Real Men of Japan: A typical Tokyo bachelor

Fumitaka Mori (48), of Tokyo's working class Ittabashi-ku is hanging on to his happier days. The property manager refuses to accept any new tech from after 1994, he doesn't even own a cellphone. He has a traditional landline and hi-fi setup he bought in the early 1990s. My new friend lives in a two room, rent controlled apartment, a 20 minute walk from the loser end of the Mita line.

His old apartment is jammed with thousands of VHS tapes, audio cassettes and vinyl LPs. He also has a huge collection of home videogame consoles and software from the 80s and early 1990s.

Classic media fans in their 40's are all over Tokyo these days.

Why the old, piece of shit Walkman?

Well, I'll tell ya, to me, cassettes make me pay more attention to the music, this is not because I think it sounds better. I bought this thing in 1991 and it still works, why get rid of it? I also have a Pioneer turntable I bought 22 years ago in Akihabara because I thought it could be a fun toy, it still works now, and it's very good. I make my own mixes and I think the cassette is a better format than minidiscs or MP3s. If I put a record on it requires more effort on my part, it's a more active experience than listening to music on a smartphone.

If you downloaded music online it would be free. You could also watch porn on a smartphone. I'll teach you.

I would say that there's a kind of camaraderie with the artist when I  pay full price at Disc Union for the vinyl.  I make my own tapes, sometimes a custom mix. I guess this comes from experiencing the music the way that the artist intended it to be experienced. We Japanese are people of honor. We don't steal. I'm not saying the western way is wrong, Prince, just that the Japanese way is right.

Watching porn online is stealing, and it will also infect your computer with a nasty virus.You white foreigners feel that's 'pretentious', or that I'm a dick for carrying this Walkman around and watching my VHS tapes, but it seems to me that you lose something when you, as the listener, change the music. Now, you may similarly gain something by doing this, but to Japanese men my age, it's not a valueless transaction.

I was told you may be the panty thief of Takashimadaira 2 cho mae, is there any truth to that accusation?

Oh lord, no, but I was a great panty thief in my junior high school days. I used to cycle to nearby towns on hunting expeditions. There was a women's college near my area. A lot of these young tramps hung their underwear out on the balconies, especially if they lived on upper floors. Me and my friend, Munehisa began to notice these dirty whores would hang the freshly washed bras and panties out.

We became very skilled at stealing from balconies. It was no problem for us to scale a back wall and climb up 2 or 3 floors for our trophies. We also used to hit all of the coin laundries on our bike rides and find rare treats young women had left in the dryers. The raids themselves were almost as fun as searching for stains and trying them on when we got back home.

Whats the appeal to stealing underwear?

The obvious answer is the violation of her privacy. 99.9% are too ashamed to call the police so it's easy and victimless. I took to wearing them under my school uniform on cold days. This was back in the early 1980's mind you. I'm not the guy the cops are looking for now.

When Japanese boys discover the pleasure of stealing women's underwear, it often is born out a piqued curiosity towards human sexuality and exactly what the whole process is like. The average  typical teenager doesn't directly delve from panty theft to JAV (Japanese Adult Video) right off the bat. But JAV literally changes the pleasure centers in your brain, the more you watch and the more you masturbate and time your orgasms along with it. Just like a drug would, it activates neuroplasticity and triggers areas in the limbic part of the brain to change.



You're talking over my head, Fumitaka. Do you know anything about the panty thief in this area?


Have you ever masturbated with a pair of used panties over your head? I mean with your eyes exposed, but nose and mouth covered. If you can find actual fecal or menstrual stains that still have a scent? It's an experience that's better than all your 4K, 3D 50'' screen Blue Ray JAV anyday. The youth today and  you foreign downloaders have no idea.

Men who were once inexperienced towards pornography and sniffing stolen panties, will now start needing more stimulation, more intensity in the JAV to reach the same arousal and be able to finish. This is how a lot of Japanese men who started off with simple JAV end up gravitating towards more intense pornography and 'lifestyles'.

Such as train groping?

Yes, sometimes that's the case. Munehisa ended up in that camp for many years. We lost touch after he got married in 1998. He's most likely still doing it on the Saikyo line. That's paradise for the train gropers, with all the schools and long distances between stops. Not with me though. I'm not some sort of creep. The issue lies in how a man translates this into the real world when the opportunity for a real life sexual encounter arises. If they can have realistic sexual expectations regardless of the type of JAV they watch, then the guy is fine.


So you've never been a train groper and you're not the guy the cops are looking for?


Look, if pornography is what they're using a sex guide, especially if their taste has escalated towards more fetish, molester type porn, they might be in for a surprise when it comes to real life dating with regular Japanese women. Now there are outlets for these urges. Happening bars, No Panty bars- usually staffed with non Japanese or ugly Japanese women, fat ones with low self esteem, and what not, I don't need that myself. All of the super hot girls, like the ones in JAV, are in high class hostess bars for rich guys.

The picture on VHS is crap compared to a digital copy, don't you think?

Now, some people prefer the sound and picture of DVD/CDs. Whether this is 'right' or not is a purely subjective question. As for the pornographic films you speak of, for me, I like the ritual of choosing from my collection, opening the case and loading the physical tape... I just like the intentionality of the act. It's a ritual I like to go through. Maybe you think it's OCD or something...

Many JAV consumers over 45 think DVDs are for the birds.

DVDs and Blue Rays are not for me. I don't want, or desire to see every ingrown hair on the shaft of the actor's cock, I don't need to see every pimple on the idol's ass in high definition. Pornography has already made us consumers into something that is subhuman.

A lot of the golden age JAV you like is fake.

