SEXIS WRONG

train from Osaka. From the outside, it resembles a comicbook
version of a Russian palace, with blue and white onion
domes rising over a sprawling, brown, strip-mall-looking
building, and inside, well, it doesn’t really resemble anything
else on the face of the Earth.
Visitors are greeted by a giant, preserved whale vagina at the
entrance, then things really get odd. After paying the 2600
yen (about US$25) admission fee, the visitor is taken on
a whirlwind tour of sex throughout history and around the
world. The bizarre voyage through space, time, and mythology
starts with a woman having standing-up sex with a swan,
then the bewildered museumgoer is confronted with a centaur
raping a screaming woman. There are mannequins of a
half-naked Salome triumphantly holding the bloody, decapitated
head of John the Baptist; Caesar and Cleopatra making
love; and violent Viking sex. One of the museum’s most
famous dioramas shows a technique, apparently from the
Kama Sutra, in which a woman sits in a rattan basket astride
her male lover, who enters her through a hole in the bottom
of the basket. The ropes supporting the basket are twisted
around, then released, allowing the woman to spin round and
round on the man’s penis.
Next, it’s on to the animal paradise, which has
all the scenes they couldn’t show on Wild Kingdom,
as well as a woman having sex with a
monkey. The next room is all about horror sex
and sadomasochism, with men eviscerating
their partners as they climax, and naked women in iron maidens.
To leave the horror sex area, the visitor walks through a
Dalí-inspired hallway, where women’s breasts and genitals,
rather than clocks, are melting. The adjoining area focuses on
Japanese sex, and the samurai, geisha, and yakuza here look
especially run-down. A single mannequin is said to cost tens
of thousands of dollars, and nothing in the museum looks to
have been replaced in the last decade or so.
The exhibits take something of a scientific and historical
turn in the next section, where there are numerous displays
on the history of birth control and condoms, the stages of
pregnancy, and sexual diseases. The subsequent room is
the last of the mannequin areas, where dozens of characters
from Japanese mythology and popular culture are mixed and
matched in improbable sexual pairings that bring chuckles
from Japanese visitors and confused looks from foreigners.
After a final area with sex-related carnival games, it’s time for
the highlight of the tour.
What could top whale vaginas, basket sex, and evisceration?
At 2:00 p m every day, an old, white horse with a mangy coat
and a stiff-legged gait is brought into the museum’s last room
and called on to stand and deliver with his mare for ten minutes
while an old trainer gives a play by play of the action.
As they leave, many visitors must find themselves asking,
“How in the world did something like this ever come to exist?”
Well, sex is considered neither dirty nor sinful in Japan,
and although there are numerous societal mechanisms
and constraints which curb actual intercourse, Japan has far
fewer taboos regarding nudity, talking about bodily functions,
and looking at pornography than other countries. Most of
Japan’s sex museums started in the 1980s during Japan’s
so-called baburu keizai, the infamous economic bubble, during
which the country seemed close to overtaking the US as
the world’s foremost economic powerhouse. Money was so
plentiful that sales at Louis Vuitton Japan rivaled Louis Vuitton
sales for all of Europe, golf club memberships were being
traded like stocks, and a membership at a top golf course in
Tokyo could cost more than $1 million. A huge travel boom
sprang up, and there was no such thing as too cheesy or too
over-the-top when it came to tourist attractions. An entrepreneur
named Masato Matsuno got the idea for a large-scale
sex museum.
The Ganso Kokusai Hihoukan: Ise Branch was opened in
1971, and Matsuno blossomed into a minor celebrity known
Visitors are greeted by a giant,
preserved whale vagina at the
entrance, then things really get odd.
as “Professor Sex,” appearing on numerous television and
radio programs. His hihoukan became a well-known tourist
attraction, starting a minor sex-museum boom that saw the
creation of nearly a score of hihoukan across the nation.
The Science Fiction Hall of the Future
After the success of the Ganso Kokusai Hihoukan, Masato
Matsuno decided to create a second, even more over-the-top
sex museum. It was called the SF Mirai Kan, and it certainly
surpassed his previous creation in terms of strangeness. The
inspiration for the Science Fiction Hall of the Future was tabloid
news reports about alien abductions involving anal probes
and half-human, half-extraterrestrial love children.
At the entrance, visitors were informed: “In accordance with
the prophecies of Nostradamus, the downfall of the human
race came in 1999.” After wiping out most humans, aliens
from another planet began to hunt down the survivors in order
to breed a new race with which to populate Earth. Exhibits
began with the hunting of humans by sexy spacemen and
spacewomen, then proceeded to sperm extraction, forced
dildo sex, painful artificial insemination procedures performed
without anesthetic, and finally disposal of the tortured vic-
THE HOUSE OF SECRET TREASURES 79