Nothing outside Tokyo's 24-Kaikan hotel hints at what goes on behind its grey concrete walls. In a back street near the Shinjuku business and shopping district, the seven-storey building could be an apartment block for retired civil servants. A stream of customers in the salary-man's uniform of dark suit, sensible shoes and winter overcoat files quietly through its innocuous doors. Only in the foyer, adorned with scenes from a sex movie, does it become clear that this is one of Asia's biggest gay landmarks. Past the ticket machine - 2,600 yen (HK$225) for a 13-hour stay to sample its treats. Pretty much anything goes, say guests, who come from across Japan and abroad. It is very Japanese: discreet, compartmentalised; fastidiously careful about order and details. Live and let live as long as the outward appearance of things is maintained. 'This is a country that happily lives with contradictions,' says Taq Otsuka, author of several books on Japan's gay scene. 'It has its own way of doing things.' Thus Tokyo, a city with a reputation for being one of the most uptight capitals, also boasts one of the most dense and diverse concentration of gay bars and clubs: 2-Chome, home to the 24-Kaikan. But the area is in crisis. About 300 businesses are jammed into 2-Chome's two blocks, including sex shops and bars catering to a vast array of tastes - known in Japan as kei (speciality). Bars for overweight men, transvestites, spankers, the hirsute, men over 70, older men who want to be with younger men, with names like Popeye, Tarzan, Duke, Brutus and Bambi. 'There isn't much you can't find here,' says Otsuka, who has run Tac's Knot bar for 28 years But 50 years since its birth as a refuge for homosexuals in what was formerly a red-light district, the block is in decline. The local commercial organisation that promotes 2-Chome estimates that the number of gay bars in the area has fallen by at least a third in the past decade. The once exclusively male gay clientele is filled out at the weekends with the straight, the female and the simply curious. 'This used to be a place for meeting and communicating with like-minded people,' says spokesman Mitsuo Fukushima. 'Now there are many other ways of communicating.' Last year artist Susumu Ryu tried to document the decline in a 276-page manga comic with the clumsy English title Vanishing Shinjuku 2-chome - who severed the jugular of a flower garden of heretical culture? Ryu blames gentrification associated with the opening of a new subway line, which has pushed up local property prices and made many tiny bars unviable, and the rise of the internet, giving men with secret lives a way to navigate the world. Instead of cruising bars they hook up online. He cites the 2004 closure of the famous gay magazine Barazoku after 33 years as a key moment. 'That was a symbolic event when the internet overtook gay culture here,' he says. But the recession hasn't helped: many of the bars demand a cover charge of up to 1,000 yen. 2-Chome partly mirrors the changes in Japan's gay culture. Until the 1980s, says Otsuka, the area - 10 minutes walk from Tokyo's busiest transport hub - was an escape for men who were married and hiding their sexuality. 'When I came here first in my 20s, everybody used fake names and it was just accepted you were going to be unhappy,' he recalls. 'Couples came separately. The idea that gay people could share a life together was a fairy tale.' Mark Oshima, a Japanese-American who came to Tokyo two decades ago, says: 'In the old days, everyone got married - if they had respectable lives on the surface, they could live a double life.' Although blighted by the usual agonies of personal identity and need for secrecy, gays and lesbians in Japan didn't suffer the same repression as in other places. Discrimination in Britain and the US, at least until the 60s, was 'horrendous', says Mark McLelland, a British academic and author of Homosexuality in Modern Japan: Cultural Myths and Social Realities. 'There you could be prosecuted, whereas the Japanese are fairly laid back about sexual scandal - it's not personally harming in the way it is in the West.' As Otsuka says: 'Homosexuality was never considered a sin here, just shameful.' But Japan lacked the political and social frisson that helped transform the lives of homosexuals elsewhere. Gayness was and is still largely seen as a lifestyle choice, not something to be flaunted or argued over on the streets and in parliament. Otsuka says he sometimes looked with envy at the battles for gay equality around the world. 'It seemed extreme and frightening, but I admired how you could shout your identity from the rooftops and tell everyone that you were in a gay relationship,' he says. He began writing about what was happening abroad and set up his bar to lead by example. 'I learned the English phrase 'coming out' and told people about it. I was in a long-term relationship and I wanted to show others it was possible. When my partner died of Aids 10 years ago there was a lot of ignorance about the disease so I spoke about that too, though it was very hard for me.' Today, men in 2-Chome are far more likely to use their names, bring their male partners and announce their relationships to the world - or at least to the clientele of their watering hole. But progress has been slow, and many gays are still living a lie, says David Wagner, a business consultant and 24-year veteran of the 2-Chome district. 'It's the stone-age here,' he says. 'This is one of the biggest cities in the world but the gay scene is pathetic. The Sydney gay parade has 500,000 people marching every year - Tokyo has maybe 3,000, when it happens.' Homosexuals are not legally recognised in Japanese civil law, and civil unions are prohibited. There is, as yet, no openly gay lawmaker or prominent business person, says Kaneko Otsuji, a lesbian activist who ran in 2007 as the country's first openly gay candidate in a national election after publishing her biography: Coming Out: A Journey to Find My True Self. Young gays club-hopping around 2-Chome find Otsuji's struggles to change society bewildering - one reason perhaps why she came near the bottom of the 2007 poll. Many have never heard of her or the 1969 New York Stonewall riots, a landmark event in gay history, or taken part in the Tokyo Pride parade, which limps into action some years and other years doesn't happen at all. But many accept their lives have been transformed since the last generation of gay corporate samurai sought refuge from tormented lives. 'I came out to my parents when I was 11,' remembers Yusuke Takane, a university student who sips a drink in Arty Farty, one of the area's most popular clubs. 'I don't know what it means to be hiding because I've always been out.' His time living abroad has convinced him Japan is friendlier to gays than elsewhere. Few seem worried or even aware that 2-Chome may be dying. But among proprietors, talk is of little else. Some believe Tokyo's famously right-wing governor Shintaro Ishihara, irritated by the area's reputation for sexual freedom and occasional debauchery may have a hand in its decline, but there is no proof of that. 'He doesn't have to crush 2-Chome,' says Wagner. 'It's imploding.' If it is, nobody has told the clientele of the 24-Kaikan, which will surely be there long after the last bar shuts its doors. At nearly midnight on a Saturday, it is three-quarters full. Cars outside bear licence plates from several prefectures. 'I've been here dozens of times and I love it,' says one middle-aged man. 'I hadn't heard about the problems in 2-Chome but even if it's true, so what? We will always find ways to meet. You can't stop people enjoying themselves.'