True. This is a touchy subject for many fans and the industry. Long ago, when the mosaics were much larger-before the arrival of  'digital mosaics', most mainstream studios, like Alice Japan, Max-A, Kuki and so on, had fake sex. One of the big appeals of the new wave of indie studios S1 and Moodyz was that they had real penetration. Sadly, their stuff was only out on VHS for a few years before the switch to DVD.


VHS provides fantasy. I found that much of my masturbation experiences are automatic these days. There's nothing wrong with that of course, but it's a nice change to sit down in the evening and take ones time to deliberately choose what I want to beat off to.

Fumitaka's shitty apartment building looks like it should be in North Korea.

OK, but don't you want to watch JAV anywhere you happen to be? A single man like you has needs, right?

VHS and an old fashioned TV are the best platform for Japanese Adult Videos- as well as the classic video games I love. Many young people seem to prefer their pornography viewed on an iPhone. I personally love to put in one of my old VHS tapes into my VCR. I can leave the tape at the exact spot I ejaculated and carry on with the rest of the movie later, sometimes it's years before I get back to the tape and I imagine it's like meeting an old girlfriend. We Japanese also agree that in spite of the undeniable fact that VHS reproduces reality more accurately, and with a bigger mosaic for even uncensored formats and even then, color reproduction is better on my old CRT TV.

The million dollar view from Fumitaka's living room is enough to make anyone want to watch 1990's Japanese porn on VHS.


Don't the giant old TV and the tapes take up a shitload of space in your small apartment?

I use the shelves of tapes to block my windows. The Arakawa river outside is basically toxic sludge and human waste anyway. No mosquitoes though, they can't even tolerate the chemicals in there. There's some sort of  manufacturing going on across the river too. The local government won't release much info about what's going on over there. We locals don't even ask anymore.

Tokyo is too expensive for many single men to date real girls in. JAV is a more affordable substitute.



Anyway, I'll tell ya, Betamax had better picture quality. I have about 750 JAV tapes in the Beta format. They also had very good signal to noise ratio. Akai manufactured a 12-track all-in-one mixer/ recording system that recorded to betamax and it was actually quite good! The preamps were transparent and the multitrack was quiet. It was easy to operate, easy to overdub and fun to use. One of the main reasons Beta failed in Japan was pornography. Sony refused to license Betamax to the Japanese adult video industry whereas JVC let them produce pornography on the VHS.

What about all the space that shit takes up though? You could fit all those tapes on a few 2TB external hard drives. They're like the size of a pack of cards.

I'm not saying your way is wrong, Prince. Just that I think my style is the right way to enjoy the medium. I also have a lot of nostalgia for the format and my collection. I have about 3000 or more VHS cassettes cataloged and organized in custom made shelves. Back in the late 80s to the early 2000s, all JAV was put out on VHS. I'd rent 4-5 movies at a time and I'd record the ones I didn't watch for later. I'd actually dub them all. There are still hundreds I haven't seen.

There are many outlets for stress in Ittabashi besides viewing golden age, Japanese pornography on VHS.

Don't you want a regular girlfriend or wife someday?

I don't want to settle for the type of woman who would be available to a man like me. In Japan, 5-10% of the guys get 95% of the attractive women. Investment bankers and doctors mainly. The alpha male types. As far as my brain knows I have dozens  of girlfriends( laughs), the brain sees the sexual imagery on screen and feels my release and thinks these 9s and 10s are actually with me romantically.


By discovering JAV, I've actually hacked my brain into believing I'm some sort of middle aged, ladies man. My brain thinks these are my actual sex friends. I doubt I could ever pull off dating such attractive ladies with my pitiful salary anyway. I can't imagine being married to some hausfrau and living a boring life in the suburbs. I have no need or motivation to date a real, breathing woman. It's also very expensive to date in Tokyo. This is one of the most expensive cities in the world, right? Being single in Tokyo is very socially acceptable these days thanks to pornography.

Has pornography given you unrealistic expectations about who you should be dating?

So, back in the day, I used 4 VHS machines in mint condition and 2 Betamax, so I could record and watch movies or TV at the same time. It was pretty elaborate. But the scrambling exploit got Beta out of the marketplace even sooner. The yakuza people absolutely lost their shit when they realized it was essentially worthless and we geeks could circumvent scramblers so easily.

The industry's the biggest problem with tape in general was, we fans can only masturbate so many times in a day.

He only knows about the latest JAV idols because of the magazine covers he sees in the 7-11 men's section.

Are the latest releases even available on VHS anymore?

I don't need them. I made so many classic, JAV VHS dubs that I would need two lifetimes to see them all. Honestly, I have no idea who the latest JAV idols are. I don't even know what that big breasted freak Hitomi or Yuria Satomi look like. I mean, I know some of the faces and names from men's newspapers and what not. And, I confess, I do have about 50 VHS tapes that were recorded from DVD. Those are rare exceptions though. Those cases were when performers I was nostalgic for, made a comeback and it was only available on DVD. As a fan, it's my duty to support the artist in that situation as well.

Oy vey...



If someone likes to view porn on DVD or digitally, then it's not bad of them, in any of the directions you complain about, to seek out VHS that was recorded and intended for old TVs. They want to see the old picture, and they want to hear the sound that the director intended.

Fumitaka will let go of his Walkman when it's pried from his cold, dead fingers.



Most of the new girls in JAV are way hotter than the 1980's. You can check it out on my iPad with my if you want a little taste.

Prince, I've seen some of the new porn. Don't care for it... The mosaic is too small. Leaves too little to the imagination. It's also disrespectful the the actresses. I guess I haven't really been into anyone new since about 2003, that's when the VHS market switched over to DVD in Japan. End of an era...

Fuck that stubborn old cunt, Fumitaka. I've got oden to go to town on.