Japan, Porn, Tentacles, Weird, WTF, Pornhub, fringe,Chikan, Frotteurism, Man, Woman, Eels, Timestoppers, Game Shows, Smells, tentacle porn, japanese school girl
Illustration by Sadewa Kristianto 
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The Weirdest Japanese Porn Trends We Wish We Never Saw

We razed the internet for the weirdest, most bizarre, and downright reprehensible subgenres of Japanese porn and fetishes, all so you don’t have to.

This story is part of a wider editorial series. Coming Out and Falling In Love is about the queering of our relationships with others, and the self. This month, we look at Asian attitudes to sex and porn, dating in the digital era, experiences of LGBTQ communities, unconventional relationships and most importantly, self-love. Read similar stories here.

In Pornhub’s very comprehensive year-in-review infographic for 2019, It was estimated that there was a nether-numbing 1.36 million hours of new videos uploaded to the site. That’s 169 years of content.

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We have consumed adult entertainment with such ferocity and voraciousness, that a quarter of all search engine queries are related to porn. Pornhub alone hosts 78,000 searches a minute, a number that is only set to increase with technological advancement, faster internet speeds, and AR and VR opening up a whole new realm of possibility.

It seems like our tastes are getting weirder too. With searches on Pornhub ranging from the comparatively vanilla “lesbian” or “milf,” to the downright extraordinary and even extraterrestrial. In 2019, the hunt for life beyond our solar system reached unprecedented levels. It seems that armchair astronomers were out in full force, with 30,000 searches a day dedicated to “aliens,” this, even before the “Storm Area 51” memes went viral.

One thing is clear: human creativity knows no bounds or limits, especially when it comes to matters of pleasure and sex. One country that has gained notoriety when it comes to this is Japan, home of hentai manga and tentacle porn. We’ve all heard our fair share of the weird fetish stories, and most of the time we dismiss it with apathy and indifference. But not this time, as we pinch our noses and trawled the depths of the sweat-stained, piss-soaked pool of weird Japanese porn trends. Just so you wouldn’t have to.

Frotteurism/Chikan

Frotteurism, as defined by Psychology Today is a sexual disorder relating to “the act of touching or rubbing one's genitals up against another person in a sexual manner without their consent.” In Japan, they call it “Chikan.” Although Chikan is a blanket term that refers to the act of groping and the groper themselves, it is most commonly associated with molestation that occurs on public transport. For most of us, getting touched in a crowded subway carriage is the stuff of slice of life nightmares, but in porn world, videos abound with suited up salarymen creepily exploiting the subdued female archetype. It’s even more reprehensible knowing that nearly two-thirds of young women surveyed in 2009 said they had been touched inappropriately in a train or, wait for it, underground carriage.

Tentacles

Any Japanese porn aficionado (I asked around) will tell you that the one thing that makes porn distinctively Japanese, is the censoring of the pornstars’ genitals. It can be pretty amusing to see a couple of consenting individuals doing the dirty, extremely animatedly, only to see their nether regions blurred out. I’d like to buy a drink for the person whose job it is to do the blurring. The motion tracking is impeccable.

The Japanese government introduced a media censorship law in the 19th century, as what now seems like a rather ironic attempt to seem more civilised to western civilisation. To circumvent that law, the Japanese, ever the innovators, found a workaround in the form of tentacle porn. Simulating the phallic structure of a penis, but with the additions of bumps, ribs, and ridges, tentacles hit the front page of the Japanese AV (adult video) industry as a viable replacement to the more conventional, but arguably less exciting, censored penis.

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How do tentacles fit into the narrative structure of a porn flick, you ask? One interesting plot line (as told to me by a friend) features an inter-dimensional squid monster that appears out of a portal in a high school classroom. I’m not too sure what happens next.

Eels

This is a pretty natural extension to finding other phallic substitutes for human appendages. I don’t want to spend too much time on this one, mainly because I’m a mentally sound human being who does not want the impression of my favourite Japanese meal, unagi don, forever tainted.

This genre of porn involves the insertion of a live eel, (yes, wriggling and very much alive) into the pornstars’ rectum. Without going into too much detail, there is often more than one eel. Ok next.

Timestoppers

In the 2006 award-winning hit TV series Heroes, Hiro Nakamura, an unassuming Japanese salaryman, is able to bend the laws of space-time using only the power of his mind. Not unlike this, Japanese porn has their own version of Nakamura-esque time travel, where instead of using their superhuman abilities to "save the cheerleader, save the world," they, well… have their way with the cheerleader.

Timestoppers is a genre of Japanese porn where ill-intentioned salarymen get their hands on all-powerful devices that allow them to manipulate time at will. But instead of saving old granny from getting hit by a bus, or robbing banks, these clock crusaders go on extravagant grope sprees. Be it at gyms, locker rooms, classrooms, even newsrooms, these morally bankrupt time travellers have their way with anything they can flick their d*ck at. Nevermind that most of their victims are unfeeling, unresponsive, and have no awareness or recollection of even being a victim when time resumes, it's still categorically rape.

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Game Shows

Extremely competitive and oftentimes physically demanding, Japanese game shows are popular daytime entertainment. Some standout examples include contestants using naked human bodies as a slip and slide, getting a hand job while singing karaoke, and the much talked about Orgasm Wars, where a professional straight male pornstar tries his best to keep from blowing his load while a flamboyantly gay man “polishes his pole.” Even though a lot of these game shows sound massively inappropriate and voyeuristic, they're all over Japanese TV.

Diving deeper into the proverbial rabbit hole of the world wide web, you become an audience to game shows that you become certain should never see the light of the rising sun. Most are so explicit, we won’t even write about them. But they lurk in the crevices of the internet, ready to make any unsuspecting person lose their lunch.

Bonus: Smells

If you’ve ever strolled down a rustic cobbled pathway in a quaint New England town and all of a sudden thought to yourself, “Gee, I really wish there was a waft of ‘Sex Briefs Semen Aroma’ in the air,” then this one’s for you.

Kanojo Toys caters to an often overlooked group who appreciate the more exquisite scents of life. Move over Calvin Klein body spray and Victoria’s Secret room mists, these eau de toilettes literally feature smells from a toilet, with an array of fragrances ranging from “Schoolgirl Toilet Smell Fetish Spray” to “Beautiful Girl Armpit Sweat.”

They’re not exactly porn, but many in Japan use these, er, unconventional scents to set the mood before they hit play.

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