratuitous, Tea Friends depicts its senior-citizen liaisons with unblushing candor and a decidedly sex-positive slant.”

With a running time of 135 minutes, Tea Friends is currently in theaters in Japan now.