Sex and the Rising Sun

To the Western visitor, Japanese society seems to exhibit a mysterious mixture of openness and prudishness when it comes to sex. We asked Contributing Editor Peter Ross Range, who has spent time on various assignments in the Land of the Rising Sun, to report.

"I think Japanese girls are like time bombs just waiting to be released," said the young Japanese. "They are so demure and proper on the outside; then, when you finally get to them, it is like an explosion."

On the surface, Japan's is a nearly asexual culture. Schoolgirls wear ankle-length dresses; women are innocent of the plunging neckline. Eye contact is something they make only with their ophthalmologists.

Yet Japan is the land that invented the "love hotel," a fanciful pleasure palace. Perfectly respectable couples visit these sexual emporiums for hours of fun and games with all the paraphernalia of their fantasies. Rotating beds, hanging chairs (with open bottoms), sunken baths, "head chairs" for oral sex and built-in video-tape recorders with hidden microphones are the toys available at Tokyo's famous Meguro Emperor. Prices run from $16 to $67 for two hours, from $42 to $150 for a full night. Most other love hotels cost less. Yet the Meguro Emperor, a 20-minute subway ride from downtown Tokyo, hosts some 110 couples per day--including threesomes and foursomes several times per week--in its 30 rooms.

In Japan, Western porn movies are toned down to soft-core. In Japanese movies, the women usually wear panties. Yet it is not at all unusual to find a bare-breasted woman being tied and whipped on the regular 11 P.M. soft-porn show on Japanese TV.

Japanese magazines favor very young girls in Lolitalike poses. "We do not have the concept of 'jailbait,' " explains one man. Western magazines containing nudes are heavily censored--all exposed genitals are cruelly scratched out, presumably by a mad misogynist in a dank warehouse at Narita International Airport. Yet every subway kiosk is awash in 300-page comic books depicting a wild mixture of kiddie porn, masturbation, wanton violence and heartbreak. New editions appear weekly.

Prostitution is banned in Tokyo-- but "Turkish massages" are available for $125 per hour in Kawasaki, on the outskirts of town. Skilled Japanese women--sometimes moonlighting students--perform the time-honored Japanese ritual of a double bath combined with a double orgasm.

The prostitution ban has not hampered the proliferation of Tokyo's so-called pink cabarets. On the surface, these are merely strip shows with a penchant for mock S/M scenes in which the girls never remove their panties. But the real draw is the Western strippers imported by the cabarets. After their shows, one customer--chosen by lottery from the audience--is allowed to go onstage and make love to the stripper. One blonde in Shinjuku fornicates in a Little Bopeep outfit with nothing underneath. She brings the towelettes and condoms in a basket.

Underlying these seeming enigmas is a history free of Freudian introspection and centuries of Biblical guilt. "Traditionally," says one Japanese magazine editor, "sex was entertainment. Only a century ago, with the Meiji restoration, came the concept of Christian chastity." And it finally took General Douglas Mac-Arthur's stern occupation edicts to eradicate the traditional "amusement district" in every city, where men could dispel a day's tensions with, quite literally, wine, women and song. Today, they still go out for the song and the wine (more often, Scotch), but the women are merely bar hostesses who charge dearly for their conversation, then go home alone.

Now Japan seems to be recovering from the repressions of the postwar years. "Men's cocks and women's breasts are becoming larger," insists one Japanese, citing a sexual "white paper" released last year by the government. This may be a reflection of Japan's lingering inferiority complex toward the West, though studies show that with modern nutrition, Japanese are growing taller and heavier. Women's magazines commonly carry graphic instructions, with clinical sketches, on the finer points of fellatio.

Yet it is still a society in which marriage is the goal of every Japanese--man or woman. Among the better families, it is common to have a detective agency check out the backgrounds, both medical and genealogical, of a prospective bride or groom. While polls show that most city girls have had sex before marriage, it is not unheard of for a young bride to undergo plastic surgery to have her "virginity" reinstated.