by Dan Papia
Author of Target Tokyo: A First-time Visitor's Guide
We didn't know any of that!
Seichi Yamada,
Tokyo University History Dept.
It is almost certain that sex predates the Japanese people. Even if we accept the mythological idea that the first couple descended to earth after falling off a slippery cloud, it's hard to imagine even the heavens giving birth without, as they say, "going at it."
But sex for fun and recreation, sex for the sake of sex, sex not as a means of making more people to help around the house, but just as a way to pass the time, work up a sweat and aid with the digestion of a particularly heavy meal, did not come around until some time after the Japanese were an established genus.
According to Nathan Applebottom, Kyoto University professor of archeology and one of the foremost authorities on prehistoric Japanese society, "Sex is a lot like pottery . . . it starts out as just a means of survival. But as life gets easier, man plays around with it and, eventually, makes it into an art." Applebottom expands on this notion in his 782-page history, Sex and Pots, concluding (after much elaboration on primitive ceramics) that the discovery of a given tool is nowhere near as difficult as learning how to use it.
Significantly, however, it was the woman in Japan that forged a path to the discovery of sexual excitement in the aptly titled Kofun Period. It was a woman that wrote the first dirty book, a woman who discovered the kiss, and a woman who designed the sumo wrestling costume and decided it would be more fun if the guys started each match in a bent-over position. The early male saw the sexual difference only as a way of distinguishing social stature and then, as now, had to be carefully taught the rest.
In a very real sense, prehistoric Japanese man walked with his head held high, thinking only of his structured paternal society and the hierarchical mandates which determined each person's position, while his mate followed three paces behind him and thought to herself, "nice butt."
CHAPTER ONE
Before the Beginning
It took almost ten thousand years for the idea of recreational sex to evolve in Japan, a very long time. Different scholars account for this differently. Dr. Applebottom, for example, offers that men and women in the Jomon period may have been too busy making pots to muck about with sex, while the Korean Sociologist Kim Wo Sik suggests--somewhat mean-spiritedly--that the early Japanese were "just a bunch of swishies."
In any event, sex prior to the 2nd century seems to have been purely functional and rarely ever planned. A man might have seen a woman bent over in a seductive way and experimented for no particular reason, much the same as the dog who finds a hole in a fence and sticks its head in to see what's what. (The primitive Japanese male evidently did exactly the same thing, eventually discovering another part of his anatomy better suited to the task.)
But we can infer from hieroglyphics in caves that a tainted and guilty feeling
was often the result of such encounters. The first males were repulsed in
retrospect by the idea of sullying themselves with a female who was, by
definition, inferior. So, whenever possible, they reserved their carnal urges
instead for a sexy pile of twigs or lump of mud.
By the end of the Yayoi Period, the males were getting close--building ten foot tall phalluses, drawing their organs on cave walls, inventing the shakuhachi. But, in spite of persistent raids on their secret supply of konyaku by the females, the idea of a cooperative enterprise for sensuality continued to elude them.
The women, meanwhile, were trying to push things along, creating a written language and using it to compose the first erotic novels. This greatly humiliated the men, who quickly came up with flower arranging and tea ceremony to save face. They then imported printing from China, used it to make endless copies of the dirty books, and spent even more time back in their teahouses with the "No Girls Allowed" signs firmly in place, much to the chagrin of the ladies.
CHAPTER TWO
Discoveries in the Night
The joy of sex was at long last stumbled upon, very literally, in the year 341 in the then insignificant town of Nara. An infamous warlord, returning drunk in the middle of the night, accidentally staggered into the bedroom of his wife (located three houses behind his) and passed out on top of her, using her body as a cushion.
To fully understand this tale, it should be realized that the Japanese pillows of the day were rather like wood or porcelain saw horses with an inscription on top reading "place head here." (This explains why most people had very poor posture and it is the reason that early pillow fights often resulted in serious injury.) Obviously, therefore, light sleepers were less able to nod off again just by fluffing the pillow.
That night, the warlord Fukuo slept uncommonly well, but his story would be a mere historical footnote had it not been for the next morning's earthquake. While he otherwise would have risen, snuck back home and probably gone out later that day in search of a moist ant hill, Fukuo (literally, "the lucky guy") experienced instead the intense pleasure of two bodies "quivering in harmony." Though some of his contemporaries had been trying to discover a similar sexual harmony in nature (which is why Japan boasts such excellent gardeners), the warlord from Nara immediately took to experimenting in the beds of local females. He decided to name the new activity, for his wife with whom he'd discovered it, after her cat, Yobai.
