Tokyo:
Hourglass-shaped intercourse toys casually glide alongside a conveyor belt via an ethereal new retailer in Tokyo, the newest try by Japanese producer Tenga to promote grownup merchandise with out the disgrace that’s typically hooked up.
At first look it isn’t even apparent that the modern, vibrant merchandise on show are Japan’s favorite intercourse toys for males, however the retailer has drawn a stream of {couples} and vacationers since opening this yr.
“Its openness shocked me,” stated buyer Masafumi Kawasaki, 45, “and made me a bit embarrassed that I would had a ‘naughty’ picture” of the corporate.
“I might need thought this was some form of cosmetics store,” he added.
Though greatest identified for single-use male masturbation aids, generally known as cups, the Japanese Tenga model has grown into an intimacy empire, providing toys for women and men, in addition to household planning and assist for folks with sexual issues.
It’s a key participant in Japan’s grownup items market that Yano Analysis Institute in 2016 estimated was value round 209 billion yen ($1.3 billion).
Tenga objects are offered in dozens of nations, and practically half the agency’s annual gross sales of 10 billion yen — a determine that has doubled over the previous six years — are from abroad.
Founder Koichi Matsumoto, 57, advised AFP that he has lengthy strived to de-stigmatise sexual pleasure.
Intercourse toys for males existed earlier than Tenga, however their crude designs replicating genitalia saved them underground, removed from the mainstream picture that his agency initiatives.
Matsumoto recalled seeing such items hidden in retailer corners, their packaging adorned with porn actresses and in some circumstances, cartoons of younger ladies.
“These merchandise appeared to say, ‘please use us to really feel lewd and obscene, as a result of that is what masturbation is’,” he stated.
“I discovered that message debasing and incorrect — as a result of it is a basic, vital human want.”
‘Lonely, single males’
Impressed to create one thing extra “optimistic, pleasant and secure”, Matsumoto stop his job as a automobile salesman and launched into a mission to convey the trade from the “again alleys into excessive streets”.
Tenga merchandise are designed to look completely different from express synthetic vaginas and vulvas which Matsumoto says objectify girls.
The corporate’s advertising and marketing crew describes its wares — together with the signature vibrant phallic cups, vibrators and different toys — as “inventive”.
However prejudices stay across the agency, regardless of inventive collaborations for merchandise akin to hipster T-shirts.
Tenga cups are nonetheless typically misconstrued as catering to “lonely, single males looking for a alternative for girls”, stated Mei Kamiya, a 26-year-old clerk on the new Tenga Land flagship retailer in Tokyo’s stylish Harajuku district.
However masturbation is “regular for everybody”, whereas different Tenga merchandise, akin to vibrators, can deepen intimacy between companions, she stated.
Japan, like many developed nations, is scuffling with a low start fee, which is fuelling a looming demographic disaster.
However Matsumoto rejects the suggestion that Tenga merchandise promote sexlessness.
“If something, I feel we’re doing the alternative of encouraging start charges to fall” in Japan, he stated.
‘Much less taboo’
Tenga sells sperm monitoring kits for {couples} hoping to conceive, and instruments for these affected by erectile dysfunction.
Some docs suggest its healthcare merchandise as “one choice” to deal with sexual issues, stated Mikiya Nakatsuka, a professor of reproductive drugs at Okayama College.
However there’s a tendency in Japan to shrink back from sex-related subjects, together with menstruation and contraception, partly resulting from conservative faculty intercourse training, he advised AFP.
“Are we going to see noon TV commercials about Tenga any time quickly? I do not suppose so,” Nakatsuka stated.
Even so, Tenga’s “stylishness and its medical usefulness can assist make these kind of conversations much less taboo”.
Going ahead, Tenga desires to focus on the nation’s ageing inhabitants, whose wants it says are sometimes neglected.
Some aged folks really feel they’re “routinely assumed to be too previous to even have sexual needs”, the agency’s analysis discovered.
Others dwell with and are financially depending on grownup kids, giving them little privateness.
For girls in older generations, “there was a time when it was thought-about shameful or unladylike for them to be open or assertive about intercourse,” Matsumoto stated.
“We inform them it’s a good, wholesome factor.”