The door opens slowly. The teacher, paddleboard in hand, enters the classroom. He frowns disapprovingly at his student, then closes and locks the door behind him. Suzu knows she is going to be punished.

"Stand," the teacher commands.

Dreading the paddle, fighting back tears, Suzu nonetheless does as she is told.

"Bend over," the teacher orders, crossing the room to stand behind his pupil. "And pull your skirt up."

Her face flushes crimson with shame and humiliation. She bends at the waist, reaches her hands behind her and pulls up her skirt. She flinches when the tip of the paddleboard pokes against her white cotton underpants.

"Push them down," the teacher instructs.

Not wanting to bare her bottom, wishing she could somehow disappear, Suzu hesitates. Suddenly, without warning, the paddleboard hits the floor with a bang. Suzu is pinned against her desk. A hand tugs at her underpants, jerking them down. She tries to struggle, but it's futile. Her underpants are ripped off. Her legs are forced apart. Fingers search lewdly for her vagina...

It looks exactly like a classroom, and brown-eyed, baby-faced Suzu Misaki looks just like a real Japanese schoolgirl. But looks can be deceiving. This is the scene at an "image club," one of hundreds in Tokyo and Nagano where men and women pay $150 to $1000 an hour to live out their sexual fantasies.

"The men and women who come in here are looking for ways to gratify their lewd and lascivious desires," says Suzu, a 20-year-old prostitute.

And they find them. At the club in which Suzu works, customers can choose from 11 "actresses," as the prostitutes prefer to be called, working 11 rooms. These include classrooms, a nurse's office, a receptionist's foyer, a principal's office, and an imitation railroad car where, to the recorded roar of a commuter train, passengers can "molest" straphangers in school uniforms--black or plaid kneelength skirts, white blouses, and white mid-calf boots.

"I average six hundred dollars a week," boasts Yuki Shinohara, 20, "just by letting foreign businesswomen reach under my skirt and fondle my panties." At 4'11 and 95 pounds, Shinohara is a favorite among straphanger molesters. "They are especially turned on when they learn that I shave my pubic hair," she says. "Some of them get so turned on that they stick their fingers in my pussy."

Among image club actresses, the shaving or trimming and shaping of pubic hair is standard operating procedure.

"The less pubic hair we have, the younger we can appear to be," explains Misaki.

Play-acting aside, the image clubs represent a growing obsession with uniform-wearing females as sexual objects. Far more than in other countries, men and women in Japan seem to find females in uniform sexually alluring. And, according to many experts, the target age is getting steadily younger.

"One image club's most popular draw is a 21-year-old straphanger actress who looks all of ten," says Rika Kayarna, a female psychiatrist and social commentator.

According to Dr. Kayama and her colleague, Masao Miyamoto, a male psychologist and author of a book on Japanese society, the sexuality of uniform-wearing schoolgirls in particular has become an issue in Japan. "An alarming number of them occasionally prostitute themselves to raise pocket money," says Miyamoto.

Kayama concurs. "I've counseled many 13- and 14-year-old girls who confessed to performing fellatio for as little as thee dollars," the doctor says, "and each of them discussed the sex act as if they were talking about earning money baby-sitting. No shame."

No shame indeed.

"I don't really like giving blowjobs," one girl told Dr. Kayarna. "But for the money, why not? The hardest part is not gagging when the guy cums in my mouth. But it's no big thing."

It's a philosophy shared by most image club actresses.

"Sucking a guy's dick is not my favorite sex act," says Kyushu Nagoya, 24, "but it is profitable." A baby-faced brunette who works the "Principal's Office" at an image club in Nagano, Kyushu considers herself an entertainer not a whore. "Like other entertainers, I provide a service for the general public. The only difference between me and, say, a magician," she says, "is that a magician performs a magic act for a price and I perform a sex act for a price."

The Principal's Office

Sitting behind a desk in what looks, feels and smells like a school administrator's office, the "Principal," dressed in a nondescript business suit, thumbs through several pages of paper as a uniform-wearing honor student, her head bowed, stands before him.

"You cheated on this test," the principal states, his eyes on the papers. "I'm afraid I'll have to expel you."

"But it'll s-shame my m-mom and dad," the student stutters.

Still not looking at the schoolgirl, the principal slowly shakes his head. "You're a disgrace to the honor roll. You leave me no choice."

"Please," the student begs. "I'll... I'll do anything to make up for it."

"Anything?" the principal replies, slowly lifting his head to peer at her.

She nods.

Smiling evilly, he asks, "And if I said I wanted you to show me your panties?"

