Haresh Shah
Lessons In Interactive “’Bout The Birds And The Bees”
My brain is still busy processing what I had just seen, when I see flailing hands of the several young men in the front row. Yastaka Sasaki explains to me that they are playing rock, paper, scissors. The winner would then get to climb up the stage and get to fuck the girl who has just concluded the “second act” of her striptease routine and is now waiting in front of the sparse post-lunch time crowd of young “salarymen”. Completely naked, she is squatted there on the stage floor on her knees, legs spread wide apart, the spotlight still focused on the exposed glistening inner layers of her vulva peeking through her dense and dark, artfully manicured patch of pubic hair. Her face wears a contemptuous frown with a forced smile on her lips. Staring intensely at the faces of the men in front of her, as if daring the one who would take her as a prize right there on the stage with everyone in the audience watching. Having eliminated the rest, about six of them, the winner eagerly climbs up the stage, and honest to God, there they are, just a few feet away from our eyes – her lying down on her back, opening her legs wider, her knees pointing upward like a dead duck on a kitchen table waiting to be stuffed. Her hands resting on sides, as if preparing to lift her slight frame into a bridge position for a gym routine.
The man, having hastily removed his clothes wedges himself between her open legs, tugging at his penis, possibly to give it an extra bit of hardness, slips on a condom and then plunges it into the girls’ already waiting and well lubricated vagina and begins to pump. He doesn’t last long. A minute, two at the most, before falling by her side. What I remember still the most is the cryptic smile crossing the girl’s thin lips. Her little fish eyes fluttering, her getting up, picking up her discarded clothes from the stage and walking away.
I am in Japan on behalf of Playboy. One of the enticements my boss Lee Hall had dangled in front of me to tear me away from the sunny Santa Barbara, California to the cold and cloudy Chicago, was an assignment in Japan.
Lee made good on his promise and sent me on a short exploratory trip to Tokyo within the first months of my moving back to Chicago in 1979. But it wasn’t until the mid 1985 that he actually assigned me in earnest to the project. In his opinion, though the Japanese had started out wonderfully well ten years earlier, now the sales had began to go south and something needed to be done. On their part, our partners Shueisha had brought in a whole new editorial team and Lee felt that I could form a part of that team, and help them lead in a fresh editorial direction, thus helping them gain back some of their lost readers and hopefully find some new ones.
Flattered as I was, technically I was still the division’s Production Director. Perhaps because I had proven my editorial impulse, working with Playboy in the Netherlands, two years earlier, he must have felt that I could do the same with the Japanese. But Japan was not little Netherlands. Plus I had lived and worked in Holland for several months and had some idea of what the country and its people were like. But Japan seemed like a completely different planet. The two times that I had been there for short visits, I couldn’t say with any certainty that I even had a least sense of what the Japanese were all about. Even those two short trips had made me realize that the Japanese were like no other people I had ever known. I needed to know more about the country, the people and its culture before I would take on the challenge. Lee didn’t only understand but totally concurred with me
He recommended that I read Edwin Reischauer’s The Japanese – in his opinion, one of the most defining books ever written about the country and its people. My first sense of Japan came from reading Ek Zalak Japan Ni (A Glimpse at Japan) by the most prolific Indian artist and writer, Aabid Surti, who has since become a close friend. I had also read the Japanese novelists that included Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima. I added to them, Behind the Mask by Ian Buruma and Pictures from the Water Trade by John David Morley. Several months later, I felt prepared enough to board the Northwestern flight to Tokyo. But I still wasn’t ready to be face-to-face with the Japanese editors and the executives of the giant Shueisha Inc., who held the license to publish the magazine. What I wanted to do first of all was to get to know and experience Japan on my own.
●●●
I arrived in Tokyo on Monday night. Checked into the Imperial Hotel. Got a good night’s sleep, dumped my baggage in the hotel’s storage. A duffle bag slung over my shoulder, I ventured out accompanied by our Tokyo rep Ray Falk’s assistant Yastaka Sasaki. We boarded the outbound Hakusana #1 – Japan’s famed Shinkansen – the bullet train, that would take us from Tokyo’s Ueno to Kanazawa.
There we checked into an old world charming inn, Miyabo Ryokan. And for a week crisscrossed the country, visiting campus in Kanazawa, hanging out at student cafes and bars, eat at all night Japanese restaurants, browse bookstores, interview students in their club, go discoing in a place called – of all things, Maharaja. Visited Meiji Mura – the open air architectural museum and also spent some time watching middle aged housewives amidst the deafening clanging of Pachinko Parlors, their gazes fixed on the pinball machines and their hands frantically pulling the handles as if on auto pilot. Absolutely amazing! Staying always at Ryokans, the traditional Japanese Inns with tatami mattresses on the floor, with the center of the tiny room serving as the spot where you lounged, slept and dined. Eating dried fish, sticky rice and green tea for breakfast which tasted awful, but still! On the trains we ate box lunches and in towns stuck to eating at down home sushi, yakatori and tepanyaki restaurants.
