Posts Tagged Japanese porn
March 28, 2005 – These movies are just wrong
Posted by Barniferous in Life in Japan on March 28, 2015
Since moving to Numazu, I have rented a lot of movies from the giant Tsutaya store north of the train station. It turns out there was a closer video rental shop just down the street from my apartment. Palmer and Azeroth just found out about it, and learned that it was going out of business. They were selling off their entire stock of movies, so the three of us walked down the street to check out the selection.
Unlike Tsutaya, the video rental shop down the street was completely automatic. The entire store was filled with banks of glass walled vending machines displaying a selection of movies. Renting a movie was similar to buying a snack; you enter the letter and number combination of your selection and then swipe a credit card. This prompts a robotic arm to reach out and retrieve your selection. It is pretty cool to watch. The store was open 24 hours a day, and only had a staff member working during the daytime.
Imagine if you will, a video rental store open 24 hours a day where you don’t have to actually talk to any employees. Now imagine what kind of clientele that type of store would cater to, and what kind of movies they would stock.
Yep, lots o porn.
To be fair, the front of the store contained the standard recent Hollywood releases. Most of these had already been sold out, except for a few awful Stallone movies. The rest of the store was filled with a huge variety of porn ranging from conventional to funny to outright disturbing. “Black guys and Japanese obaasans (grandmothers)” was a title that caught our attention and had us laughing out loud.
Japanese porn can be a huge culture shock to people from North America. The censorship rules are very strange; they are not allowed to show genitals, but they can show almost anything else. Some of the cover art alone would have been illegal in North America. I am not going to go into details as I am still trying to repress memories of some of the horrible things I saw, but I can fully understand why these titles would be available in a place where you never have to interact with another human.
Strangely enough, despite the cavalcade of “this can’t be legal back home” porn, we didn’t notice any gay porn at all. I am not sure if the selection had already sold out, or if the owner of the video shop decided that gay porn offended them, but crying tied up actresses dressed as schoolgirls was okay.
In the end, I didn’t end up buying anything (not even Stallone movies), and I am perfectly happy to stick to Tsutaya for my movie needs in the future.
May 31, 2004 pt2 – Games and porn?
Posted by Barniferous in Team Awesome Sauce, Tokyo on June 9, 2014
Akihabara!
After spending a few hours in Asakusa, Team Awesome Sauce and I went to see Akihabara, the famous electronics district of Tokyo and centre of geek culture in Japan. None of us had ever been there before, but we expected to find lots of electronics stores, duty free shops, video games and anime models.
Akihabara is served by several JR lines as well as the Tokyo Metro. Since we were coming from Asakusa, we were on Tokyo metro. Subway stations in Tokyo are huge and can sprawl under several city blocks. If you don’t know which exit you need to take, you can end up a long way from your destination. That’s exactly what happened to us.
We came out of the subway in an area that didn’t have any of the brightly coloured stores that we were expecting. We wandered around for a few blocks while I took some abuse over not knowing where I was going. Eventually we found a movie and book store. Most stores in Akihabara are in tall narrow buildings, with different things on each floor. The first and second floor of the building had lots of cool looking movies. The third floor had porn. Lots of porn. The fourth floor was also entirely filled with porn, but not your typical, every day, conventional porn. There were several things that I will choose not to describe here. Let’s just say that you should love your pets, but you shouldn’t LOVE your pets. Japan has some strange obscenity laws that allows porn to contain all kinds of things that would be considered illegal in other countries, as long as the genitals are blurred out. After escaping the fourth floor we found that the fifth floor also contained porn, this time discount porn of a more conventional variety.
We left the store and eventually found that the electronics shops were conveniently located around JR Akihabara station. If we had taken JR instead of Tokyo metro we would have found them easily. I lost track of how many electronics and games stores we went into. Most of the electronics stores sold both Japanese models and export models of their goods. All of the game and toy stores had porn.
Akihabara is a really cool place to explore if you are into anime, video games, or electronics. You should never bring kids to Akihabara. Ever.
(2014 update) It’s amazing how much Akihabara has changed in the past 10 years. In 2005 the Yodobashi camera mega store opened in Akihabara, giving the other electronic chains some serious competition. In addition to game and electronics stores, the streets are now loaded with maid cafes. The area is always busy and crowded. Also, the porn is still everywhere.
So. Much. Porn.
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