Her cheeks turn red with embarrassment. She grasps the hem of her plaid, knee-length skirt and lifts it upward, over her thighs, revealing the crotch of her pink panties and a tiny shadow of pubic hair.

"That'll be enough," the principal tells her.

"I may leave now?"

He shakes his head. "Cheating is a serious offense." He gestures at a chair in front of his desk. "I want to see your pussy."

Knowing she has little choice, the honor student sits down and pulls off her panties. She opens her legs and closes her eyes, not wanting to see him ogling her most private part.

"Spread your pussy lips with your fingers," the principal instructs. "I want to see the glistening pink of your little hole."

The honor student spreads her legs a bit wider and does what is demanded of her.

"Okay, I've seen enough."

"Now I may go?"

The principal shakes his head. "Not yet." He motions for her to join him behind his desk.

With the schoolgirl at his side, the principal swivels in his chair to face her. "You have such a luscious mouth," he says, unzipping his fly to punctuate his meaning.

Knowing what is expected of her, the honor student bends at the waist, lowering her head into his lap. As her lips slide over the bulbous head of his hard cock, she feels his hand slide up the back of her thighs to her bared butt. A finger penetrates her asshole as her mouth slides down the length of his shaft.

"If the customer doesn't offer an incentive," Kyushu says, "I don't swallow his cum."

Nor does she fuck.

"Other actresses will do anything," she states, "but I save my pussy for my boyfriend."

Many Japanese claim to be deeply troubled by the growing obsession with schoolgirls dressed in plain school uniforms. By international standards, however, "there is remarkably little domestic disapproval in Japan at what we call Loli-Com, or the Lolita Complex," says Dr. Miyamoto.

Despite the sexual fulfillment inside the image clubs, the appeal of uniform-wearing schoolgirls, according to most behavioral scientists, has little to do with sex.

"Like some of their European counterparts, many Japanese men feel threatened by confident, knowledgeable businesswomen," Dr. Miyamoto states. "But a young, somewhat naive schoolgirl would not be threatening. It's not so much sexual as psychological."

Reportedly, in associating with young girls, men (and a growing number of women) want to behave in an overbearing way, "to position themselves as superior," Dr. Kayama elaborates. "For example, a man who patronizes an image club is not looking for a woman to perform an intimate act of fellatio," she says. "He's simply looking for a woman to suck his dick. Similarly, women who patronize image clubs are not looking for intimacy but for raw, nasty sex."

Several decades ago, sexual fantasies centered on "office ladies" in their twenties. Then the focus became movie starlets and college women, and a few years ago it shifted to high school girls, especially cheerleaders. Today, in Japan and elsewhere, the focus is on naive, uniform-wearing schoolgirls.

"Sexual fantasies have clearly changed," Gerard reports. "A beautiful movie star is not, for a great many men, as sexually appealing as a schoolgirl in a prim, plain uniform."

Others agree.

"Everybody craves the fruit of the forbidden tree," says Hiroyuki Fukuda, a 30-year-old entrepreneur who plans to launch a magazine called Anatomical Illustrations of Young Cheerleaders. "There's an undeniable thrill to defiling innocence or engaging in 'taboo' lustful activities--which is the basis of the nun fantasies harbored by many Catholic men."

Tricia Wertz, 36, a Los Angeles businesswoman who travels to Tokyo to appease her carnal cravings, agrees. "All of us have secret desires," says Tricia, who regularly patronizes the railroad car at Kaori's, one of Tokyo's more fashionable image clubs. "I get off on fondling, sometimes masturbating the girls," Tricia confesses. But I haven't yet worked up the courage to, ah... to do them orally."

According to Dr. Kayama, it's not surprising that Wertz and other image club patrons are drawn to the straphanger fetish. "Groping of females on crowded subways is all but culturally sanctioned in Japan--71% of Japanese women claimed in a recent poll that they had been abused in that way--but other sexual crimes against women are much rarer in Japan than in other industrialized countries," the social commentator reveals.

Japan is without a doubt a much safer place for females than America. "Only about one thirteenth as many rapes are reported per capita in Japan as in the United States."

Not surprisingly, image club owners claim credit for the lack of sex crimes in their country. "Men and women in Japan have no reason to perpetrate sexual assaults," says Yedo Origano, owner of Shikoku's, an image club in southeast Honshu on Tokyo Bay. "Image clubs give them a safe, legal way to live out their darkest desires." More than a few people concur. Citing the relative safety of Japan's women and the unlimited earning potential, Tricia Wertz, Michelle Gerard, and others advocate the establishment of image clubs in other countries, including the U.S. "I'd rather people act out their sexual fantasies," Gerard says, "than attack females."

And, according to "schoolgirl" Suzu Misaki, "We can give life to any fantasy."