20th December

JapFAQ: Japanese used knickers

Posted in General, Japan at 12:14 pm by Visez

Welcome to the first issue of the Japanese FAQ. Here I will attempt to answer the questions about Japan that people most frequently ask me. Which is exactly what a FAQ is. I’m sure you guessed that. But, come on, I need some kind of introductory text. Be nice.

In this first issue, I will talk about something that is kind of wrapped up in mystery. The Japanese fetish for used knickers. Is it true? Can you really get them from vending machines? Does everyone do it?
For the ones less familiar with the concept, if you are a manga reader, or an anime fan you might have been puzzled at the sight of some characters that seem to be obsessed with panties. Stuff like this:

‘Why do they do it’, you might ask yourself, ‘it’s not even funny!’. Well, in Japan, you have to understand that for lots of reasons that I’m not going to discuss now, the nerd population tends to have slightly peculiar sexual tastes. This is mirrored by the popularity of dating videogames and porn manga with the most absurd scenes, from tentacles to incest to rape to stuff I don’t even know the name of. Because of the so-called Lolicon, frequently the subjects tend to be very young girls, and a direct consequence is the obsession with schoolgirls and, obviously, their panties. I will try to discuss this phenomenon in another post.

So, together with my senpai we went looking for one. But before such a dangerous mission, I needed a suitable disguise:

Fantastic, nobody is going to recognise me now. I kind of like this Owen Wilson-ish look. Anyway, we were all set, and we started going. I’m not going to say exactly where it was, but we went to Shibuya. Shibuya is exactly how you imagine Tokyo: loud, dazzling and packed with people. And it’s nothing compared to Shinjuku.

There we are. If the indications are correct, it should be on the second floor of a building in a back alley. We start climbing the stairs, there’s a door slightly ajar in a very anonymous corridor. We open it.

Inside, a small neon-lit small room, cctv cameras everywhere, and a guy at the counter that without even looking at us keeps on reading his… erm… magazine. The walls and the aisles where crowded with uniforms, schoolgirls uniforms, all kind of stuff. The most expensive ones had pictures included of the girl that owned that uniform. In the second picture, you can see socks pinned to the wall and next to them, racks over racks of amateurial videotapes of girls all recorded in that very store. Crazy stuff. Expensive as well.
And then, there they were:

This image kindly provided by my senpai since my attempts were all blurred. This is exactly what you think it is. A huge stash of used panties and bras.

So, yes, these shops do exist. It would be untrue and unfair to say that EVERYONE here does it, but exactly like we have perversions and fetishes back in good ol’ Europe, here there are some weird things that really do the trick for some people….

Keep on emailing me your questions!

Update: These shops apparently are called Burusera shops (ブルセラ　ショップ). Just click on the link for more information about it.

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