From bars where strangers meet for sex to rubber-walled rooms where women queue to be tied up by their ‘rope masters’, it’s all on offer on Japan’s streets.
We tour the bars, clubs and gutters in the last of our three-part series lifting the lid on the country’s very well-mannered wildness.
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WORDS Dave Masters
The Japanese are a bunch of perverts.
With extremely good manners.
That has to be my conclusion after examining Japan’s very weird and (sometimes) very wonderful sex culture.
In the past two months I’ve examined the fetishes and porn fixations of the world’s politest nation.
Now it’s time to shine a light on the neon-drenched backstreets and gutters that make up Japan’s theme park of kink.
And it’s open 24 hours a day.
The country’s No1 fetish bar is called Torture Garden.
It’s where the cool, kinky crowds cross over into goth, body modification, costume-play and transvestitism on their average night out.
Wetherspoons it ain’t.
Want to give a girl an enema? Get your pipe out.
Or you’ve a desire to tie up the women who work there? Go ahead – it’s no big deal at the Torture Garden.
Places like it have been around since the early 1990s in Japan and are similar to bondage clubs in the West.
The difference is, in Japan kinkiness is a party on the High Street – not a dirty underground secret.
Inside the Torture Garden, a DJ spins industrial and techno tunes while all sorts kicks off left, right – and in your face.
Clubs in Japan are seen as the physical gateway to the kink world where people can let loose (unless they’re bound up with rope of course.)
They are how people make fantasy into reality in Japan.
They are also where many of the country’s long-term relationships are forged, with many single women visiting to find their fetish soulmate.
Yet while the atmosphere is sexually liberated, the horny blokes in attendance are rarely rude, showing a level of respect you’d never get if one of these spots opened on a British high street.
For the guys and girls wandering Tokyo’s neon-lit streets after dark (which look like Ridley Scott’s neo-noir, acid rain-soaked nightmare Blade Runner), there are dozens of naughty venues to choose from – with every niche taste catered for.
There are ‘circles’, which are membership-based communities that are common for ‘shibari’ – Japanese rope bondage.
There are expensive ‘hostess bars’, such as Jail, Black Hearts, and Dolce where girls are paid to pour drinks – often to old, rich men – who sit making the kind of filthy remarks as they serve that they could never get away with in their ‘real’ lives.
Some of the bars are more dominatrix orientated, while others are far more fetish-themed.
A third type of club is the ‘happening bar’.
These are essentially swingers’ spots, with the most popular mainstream one called Olive.
The clientele are young and good-looking and the club rarely admits foreigners – and single men won’t get a look-in at the door.
The most kink-friendly happening bars are Beauty And The Beast, Sleeping Beauty, and Bar 9259.
They are like adult carnivals with play rooms, traditional Japanese bondage areas, bars, dancing poles, performance spaces and rooms that replicate train carriages, medical rooms, classrooms, dungeons and sitting rooms.
They are mocked up as those very ordinary scenes so men can live out the fantasies that would get them arrested in reality. Blokes pack in and enjoy a criminal-free grope of a fellow passenger on a fake commuter train carriage.
They can also have sex with a ‘schoolgirl’ in a mock classroom, or feel up a ‘nurse’ in a faux hospital room.
Prostitution is illegal in Japan (for vaginal sex) but for everything else, it’s a bit like the nether regions of Wayne Rooney’s OAP hooker: a grey area.
For voyeurs, there are gekijou strip theatres, who often hire female porn stars for 10-day stints to dance and pose for pictures with punters.
The old-school club DX in Kabukicho, Tokyo, is full of old Japanese men who bring their own tambourines and play musical instruments to the girls dancing – something I’ve never seen on a stag do.
It’s the fetish niches that make Japan so vast sexually, with subculture within subculture splintering off in all directions.
One of the more common fetishes catered for on a typical night out is completely foreign to us ‘boobs or bum’ Brits: the Japanese have a taste for legs and, in particular, thighs.
The Japanese don’t go for leather boots so much as the actual flesh.
Yet sex and fashion often go hand-in-hand on the fetish party scene, with many youngsters attending just to see the most extreme new outfits.
The older folk are also into the filth, so it’s not unusual to see pensioners in these places.
While getting dressed-up is huge in Japan, getting tied up is an even bigger obsession.
In Japan it is seen by many a meticulous skill.
Many people even class it as an artform, and some call it ‘restrained sadism’.
Even Japan’s names for its fetishes are polite.
Its ‘rope masters’ are stars in their own right – from heavily-tattooed Naka to Hajime Kinoko, the top young rope master in Japan.
He has young female groupies who seek him out to be tied up and he often performs at mainstream music festivals, clubs, and rock shows to a crowd that probably have never seen bondage before, making use of DayGlo rope.
There’s the belief the nation has a love affair with rope because the meticulousness of it perfectly reflects the Japanese way of living – polite, measured and with an eye for detail.
Japanese girls crave the feeling of being tied up because it’s said to give them a ‘nawa yoi’ – which translates as a ‘rope high’.
My trawl of Japan’s sex underworld left me asking why the country is so liberated and unashamed of its fetishes.
Japan has one of the world’s most exceptionally unique and liberal sex cultures – featuring everything from porn cartoons to incest.
Mothers in Japan have even been known to sleep with their sons to satisfy their libidos.
The answer to why they’re so kinky lies in the country’s background.
Japanese people weren’t exposed to the papal decrees of the West demonizing the body and sex.
They always viewed pleasure through sex as comparable to attaining spiritual enlightenment.
But what’s the future for Japan’s sex fetishes? How extreme could it get?
Some feel the future is in snuff videos, others say the rope fetishes could extend to a fetishisation of the fading ‘art’ of seppuku – the practice of ritual suicide by disembowelment, previously reserved for shamed samurai.
But no matter how weird and wild it gets, rest assured it will come with politeness.