Donald Richie’s erotic adventures in 1960s Japan

Megumi, Kazuki, Tadashi and I like to scour the streets looking for new adventures in Tokyo. But we also make time to read. Obviously, with the amount of crime and dirty antics we report on in this blog, we need to keep a close eye on the weekly tabloids.

But we also like to read serious books. One I’ve been perusing recently is The Inland Sea (1971) by the late, great Donald Richie.

Richie was a famous Japan observer, a writer based her from just after the war and who did a lot to promote Japanese cinema in particular.

In the early 1960’s he took a long trip around the Seto Inland Sea between Shikoku and Honshu. It’s a fascinating travel book recording all kinds of encounters in the Japanese Mediterranean against a background of a nation just on the cusp of full modernization. At this point, in the rural backwaters, it was still possible to find people wearing kimono daily and living more traditional lives.

And even the rural outcrops offer their erotic charms, and Richie’s eye was never far from this side of life.

Along the way he takes in a MILF strip show, almost seduces a schoolgirl and accidentally buys a prostitute in a rural town’s backstreet bar. Unfortunately the girl doesn’t follow through with her end of the bargain, being more content to read him poetry. Eventually, she then humps the author while he sleeps. He awakens to find her riding him but unwilling to let him get his own pleasure from the situation!

Although it doesn’t happen in the Inland Sea, Richie also related the engrossing story of a sex party he once attended, one which proves that even in the postwar years people were as kinky as they are today.

Richie said such “private shows” could once be seen in Tokyo “and can still occasionally glimpse in places farther from the capital”.

There on the bare tatami of someone’s living room (for these shows were always held in someone’s house), cramped between the wife’s sewing machine and the children’s toy0boy, one witnessed all kinds of lovemaking going on just a few feet away.

One of the nicest, funniest, and most typical of these exhibitions I have ever witnessed featured a pleasant young country girl who came on naked, bowed, beckoned to her female friend, who entered somewhat more bashfully, sat down, pulled her friend on top of her, and at once went into visible ecstasies. They crawled all over each other, patting and licking, then a double-headed instrument was produced which they used with greatly evident enjoyment. Then the second girl stood up, bowed, left, and was succeeded by a young man, who bowed and at once fell on top of the waiting original girl. Nothing came of this, however, because the man suffered an attack of stage fright. Under her skillful administrations, however, he eventually recovered his self-possession and treated us to perhaps all of the forty-eight classical positions. Then, after the heights of ecstasy had been sufficiently simulated with cries and groans and arched backs, he stood up, bowed, and again the girl was left alone upon the mats.

She then promptly produced a number of objects: a banana, a full beer bottle, a length of string. With no more preamble than a small smile, she peeled the banana with her fingers, inserted it, and bit off great chunks. When it was consumed, she deftly removed it and put the mess daintily on a square of tissues. Then she bowed. Next she inserted the beer bottle and after some effort managed to pull off the cap (doubtless previously loosened). She put the full bottle to one side and bowed again. Then she tied one end of the string to a small square of paper and inserted it. Next, she held the loose end out to one of the guests and invited him to pull. He attempted, and several others after him, but she always won the resulting tug-of-war. Bowing, she removed the paper, squatted, and asked for small change, ten-yen coins. After receiving a number, she inserted them all and then asked the assembled guests to name certain amounts. Forty yen, ten yen — she never made a mistake, depositing the called for amount in her own hand and exhibiting her mathematical prowess. Then, like a proper housewife returning borrowed dishes, she offered to return the coins to their original owners, smiling only slightly when repayment was declined by all.

Then she made a low and formal bow, stood and with two hands hid those charms the talents of which we had so fully viewed, smiled a most charming smile and — the reason I remember this girl with such affection — said, “Domo, shitsurei itashimashita,” a common polite phrase which might be translated as “I have been very rude.”

We also love Richie’s sad reflection on the anti-prostitution laws, which had only been instituted a decade or so before he took his trip (or around two decades by the time the book was published).

This stupid law has changed the face of Japan. Prostitution was as necessary a social ameliorant in Japan as it is elsewhere. Prostitution, of course, continues. But it is driver underground, into the world of gangsters. Not only are there new numbers of unhappy, bored, unsatisfied young unmarried men, there is also a new connection between illegal prostitution and other forms of illegality — blackmail, drug-pushing, etc. After the law was passed the country was engulfed by pimping and syphilis, those diseases which thrive only in secrecy.

Richie, we salute you! Your words are as true now as they were four decades ago!