Weird Japanese Sex Stuff

Trust me--it's gotten a lot stranger than just tentacle porn

Trigger warning: adult content will be discussed. Proceed accordingly.

First, I’m not here to throw shade. Whatever happens between consenting adults is peachy with a side of keen, as far as I’m concerned. Don’t expect finger wagging or Lutheran moralizing from me.

But I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t worry me, where the new frontiers of adult entertainment are taking us. A quarter of all search engine queries are related to porn. With all that tantalizing porn mere clicks away, is it any wonder that just over half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 don’t have a romantic partner? That’s up 33 percent from where it was in 2004. There are more than few reasons for the romantic aridity of the young, but let’s not kid ourselves. The availability of porn is one of them.

Human relationships are messy and complicated. Compared to the ease of clicking on Pornhub, there’s hardly any reason to want one. Nobody expects anything from you on Pornhub. You aren’t forced to make small talk, spring for dinner, or compliment anybody’s shoes. You don’t even have to shower. Condoms aren’t necessary. And best of all, there are endless variations on your favorite fetish. Click on one, and there’s another and another and another. Your pleasure is limited only by your time and the availability of Kleenex.

And that’s pretty much what’s already going on in Japan. The national birthrate has plummeted so alarmingly—and yes, there are socioeconomic factors involved, too—that soon, there won’t be enough young people to pay the taxes that support Japan’s far-older-than-average population. It’s no coincidence that the sex industry is the second largest industry in the country. Or that both salarymen (and salarywomen) have chosen to forego romance in favor of a wide array of easier and less-demanding substitutes.

There is one vending machine for every 23 people in Japan, selling everything from canned bread to canned T-shirts to used underwear, presumably for sniffing purposes only.

Here are but a few:

Japanese game shows are 100% NOT suitable for work … but only if you happen to work in America. On Japan’s wildly popular Orgasm Wars, a gay man attempts to give a straight porn star a “happy ending.” The outré nature of such television fare is hardly unique in Japan. On Sing What Happens Next, men are tasked to sing a pitch-perfect medley of karaoke hits while being manually pleasured behind a small modesty screen by an attractive woman. Sometimes she uses her hands; other times, her feet.

Then there’s Man Eats Spaghetti in a Dryer. Yes, that’s a thing. As you might imagine, a contestant sits in a dryer trying to eat noodles while the tumbler spins him like an unpaired sock.

Oh, and there’s a gameshow where a girl is strapped into machine that forces her legs apart. And another one where two contestants sit at opposite ends of a transparent pipe. Inside the pipe is a cockroach. The object of the game is to blow the cockroach into the other person’s mouth.

Meanwhile, back in America: “Yeah, Pat, I’d like to buy a vowel.”

There’s a Japanese sex toy manufacturer, Tamatoys, that produces “erotic” scented oils meant to invoke forbidden smells. For reals. Like, people pay for this stuff. Already, there are “classic aromas,” such as: Girl armpit. Smell of freshly taken off schoolgirl panties. Female students’ periods. Little sister. And the strangely musky “smell of a boy’s anus.”

One of Tamatoy’s tamer selections: “Smell of a Cute Lady’s Room.”

Inaccessible to foreigners, but wildly popular among salarymen is fuzoku culture, or the world of paid fantasy. The exotic fetish scene in Japan’s biggest cities is reputedly off-the-charts. Women dress as nurses, teachers, policewomen, secretaries and every Japanese businessman’s favorite, kogals, which are young Japanese women in school uniforms, loose socks, and heavy makeup.

In some of your nicer establishments, there are “playrooms” designed to look like dentists’ offices (ha daisuki is a popular Japanese fetish where fully clothed women submit to a dental exam while the voyeur watched from a discreet distance), classrooms, conference rooms, and train cars where, presumably, kogals stand around waiting to be groped.

Oddly, the warm, lifelike, and relatively sophisticated sex dolls bother me less than a device called “the Kissenger.” Here we have a gadget that mimics kissing by using pressure sensors. Simply apply your lips to the weird silicon thing in the middle, pair with your lover’s messaging app, and shazam, you’re way lonelier than you were before and feeling stupid, to boot.

Chikan is most commonly associated with the kind of molestation that occurs on public transportation, and hoo boy, are Japanese guys into that. In English, we call it frotteurism, “the act of touching or rubbing one's genitals up against another person in a sexual manner without their consent.” And if you aren’t thoroughly disgusted and weirded out by now, you’re made of sterner stuff than I.

Almost as revolting is the unfathomable obsession Japanese have with seafood sex. It is a date? Is it dinner? Nobody knows. In Japanese porn videos, genitals are always blurred out and pixelated, particularly during vigorous intercourse, due to a media censorship law. The Great Minds of adult entertainment found a way to circumvent that law by inventing tentacle porn. The phallic comparisons are obvious. But you’re basically having unspeakable congress with a squid.

Last, but not least, are the eels. Yes, eels. This is subcategory of porn involving the insertion of a live, wriggling eel into a human posterior. I’ve never eaten an eel before, but I can safely promise you to never eat an eel now. Not after this.

If I’ve left you with a vaguely queasy feeling, that might not be such a bad thing. Personally, I think that just because porn is easy and accessible, we shouldn’t always avail ourselves of it. Pretty soon, no one will bother having an actual human relationship.

Why would they? Who could possibly compete with tentacles, crusty panties, and funky smells?

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