Assembly line nuptials

TOKYO – At the time, Aaron Frisell was just starting out as a wedding pastor in Japan. He stood at the head of the church, waiting to begin a ceremony when saw a problem: the pews before him were filled with gentlemen sporting punch-perms, flashy suits, hats, and sunglasses.

Coming from a Christian background and having gone through many years of Bible training in the United States, Aaron knew that there are certain acts which are simply not acceptable in, as he says, “God’s house.” Wearing sunglasses and a hat are indeed two of them, and this applies to yakuza members the same as everyone else.

A standoff ensued. Aaron announced that he wouldn’t begin until everyone was appropriately attired. After a few awkward minutes, one gentleman in the front stood, removed his offending items, and the rest of the audience slowly followed. Read more

Raunchy wife, flaky husband revel in kinky togetherness

“We’ve been married a long time, and it’s been quite a while since my husband and I engaged in any ‘night life,’” writes a woman who goes by the handle “Sha-mail.” (“Sha” is the character meaning to shoot — and also to ejaculate.)

Shukan Bunshun’s weekly column, “Shukujo no Zasshi kara” (from ladies’ magazines), features this gem, excerpted from the November issue of Ai no Taiken Special Deluxe.

“One day, I was taking a shower,” she relates. “And while directing the shower head on myself down there, I started feeling really good. Suddenly, I sensed someone was behind me and when I turned around, I saw my husband, watching me masturbate! And what’s more, he wasn’t just watching, but was shooting my picture with a cell phone camera. Read more

Woman’s foreign ‘sefure’ really hit the G-spot

“Five years ago, a Canadian student I ran into in a bar district came on to me,” says Asako, a 45-year-old woman who works at a corporate management job. “Communicating in my broken English and his broken Japanese, he told me, ‘You’re the nicest gal I’ve ever met.’ His house was near by, and he took me there.”

Up to that point, Asako had never cheated on her husband. But she had various concerns, and was looking for a diversion.

“I was ready to try something drastic,” she tells author Sanae Kameyama in Nikkan Gendai (Nov. 14). “I’d just turned 40 and had lost my self-confidence as a female. I hadn’t had sex with my hubby for a long time, and my body was tingling like crazy. Read more

Mahjong world championship comes to Tokyo

TOKYO – Jong Rock rides a motorcycle and plays guitar. He’s a tough guy with long sideburns and a skull-painted leather jacket. The ladies can’t resist him and he plays…mahjong.

Rock is the main character in a manga featured in Kindai Mahjong, a bi-monthly magazine whose content includes various serials and advertising all focusing on the game of ceramic tiles on felt.

As a business, mahjong doesn’t have the scope of pachinko, one of Japan’s largest industries. Neither does it have quite the sophisticated allure of horse racing. Instead, its reputation over the past decades has been as the game of choice for high-stakes wagering in smoke-filled backrooms and parlors by hard-core gamblers – including members of the yakuza, company presidents, and politicians. Read more

Tsukiji

TOKYO – Outside the tiny Yamato sushi shop within Tokyo’s bustling Tsukiji Fish Market, a long line of customers forms down a narrow alley. The reputation of this shop for delivering some of the city’s best – and freshest – sushi is legendary.

Inside, one of the chefs behind the counter takes two live shrimp into his hand and sets them on the rack above the counter to enable his patrons a clear view. A couple sitting on two of the shop’s twenty stools giggle as the shrimp flap their tail fans and squirm atop the perch. He then moves both below to his cutting board where he quickly takes two chops with his knife. The shrimp are once again set in front of the pair, this time mounted on slabs of rice with a bit a wasabi. The sushi master grins from beneath his white paper hat. “What do you want next?” he asks.

Freshness is indeed a necessity for customer satisfaction in the seafood trade, and it is a general assumption in Tokyo that the closer one is to the Tsukiji Fish Market, located on a 22-hectare plot on the banks of the Sumida River, the fresher the fish must be. Whether this geographic relationship is more myth than fact is best left to trial and error. In whatever case, early mornings at “Tokyo’s Kitchen” are typically comprised of 15,000 workers engaging in a chaotic environment of buying and selling to supply seafood that is the freshest possible. Read more

A J-pop diary

TOKYO – It was an experience like no other. Fully naked early one morning, she swam freely – and unseen – in the pool of her Los Angeles apartment complex. This young woman from Sapporo had never felt such freedom in her life, let alone in her new career as a Japanese pop singer.