The idea was to observe, experience and absorb as much as one humanly can of the country, its people and their lives within six short days. Also to see places and people where our readers are most likely to be. Perhaps even glean some insight into them. Basically, experience first hand the smells, the sounds and the sights of the land of the Rising Sun.
‘There is something else that you must know and see about the Japanese young men,’ Sasaki said, if a bit hesitating.
‘Sure.’
So here we are in Toyota city of Nagoya, sitting in a small dingy and dim lit place called Tsurumai Theatre Live Strip Show. Its no bigger than a large living room with a small round stage at the other end, in front of which are several rows of randomly placed individual chairs with vending machines on the wall behind the audience. Machines are stocked with Coke and other soft drinks as well as an assortment of Japanese beers. Unlike what one would expect in a place like this, the beverages are prized the same as they would in a company cafeteria. There is no bar, neither the girls coming out in the audience to hustle. I remember, the entrance fee being an equivalent of US$ 12.- which even by the standards of 1985 was cheap, very cheap by the Japanese standards.
Not much different from the striptease joints in Soho district of London, except the audience and no hassle ambience. Most every one here is plus or minus twenty five years of age, compared to me at forty five and Sasaki a bit younger, we would be considered dirty old men. If not quite the middle aged geezers of London. Other than a bit of commotion at the end of the performance, with the men in the front row playing scissors, paper and rock, audience is extremely well behaved, almost reverential. They are all dressed in their young “salarymen” uniform of dark western suites and mostly white shirts with appropriately somber ties.
But what is different is the show itself. No holds barred to say the least. The dance routine as mechanical. The girls would strip in the standard, one piece of clothing at a time till she is completely naked. Normally, this is where the show must end. But no, it serves just a warming up for more routines to follow.
The spotlight is focused on the center of the girl’s wide open legs, she inches forward to the edge of the stage where the heads of the scissors, paper, rock crowd is bopping up and down to get a closer look at the innermost anatomy of the other sex. She puts her index finger and the thumb on either side of the skin surrounding outer lips and stretches them open even farther, looking over the heads of half a dozen or so men now hovering over her crotch. And then she moves her hand and extends it to take one of the men’s outstretched hand in hers. Has him fold rest of his fingers and let the index finger stick out. A pack of condom appears in her hand, which she tears open with her teeth and slowly sheaths the man’s finger with it, holds and guides it slowly inside her vaginal canal, guiding him to vacillate it in and out motion and then lets him do it on his own. It is no longer erotic for me. If I did feel aroused earlier in the act, now I could feel my arousal deflecting. And yet, as outrageous as it is, its absolutely fascinating. The girl guiding the man’s finger in and then allowing him to explore on his own, as if handing your little kid the house key and teaching him how to open the door
The music changes and another girl saunters on the stage. This one is dressed like a nurse in starched white uniform, head piece and all, carrying a small emergency kit, a white box with the red cross painted on the lid. The same routine. Removing of the clothing from the head piece down to the shoes and eventually the skimpy pair of panties. But even while the dance is in progress, I notice something in the background, which I presumed to be just a mesh screen to cover the wall. Nope! Now the back of it is lit up and one could sense something else going on behind the screen. It now looks like back-lit silver threads, hanging from the ceiling down to the top of the stage and behind that is the silhouette of a couple frolicking in the nude. I give Sasaki a sideway glance.
‘One of the losers of the scissors, paper, rock can buy her services by paying extra.’
Set up in the background is a rudimentary bedroom with a full size mattress on the floor. The young man is lying on it on his back, the girl is leaning down and massaging his cock and when she has brought it up to its full glory, she pulls out a pack of condom from her little purse lying by the side of the mattress, tears the foil open and slips it over his penis in what seemed like a ritual manner. She ties her hair in a pony and then plunges down her open mouth to engorge him and begins to oscillate, as if also to the rhythm of the music being played for the stripper in the foreground. A smile breaks out on my face as I once again look sideways at Sasaki, amazed and shaking my head. What I am thinking is: So these are our readers!! And this is in the country where they hire kids to blotch out pubic hair in imported magazines?
© Haresh Shah
Illustration: Celia Rose Marks
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MOTHER KNOWS BEST
Playboy once ran a pictorial, Father Knows Best (February 1979), in which they ask: Would you let your daughter pose nude for Playboy? How about mothers? Would you?
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