Since walls of the time were very thin, and Fukuo really got around, news of the new nocturnal practice spread quickly. Women took to leaving their doors and windows open, welcome mats outside, trays of elaborately prepared sweets and fish cakes on night tables in plain view. Within the next few centuries, this custom of yobai was embraced by the entire community and Nara became Japan's first capital.
CHAPTER THREE
Gals on the Prowl
By the 8th Century, yobai had become such a popular way to pass the evening hours that herbal health tonics (the forerunners of today's sports drinks) had to be invented to help people stay awake on just a few hours' sleep.
Excited to finally be the object of male attention, females became greedy and no longer content just to wait around and make do with whatever came in through the window. Since it was dark outside, the ladies took advantage of the situation by swapping bedrooms, arranging for sleep-overs, or slyly sewing flourescent "kick me" signs onto the kimonos of particularly unsatisfying lovers--depending on their moods, cycles and intuitions.
Unattractive girls who couldn't get invaded no matter where they slept even started their own after-hours hunts. These would begin just after dusk, when the males were still in bed, and were known instead as yabai. The antics escalated to the point where, between dusk and dawn, virtually everybody would switch beds at least once. According to one author's account, the moon passed briefly in front of the sun during an eclipse in the year 782, and when daylight returned, nobody was home.
CHAPTER FOUR
Voyeurism and Videotape
The first recorded sex act took place around the 10th century A.D. By this we don't mean the first time that two people had sex, smoked a cigarette, then went home to write about it. But rather that one of the partners (or perhaps an envious and lonely neighbor) took it upon him or herself to record the event while it was actually happening, so that they could either enjoy it later at leisure or prove to the guys that it really took place.
The memories of Heian-period perversion were preserved through the stashing of a small, quiet scribe in the closet or behind a cabinet and equipping him with a candle, a roll of paper and a large bottle of ink. This particular encounter, between court lady "Mii" and sometime samurai/sometime potato vendor "Beppu," was set down in the year 962.
By the end of the millennium, the nation was well on its way to building a rich and varied sexual culture and getting into some pretty kinky stuff. At the beginning of the Kamakura period, however, (around the year 1180) a very serious problem suddenly materialized--one that threatened to thwart the development of Japan's sex life as we know it and send its people the way of the British. The name of this unfortunate party pooper was premature ejaculation.
At the root of the matter was the decay of a once powerful government and the
emergence of thousands of angry, unstable clans that were constantly at war
with one another. Even very organized types who had always budgeted their time
wisely now found that they were too busy killing people to do anything else.
"It's significant that the ceramics of this period suffered, too," Applebottom writes. "The local government, and hence the official colors and patterns that an artisan used, would change three or four times before a potter could finish a single dish."
The warriors of the time, their minds constantly consumed with either killing or being killed, adapted by learning to copulate and consummate quicker. The houses were still little more than glorified origami and, if an enemy happened to hear some panting, it didn't take long for him to slice up the building. By the time emperor Go-Daigo ascended to the throne in the year 1288, the average sexual encounter was, like everything else of the day, short lived.
In the then-popular revision of the Pillow Book (titled How to Do It Without Dying ), the authoress maintains that a good roll in the hay should last "roughly the time required to peel an onion." And, when the Chinese historian Liu Ch'ing sent a message to the ex-Imperial Mistress, Lady Nijo, asking if he could come and visit her to study the phenomenon of premature ejaculation, she reportedly answered, "Why? Is there another kind?"
CHAPTER SIX
Sex With the Light On
Japan was rescued from its impending sexual dark ages, however, by the arrival of European vessels in the year 1592, and what proved to be the badly needed elixir for improved sensuality: namely, pubic hair.
The Japanese had no prominent body hair below the face prior to the 16th century. This was especially hard on the ladies, who stared enviously in the bath house at the sexual signaling devices of such early foreign visitors as Isadora Window and the part of Ulysses S. Grant's wife that the latter affectionately referred to as "Grant's Tomb." Limited in the design of their own bodies, women had formerly needed to arouse their men by luring them into bed and showing them a collection of wood block prints. Now, however, the Japanese female saw another way.
