On our first night in Tokyo, we were wandering around the Akihabara area, full of bright lights and thousand-dollar rice cookers, when we came across a sex shop. So of course, we decided to go in and check it out. We might as well go see Japanese sex toys while we are here.

I think my slight fascination with the idea of Japanese porn and sex toys came about when at my last job, one of my colleagues received a formal warning from HR because of some “suspicious activity” he was found to be doing on his work computer. Apparently, a colleague with whom I was friendly who worked in IT told me that the internet complaints regarding the terrible speed were due to this guy streaming anime porn during work hours. First, they tracked down the streaming to his computer, then identified what he was streaming and which site it was from. It was pretty hilarious to me when I found out because then, I had no idea anime porn even existed; I was completely ignorant to it. I thought about how sexually repressed Asia, and especially Japan, is, and it made sense why people would be drawn to anime porn; it’s not real people having sex, but just a bunch of cartoons with big eyes and big boobs. How illicit could that be?

This sex shop had multiple levels. The first one was for women, the second level was for both sexes, and the third was exclusively for men. There were signs all over the second level saying that women were not allowed; “FORBIDDEN!” with female symbols were all over the stair well to the third level. Chris chuckled and said that since I was forbidden, I’d have to wait for him on the second level while he went upstairs. So while I waited for him, I watched my very first segment of Japanese anime porn on their television screen. Boy, was that an eye opener.

Even if I didn’t see anything on the screen and just heard the sounds, I’d definitely know I was listening to people having pretty intense and rowdy sex. But as I looked at the screen, all the usual things you see in anime were there: cartoon women with massive, buggy clear eyes, thin build, big, ball-like breasts, and long, flowing hair. The man and the woman were on some swinging contraption, screaming and moaning loudly, likely yelling at each other to go faster, and swinging back and forth. The one thing I noticed about the action was that every time there was a zoom-in shot of the penetration, it was completely pixelated out. It’s already fake, so why the need to pixelate it at all? This culture is so repressed that they had to reduce sex down to a cartoon, and even in a cartoon, I can’t see what’s really happening to cause all that ecstasy? It completely boggled my mind in multiple ways.