I am ordering vodka and Red Bull at $10 a pop at the bar of a posh Ginza club and a woman dressed as a nurse carrying a silver tray full of syringes taps me on the shoulder.

“Open your mouth!” she says with a wink.

“OK then.” And she squirts some strawberry-flavoured cocktail down my throat.

Moments later another pretty girl dressed in a skin-tight pink rubber “Cat Woman” suit introduces herself as Azusa. “I work at the Torture Dungeon.”

“Of course you do, sweetheart,” I reply, becoming increasingly confused at how this exclusive “Night of the Body” theme party was being passed off as a “fashion event” with so many people having squeezed themselves into rubber, leather and barbed wire. Whatever cracks your whip, I guess.

“It’s nothing kinky,” said Maika, one of party organiser Libido’s top dancers. “Our customers, I guess people with a bit of money maybe, like to dress up.”

If Tokyo is feeling the bite of recession, it certainly wasn’t in evidence this night as pole-dancers whirled dangerously in razor sharp stilettos, guests volunteered to be “soft”-whipped and a bleached blonde beauty had various sweets and desserts artistically laid out on her naked body in the Japanese “nyotaimori” style.

One funky Japanese guy in dreadlocks and platform shoes boasted that he had designed his own rubber suit. It had taken him two weeks at a cost of $2,000.

“My jeans are Issey Miyake,” I responded a bit lamely.

Clearly this underworld of fetish parties was big in Japan. In one night I was invited to no less than three similar events over the following two weeks.

Not with my wardrobe. Not on my wages.

Photo credits: REUTERS/Issei Kato