SEXIS WRONG

The House of
Secret Treasures
Japan’s Sex Museums and Festivals
Ed Jacob
Japan has museums for everything. From parasites to kites,
from laundry to rubber baseballs, there’s no aspect of human
existence that’s too mundane, unappealing, or strange to deserve
a museum. It’s hardly surprising, then, that there also
should be a number of museums devoted to that most popular
of human activities, sex.
Visitors to a typical Japanese sex museum wander through
a surreal wonderland of erotic art, horror sex, adult toys from
around the world, copulating animals, X-rated carnival games,
and life-size dioramas of sex in various cultures. The gigantic
whale vulvas, Viking rape scenes, and woodblock prints of
lustful samurai with dramatically enlarged sex organs all merge
to form a bizarre, erotic dreamscape as the gawking visitor giggles
and smirks his or her way through the exhibits.
Japan’s sex museums are called hihoukan, a word that
means “house of secret treasures.” Hihoukan is a typically
euphemistic Japanese term that could be used as a name for
anything from a candy store to a used record shop but has
more and more come to be associated with sex museums,
because it is almost always used in their names.
The Secret Treasurehouse of the
Hermaphrodite God
Japan’s first sex museum opened in 1969 in the town of
Awacho, in Tokushima prefecture on the island of Shikoku.
Located in the hinterlands of the least populated of Japan’s
four main islands, the Ome Kamisama Hihoukan (The Secret
Treasurehouse of the Hermaphrodite God) certainly doesn’t
get many visitors.
It’s so small and has such irregular opening hours, in fact,
that there are occasional reports that the museum has gone
out of business. If you’re lucky enough to arrive on one of
the random days when the museum is open, you’ll be met
by a friendly old man who will escort you. There’s not really
much to see, though, and you can be in and out in fifteen
minutes. Most of the museum’s collection consists of
old shunga (erotic woodblock prints), which originated in the
seventeenth century and served as both pornography and
sex education material for newlyweds. Painted by some of
Japan’s greatest ukiyo-e (woodblock print) masters, these
erotic images of women with tangled hair and unwound kimono
sashes helped to shape Japan’s artistic and cultural
development. Then there are a few tabloid magazines with
articles about sex museums in a glass case, and you’re off to
see the hermaphroditic deity.
Although it’s technically a shrine, with an official permit to
prove it, the place of worship is just a grungy old building.
The Ome Kamisama is male on the right side and female on
the left, and is believed to grant long life and happy marriages
to people who pray to it. Apparently, it has both male and
female genitalia, but they’re always covered, so visitors have
to take the owner’s word for it.
The Ome Kamisama Hihoukan is tiny and not terribly exciting,
but it was popular in its day, and it was a pioneer. It’s important
not for what it is but for what it inspired.
The First International House
of Hidden Treasures
What the Ome Kamisama Hihoukan inspired is perhaps the
most twisted, deviant, freakish facility ever to be called a
museum. Located in the town of Toba, not far from Japan’s
holiest shrine, the Ganso Kokusai Hihoukan: Ise Branch is a
long bus ride from a small tourist town about two hours by
78 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG