9 September 2022
How do you combine a Japanese love of number-based wordplay and the gay male urge to cruise with pre-Internet, pre-cellphone technology?
The answer for Japan in the early 1990s? You let the phone company take care of it!
Nippon Telephone & Telegraph (NTT) developed Dengon Dial in 1986 as a call-in answering-machine service.
Once you connected, you were prompted to enter an eight-digit exchange, followed by a four-digit passcode. The passcode was meant to be a security level, in case someone guessed your exchange or dialed it at random. Anyone could create an exchange. A maximum of ten messages could be left on the exchange. Each message remained in the system for exactly eight hours before being deleted.
A Japanese pay phone, circa 1995.
Y, a dear friend of mine, introduced me to the service. He had already taught me a lot about cruising in Japan, in the years before Hiro found me. Several Dengon Dial numbers appealed to me, and Japanese numeric wordplay made it easy for me to remember them. The simplest combinations repeated a set of numbers twice for the exchange you dialed in to, and once for the passcode you needed to access the messages left.
1990, me getting a big hug from my high school friend, K, with Y looking on in my first apartment in Japan.
Exchange Passcode Japanese English
01050105 0105 otoko x 3 man x 3
01030103 0103 otōsan x 3 daddy x 3
02130213 0213 onīsan x 3 big bro x 3
86048604 8604 yarō yo x 3 let’s get it on x 3
29862986 2986 niku yaro x 3 muscle boy x 3
01030103 4404 otōsan, otōsan, shiyō yo
daddy, daddy, let’s do it
And my absolute favorite:
21010213 4404 futoi onīsan, shiyō yo
chubby big bro, let’s do it
How did I use the system?
In the beginning, I’d listen to the messages, hearing the details that other people thought were important. Frantically, I’d copy down the phone numbers of the guys I wanted to meet. One young man in particular offered to drive me around in his Subaru coupe, the stick shift making everything that much more challenging when he finally parked somewhere secluded.
I graduated to leaving my own messages with my phone number. A parade of men marched to my front door. With utter delusion, I thought I was so discreet. Until the day Cameron, my very first gay friend in Japan, came to visit me, stopping for sushi in my neighborhood before he arrived.
Me and Cameron at a 1989 Halloween party in Tōkyō’s gayborhood. I went as a foreigner. I know, I know. Lazy-ass costume.
He stood on my threshold in utter hysterics. When he finally calmed down, he let loose: The sushi guy asked if I was coming to see you. When I said that it was, he confided that I was very busy lately. So many private English lessons.
At first I was aghast. Cameron made things worse by reminding me that if the sushi guy knew, everyone knew. But the more I fretted about it, the more I came to this conclusion: my neighbors could definitely envision English lessons, but the thought of me dancing between the sheets with each evening’s paramours would never even occur to them.
Dengon Dial was fun and easy. Too easy, I think, but that’s a story I’ll keep in the pages of my memoir.
