New Angles

Hiding behind dark glasses and a pseudonym, a pretty young girl last week emerged from Tokyo's Jujin Hospital of Cosmetic Surgery. She had given her name as Miss Dang Tuyet Mai of South Viet Nam. But from the moment she arrived, she had got special attention--as befits the First Lady of any nation. For the patient was, in fact, Madame Nguyen Cao Ky, 24-year-old wife of the Premier of South Viet Nam.

Why had she visited one of Japan's foremost plastic-surgery clinics? "We cannot reveal what sort of treatment Madame came for," volunteered a doctor on the Jujin staff. "That would be unethical." Madame Ky was only slightly more helpful: "I want to be more charming to my husband."

Whatever the specifics, Madame Ky was only one of the tens of thousands of Asian women who flock every year to plastic surgeons to make themselves "more charming" to their husbands and boy friends--or even to get ahead in the business world. "These days," says Dr. Jiro Minagawa, who heads Tokyo's plush Minagawa Cosmetic Clinic, "girls come in and go out much as they go to the beauty salon to have their hair done." Dr. Pham Ba Vien, dean of Saigon's practitioners of chirurgie esthetique, agrees. "Show a woman something different--a new style or a new face--and she wants it," he says. "And if she can afford it, she will get it."

What most Asian women want are operations to round out their eyes, build European-type bridges into their noses and, especially in Viet Nam, enlarge their breasts. ("Vietnamese girls have beautiful, classic faces," says Dr. Vien, "but remove their clothing, and they look like boys with long hair.") Like hairdos, however, the styles are constantly changing. A decade ago, most Oriental clients wanted to be remade in the image of American and European movie stars. Today, the accent has shifted to a combination of Caucasian and classic Asian beauty, with eyes less rounded, noses less bridged, breasts less protruding.

The rage for new angles, however, has not lessened at all. Throughout free Asia, the demand for plastic surgery now exceeds the supply of plastic surgeons. A Bangkok specialist, who performed more than 1,000 operations in 1965, reports that his business is growing at the rate of 10% a year. In Hong Kong, where the practice is strictly regulated by the British government, there is a booming black market of unlicensed operators, most of whom got their start as beauticians.

For those who can afford it, the In place to go is Tokyo, whose 108 clinics lure an estimated 200,000 women every year. The attraction of Tokyo is easy to understand. Japanese techniques are more advanced than anywhere else in Asia, and Japanese surgeons make it a practice to keep au courant with the latest fashions in faces. Besides, Tokyo offers an advantage that local clinics cannot match: secrecy. Unless her name is Madame Ky, milady can accomplish and recover from all her rearrangements while her friends think she is on a three-week jaunt around Japan.

Japanese surgeons can perform miracles. Jujin Hospital's Dr. Fumio Umezawa was once asked to remodel an unknown Hong Kong actress to look like a star who had died in the middle of a movie; his work was so perfect that superstitious studio hands swore they were seeing a ghost. After nearly three decades of plastic surgery, in fact, Dr. Umezawa admits to only one failure. It involved a Japanese movie actress who had come to him for the insertion of bags of silicone jelly to build up her breasts. Shortly after the operation, she had to go before the cameras to play a violent love scene. At the height of a passionate embrace, one of her breasts collapsed under the strain.

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