Nori, or flat strips of dried seaweed, had long been known to stimulate growth on the head. In the 17th century, though, Japanese ladies set about trying to grow hair in another place by consuming blocks of nori, folded into the desired shape, with bits of fish and vegetables inside to represent the genitals. This came to be known as onigiri (literally: devilish obligations).
Concerned for the public health and welfare, and convinced that people might actually be on the verge of having fun, the government promptly put a ban on pubic hair, claiming that it would discourage people from washing because nobody would want to use the soap. Pubic hair, therefore, had to be cultivated secretly and both sexes took to wearing undergarments and keeping their respective body parts concealed when entertaining casual guests (the term "secret hair" persists to this day). It is for this reason that we know very little about the proliferation of pubic hair or how widely it was spread, so to speak.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Good Clean Fun
Bathing and sex have been inextricably linked for three-and-a-half centuries, ever since an incident in 1617 in which a legendary bather started a bisexual orgy at an onsen reaching for what he claimed to have thought was a "towel rack."
Very soon afterward, bathhouses emerged as dens of sexual energy and activity. A sort of one-stop shopping for tired travelers who were both dirty and in need of interesting companionship, they became so popular that, in villages along the main thoroughfares, to say "I'm going to take a bath" was the same as saying "I'm going to have sex with 14 different people."
In a dirty fishing village called Edo (the site of modern day Tokyo), then known only for the fact that it would burn down and have to be rebuilt every 50 years or so, Japan's largest red light district emerged from a cluster of bathhouses on the coast. Too poor to fill their tubs frequently enough for the soot-covered Edoites, some of these businesses were forced in desperation to offer a special reduced rate for bathers content to disrobe, stand around for a while, then put their clothes back on and leave. To everyone's astonishment, these establishments boomed, placing the Yoshiwara District on the map.
Home to both the erotic bathing facilities and these new "bathless bathhouses," located near the pleasant seaside community of Ginza, and illuminated throughout the night by the Edo fires, the Yoshiwara attracted visitors from miles and miles. Within 150 years, in fact, Edo was the new capital.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Pulling the Plug
With the arrival of Commodore Perry's fleet in the year 1853, internationalization suddenly became the order of the day. Since Japan was trying to put its best foot forward, it was decided that the nature of public bathing should be changed so as not to offend the sensibilities of other nations. Baths became baths, places for bathing and nothing more. It was diplomatically deemed that the facilities for perverse, depraved behavior should thereafter be known instead as "Turkish Baths." (The Turks retaliated some years later by referring to their public toilets as "Japanese Swimming Pools.")
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As Japan finally emerged as a competent world player, its people soon started
to take a closer look at their own genitals, which led, quite naturally, to
various forms of oral and auto sex. <p>
Tastes and proclivities also began to shift in the midst of this sexual
renaissance until, all at once and quite by accident, geeky looking guys with
glasses, lisps and pale skin were suddenly considered )
Creme de Boyde, for example, writes in his book Japan for Studs:
The last two decades have seen the rise of topless ramen shops, bottomless coffee houses, lewd coat hangers, kinky ice cream scoopers, and even smutty reclining chairs that squeek in a suggestive way when you shift backward. All sorts of heretofore innocent household items have taken on new sexual meanings to the point that today's young people complain of feeling that they've seen it all and done it all by the time they're 12.
As the country's diet changed and full-figured women replaced the chopstick-shape as the popular turn-on, for example, underwear sales doubled and the garments took on a new significance. Once a trivial part of the wardrobe--handed down through generations irrespective of gender and doubling in the winter as mufflers, undies were transformed into accessories for sex. Some companies even came out with a "male bra," which didn't quite work. But the hit-and-miss evolution of lingerie eventually produced alphabet underwear (most notably the "T-back," the "O-back" and the just slightly naughtier "Q-back") which today give intimate couples 26 variations for watching each other disrobe, as well as allowing so-called "swinging circles" to get together and spell things.
The next thing to become sexually galvanized was dancing, formerly no more than a religious rite or a handy way of pretending that you tripped "on purpose." This came about in the 1980s when a group of young ladies who liked to dress up, had few inhibitions regarding sex, and weren't real particular about clean linen, banded together to form a clan called the IkeIke girls, undercutting the sex industry by frequenting discos and trading sex for KitKat bars. While their impact has been devastating, the phenomenon is so recent that little is known about them apart from a few birthmarks. Dr. Applebottom in Oct. 1992 writes:
Today, like no other time in Japanese history, sex is varied, totally free and completely accepted. There's casual sex, group sex, telephone sex, outdoor sex, video sex, virtual sex, car sex, safe sex, office sex, the weaker sex and more people than ever saying that, frankly, they'd rather just stay home and play cards.
