AUGUST 4
Then I went to Akihabara which is famous for its computer gizmos, but SHOULD be famous for its INSANE PORNOGRAPHY.
JAPAN PERVERSION FIELD TRIP. . .
J.G. BALLARD is a famous british author. He wrote EMPIRE OF THE SUN and CRASH, which became big movies. He also wrote CONCRETE ISLAND, HIGHRISE, ATROCITY EXHIBITION, and tons of other demented, underground books. He's basically like Prince (if Prince were a nerdy English grandfather obsessed with the Apocolypse) : he can pull a super-mega-platinum hit album out of his ass without even trying, but normally he does poorly selling underground stuff because he just feels like it.
Anyway, one of my favorie Ballard qotes goes something like this : "the most extreme perverted pornography is so strange it doesn't even LOOK like pornography anymore." I haven't run into Ballard's example of a porn magazine entirely full of pictures of dishwashing machines . . . . but in Tokyo I've found stuff that's ALMOST that weird.
the 'catfight' genre of videos has become so popular, it's spawned (heh) a vast array of SUB-GENRES: you can get sexy girl sumo wrestlers, WWF-style wrestling with flashy costumes and trash talk, or very serious women , who you'd swear are doing legitimate, Olympic-style wrestling until the pants come off. you can get very techinal, authentic wrestling, or just bitch-slapping street fights. You can get anime costumes or just regular casual clothes, or violent schoolgirls, or Andy Kaufman-style woman-vs-man wrestling, where the losing guy gets penetrated. You have your pick of endings too: the loser gets KO'ed, or the loser gets stripped, or the classic 'lesbian battle' where the wrestling turns into something else entirely.
You can also go to LIVE performances, if your VCR is broken. . . .The Japanese catfight scene (according to the manager) started about 10 years ago, when all night erotic theatre performances might occasionally set aside half an hour for a bout. But, about 3 years ago, it became popular enough to warrant entire evenings of catfighting, and even a cable-tv show dedicated to the subject! A given performance might cost $35, last 3 hours, and feature a half-dozen fights in various different styles of fighting and costume.
In fact, catfighting isn't even the only combat-porn genre here !!: there are ALSO x-rated versions of ULTRAMAN, where women in anime costumes (and sometimes giant plastic 'anime style' masks with oversize eyes and tiny mouths) who fight 'villains' and get 'taken prisoner.' And videos of 'giant women' trampling on Little Green Army Guys, or (in one memorable tape) trampling on plastic models of the U.S. Senate and White House!!
Of course they have American style Crush/trample videos too, and English style Splosh videos (where people have sex covered in food, or where a well-dressed, elegant woman gets pushed into a vat of food). But in a typically Japanese fashion, they've taken Splosh and made it much more formalized, ritualized, and less Benny Hill: women get 'painted' systematically over their body with monochromatic syrups.
but the real surprise was the SWIMMING porn: . but what's amazing is that
it looks nothing like porn!! it's just some lady in a business suit sitting
in a swimming pool !!!
other 'is it even porn anymore??' videos include: close-ups of women eating and brushing their teeth (using totally gynecological closeup cameras), women cleaning their ears with q-tips, women giving each other wedgies FOR 60 MINUTES, And some video where one schoolgirl puts an old pervert in a full nelson, forcing his head onto a school desk, and another schoolgirl just spits on him for an hour. Ptoo! And finally, videos of girls wearing the famous Loose Socks, walking around in mud until their socks are all dirty.
Oh, that last video was from the foot-fetish store downstairs. And you know how trendy girls used to all wear 18 cm platform heels like 4 years ago? Did you ever wonder where all the used boots went after the trend was over? Well, now you know.
Next to the footfetish store was the 'sports' store. You can buy lots of schoolgirl gym shorts (I didn't ask if they were new or used), and also videos of some woman playing tennis. It's a fully-clothed, fully educational tennis 'how to' video, except for one thing: the camera angle. The REALLY LOW camera angle. Oh, and it also instructs the viewer on how to put on the uniform. Plus, they had polaroids of actual cheerleaders, taken at actual football games, caught in the middle of a high-kick, with their eyes blacked out by magic marker. That's kind of messed up, but they ARE cheerleaders so they deserve no sympathy. Except the one lady whose team was apparently called 'THE ELVES'. Ouch.
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