They Call It The Pink Trade Here

November 7, 2011
STOYA

Akihabara is full of electronics and anime. It's the Tokyo that American fans of manga imagine, home to the world's first dedicated robot store and covered in signs depicting cartoon girls with giant eyes and inhuman waist to hip ratios. Epileptic fit-inducing displays of flashing lights lure customers into shops full of electronics and raw materials for customization or building from scratch. Other store fronts display an incredible range of anime and collectible statues, half of which looks like it could be porn. This would be cause for investigation were it not for the actual porn store, eight stories high. It's across from the four story porn store, and down the street from the five story adult shop, but "bigger" and "porn" seem to be concepts which go together well, so we head into the super-sized one.

Aside from the scat DVDs displayed next to the entrance, the pixelated genitals, and a more varied selection of anime/cosplay themed blow up dolls and skimpy costumes, it looks just like an American or European adult store. I'm disappointed. See, my first encounter with Japanese porn was downright bizarre:

On my first trip to Japan, I was introduced to an artist named Daikichi Amano. He brought me a small wooden box containing prints of his work. Surreal photographs of partially nude women wearing butterflies , tree bark, swans, or various ocean-dwelling creatures. The girls were all alive, the animals ranged from live through dead, sometimes expiring as the photos were being taken. In one, a girl wears an octopus as a hat. In another, a vagina holds bright green moss and tiny lizards. It sounds weird… because it
is. He told me that he considers himself a pornographer. I started to say that nudity and sexual themes are common in art, that the differences between tanned leather and freshly plucked goose are mostly semantic, although I could see the olfactory repercussions as well. His work lays bare the base nature of humanity in an aesthetically pleasing way, exposes the raw instincts to kill and fuck, and presents them in a format so intricate and beautiful that the viewer is drawn in before they have a chance to close their minds to what is being shown. He silently trumped my defense of his art by handing me a compilation of his Genki Genki work. I would tell you to google it, but I'm not sure what the legality of accessing a (mostly) maritime bestiality website is in most countries. Yes sir, that is definitely porn and you directed and filmed it, meaning you would be classified as a pornographer. I was and still am classified as a pornographer, but I make a very different sort of porn.

Obviously I took it back to the hotel and watched it. I watched an entire film of women having sex with a variety of not human creatures. A couple of hours later, Daikichi arrived at the room, having planned a karaoke excursion. Among other negative qualities, karaoke bars are loud places and I was much more interested in asking questions in an environment where I would have a higher chance of effective communication. The first thing I wanted to know was where he had acquired a lesbian canine. Live fish, frogs, and octopi seem fairly easy to come by, but I didn't think someone would purchase a dog just to film one sex scene. It turns out the dog belonged to Daikichi, she was his pet, and he'd filmed that one scene when he first started making pornographic films but wouldn't do it again. He felt bad for the dog because she'd been sick afterwards, she'd ingested too much condensed milk during the filming (that's how they got the dog to perform oral sex on her human partner) and he doesn't like to see creatures actually suffer. He indicated that the woman in the scene had been more than willing to participate, and did not feel bad for her.