Auga Yaya, the stage name of Mikako Motoyama, was a star on the rise. One year earlier she had her debut single “Close to the Night” hit the 12th spot on Japan’s Oricon singles chart. This temporary stay overseas was for further studio recording for her record label, entertainment giant Avex.

Even though her subsequent two singles hadn’t matched the roughly 150,000 copies shipped of “Close to the Night,” she still sensed she was moving up Japan’s pop ladder. At that moment in the water, Japan, and all its inherent rigors and rules, was slowly fading into the background. After all, this was a big foreign city, the City of Angels. A small-town girl of 21 was on her way, she thought. Read more

Taro Okamoto in Tokyo

TOKYO (TR) – Glimpses of Taro Okamoto on television or in photographs often showed the avant-garde artist with his hands moving in circles in front of his face, flashing the cheeky grin and bulging eyes that became as well-known as his proclamation: “Art is an explosion!”

Such expressions and imagery usually found their way into self-reflective paintings and sculptures—colors bursting forth, swirling patterns and distorted facial features—that made Okamoto one of Japan’s most revered contemporary artists.

Born in 1911 in Kawasaki, Okamoto studied philosophy and sociology at the University of Paris before serving in the Imperial Army in China during World War II. Following his return to Japan in 1946, he harbored antiwar sentiments. Soon after, he established a studio in Setagaya that would later move to Aoyama, which today is the location of the Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum. He died of acute heart failure in 1996. The installation of one of his masterpieces, “Myth of Tomorrow,” inside Shibuya Station later this month will certainly renew interest in his output, which can be widely seen in Tokyo and the surrounding area. Read more

Unwinding the mystery of the gyroball

TOKYO – Daisuke Matsuzaka is 26 and sports a crown of spiky hair. He stands at 182 centimeters, weighs 85 kilograms, and throws a gyroball.

He throws a what?

Based largely on Matsuzaka’s dominant performances in the World Baseball Classic and the 2.13 ERA and 200 strikeouts he posted with the Seibu Lions last season, last month the Boston Red Sox submitted a bid for the whopping sum of 6 billion yen just for the privilege of negotiating a contract with him.

To his Japanese fans, the right-hander is known simply as “Daisuke.” When he pitches, his follow-through often ends with a high kick of his right leg. His fastball checks in at a lofty 150 kilometers per hour. Knees buckle at the sight of his curve. His change-up makes hitters look foolish. And his gyroball… Read more

Toshio Maeda: Hentai pioneer

TOKYO (TR) – Toshio Maeda’s groundbreaking manga series “Urotsuki Doji” from 1986 firmly placed him in the history books as the pioneer of the genre known as hentai, or perverted. The work featured violent and graphic images of shapely young women being probed, felt, and fondled by the tentacles, elongated tongues, and miscellaneous extensions of creatures. The world of manga would never be the same again.

From that auspicious beginning, Maeda’s work blossomed over next two decades, one tentacle at a time. Subsequent work included the six-volume “Trap of Blood” and the very successful tentacle-rape opus “La Blue Girl.” Though a recent traffic accident has left him with limited drawing abilities, next year – fresh on the heels of the worldwide success of his recent “La Blue Girl” animation series – he plans on releasing a new anime feature and contributing to the women’s hentai manga magazine Amour. In preparation for the latter, he is being forced to change gears; much to his chagrin, he is poring over scripts for such TV shows as Ally McBeal to “understand women’s feelings.” This is in the hopes of creating a hentai piece that will satisfy the demands of females. Read more

Takeshi Oshima: adult manga artist

Takeshi Oshima’s home in west Tokyo seems very ordinary: His wife opens the door with a warm greeting, and soon after his son appears, tugging on her apron. But things change on the stairs that lead to the basement.

Large stacks of dusty manga comic books are on the edge of each step. Upon reaching the basement, more multi-colored volumes can be seen running half-way to the ceiling. A cluttered desk holds five mugs of pens and an inkwell. Just below are a drawing board and color pictures of bikini-clad young girls beneath heavy see-through plastic shields. These ladies are used as drawing guides for Oshima, who is a manga artist specializing in adult comics.

Oshima does not consider his comics to be pure hentai manga, whose focus is on the molestation of women through the use of elongated tongues, tentacles, or other long, thin probes. Though he has dabbled in the hentai genre, his 25-year career has mainly featured women simply enjoying sex. Read more

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