AFTERWORD
As we have seen, recreational sex in Japan is more than just a function of history; it is often a variable on which history is made. It has been the source and inspiration of countless cultural treasures--the paintings of Hokusai, the poetry of Nukada no Okimi, and the interesting shape of public drinking fountains, just to name a few. But will this diversion still hold the same attraction for people into the 21st century? Or will it someday soon be judged to be, like kanji, a pointless, outdated and tiring waste of time?
We shall have to wait and see.
SEXUAL LITERATURE THROUGH THE AGES
* The Gossamer Diary (Kageru Nikki) Author unknown, 1st Century A.D. The earliest known woman's diary. Details the frustrations of a court lady who was one of the more neglected of eight wives. A few sexual fantasies and anecdotes interspersed with helpful tips on home decorating, furniture polishing, and games one can play while waiting for the sun to come up.
* The Pillow Book (Makura no Soshi) Sei Shonagon, 8th Century. A precursor to the Western coffee table book in the same sense that the Japanese pillow is a precursor to the Western coffee table. The book is made up of numerous lists, including "Depressing Things," "Hateful Things," "Squalid Things," and "Things that Look Like They'd Be Fun to Touch But Later Give You a Rash." There's also a woman's guide to sex--how to initiate it, how to have it, and what to say when it's over--as well as 130 convenient synonyms for "big."
* The Tale of Genji (also: The Tail of Genji) Shikibu Murasaki, 8th Century. Hailed as the world's first novel, there are elements of plotting, characterization, and structure in this story of the prince Hikaru Genji, who has sex with a woman, then another woman, then another woman, and so on. Some scholars from other countries have argued that Genji is really just a collection of dirty stories, not unlike the "Variations" page in Penthouse. But most accept the Japanese assertion that it is indeed a novel, adding simply that it's just not a very good one.
* Fuso Ryakki Author unknown, 10th Century. A compendium of sex gods with descriptions of dosojin (roadside deities). Though popular with travelers, this was a "you love it or you hate it" kind of book. It can be viewed as either a very clever exercise in allegory or as the depraved musings of a very dull and hard-up drifter.
* Life of an Amorous Man (Koshoku Ichidai Otoko) Saikaku Ihara, 1682. Though this and other sexy yet humorous Ihara stories were originally penned as filler to add an air of respectability to his kinky wood block prints, we can get a detailed account of some arduous Tokugawa sex problems from these works. There are several funny, yet very real scenes, such as that of the man who agrees to pay for the sexual favors of a beautiful court prostitute, only then learning that she's missing a tooth. And that of a guy who sneaks in and commits yobai with the daughter of a merchant, only to realize afterward that she has a penis.
ANCIENT HISTORY REVISITED
Why was it that at the same time the Romans were inviting the Antonys over for advanced orgying and Mallinaga Vatsyayana was coming up with 64 sexy things to do with a cashew nut, Japanese men were still drawing pictures of penises on cave paintings and giggling? In 1967, a Dr. Masaharu Oda of the Gakuin Center for Phallic Studies came up with an interesting, though somewhat esoteric, explanation.
Because the average male form--not to mention the ideal female form--has been something of a short, stocky sausage throughout most of Japanese history, Oda proposed that the cylindrical statues assumed to be representations of the male phallus could actually have been "featureless Venus de Milos . . . or just plain Milos." In what he called his Andy Capp Theory, Oda maintained that pictures and statues wrongly explained away as "phallic symbols" were meant to be entire humanoid figures.
"They look like penises because people in this time looked like penises," Oda insisted in his Land of the Shafts (1968). He even went as far as creating a whole phallic genealogy, including "Flaccid Man," "Pointy Man," and "Limp Man."
While the eccentric ideas of this one historian were less than convincing and popularly regarded as "stupid," they marked a sort of conscious groping for a new national identity in terms of sex. Sexual icons and fashions were clearly being re-examined and re-defined and things were becoming exciting that a few years ago had just been icky.