SEXIS WRONG

tims’ bodies. The museum played on xenophobic tendencies
in Japan, and all the innocent victims were Japanese, while
the sexually sadistic aliens had Western features.
For years, hordes of middle-aged and elderly package tourists
dutifully paraded through the museum’s rooms, quizzically
examining the silver-suited spacemen dragging off naked
humans to their spaceships, giant-breasted women with
vacuum cleaner tubes up their vaginas, and Sadean space
vixens flaying their captives alive.
The star of the show at the Beppu
Hihoukan is Snow White, who is
featured in a diorama being eaten
out by one of the Seven Dwarfs while
his fellow little people look on.
Although the main attraction was definitely the sexually dystopian
future, the upper floors featured an erotic re-creation
of the famous ukiyo-e artist Hiroshige’s 53 Stations of the
Old Tokaido Road, with bathhouse orgies, samurai sex, and
voluptuous pearl divers.
invitation to open up sex-related tourist attractions.
The town of Beppu on the southern island of Kyushu is one
of Japan’s most famous hot springs resorts, so it isn’t surprising
that it would also be home to the country’s most famous
sex museum. The star of the show at the Beppu Hihoukan is
Snow White, who is featured in a diorama being eaten out by
one of the Seven Dwarfs while his fellow little people look
on. Another scene depicts a smoking woman sitting with
legs parted and a dog in front of her, and if guests push a button
on the control panel, her dog moves forward and begins
trying to tug off her panties.
You can’t make a sex museum in Japan without
a comparison of animal penises, and the
Beppu Hihoukan offers the usual selection of
horse, human, and whale organs. Far more
interesting, however, are the displays of phallic
objects used at places of worship, such as three-meter,
wooden phalluses, an assortment of carvings, and a woodblock
print of Japan’s famous Seven Gods of Good Fortune
having an orgy.
Despite the outrageous exhibits, the reactions of visitors at
the sex museum differed very little from those of people at
the nearby Mikimoto Pearl Museum or the Ise Aquarium,
clearly demonstrating the openness and tolerance that exists
towards nudity and sex in Japan.
The museum’s popularity declined as Japan’s economic bubble
ended in the early 1990s; domestic tourism fell off, and
the museum’s exhibits aged. The Science Fiction Hall of the
Future closed in 2001, and the First International House of Hidden
Treasures has fallen on hard times, but together these two
facilities inspired nearly a score of imitators, many of which
sprang up in Japan’s famous hot springs resort areas.
The Beppu Hihoukan
Sex and bathing are closely connected in the minds of many
Japanese people. Japan’s famous “soaplands” are basically
brothels thinly disguised as bathhouses in which customers
are washed down by “soapgirls,” and for hundreds of years,
male visitors to hot springs would engage onsen geisha, poor
cousins of the entertainers who were the life of high-class
parties in Kyoto and Tokyo. The typical onsen geisha had few
of the qualms about sleeping with her customer that geisha
from the city might, and Japan’s biggest hot springs resort areas
were home to thousands of prostitutes. Before overseas
travel became common, these resorts were the top honeymoon
destinations in Japan, so the large number of people
with sex on their minds who came to Japan’s onsen were an
The Iron Phallus Shrine:
Kanayama Jinja
If hot springs are the best places to learn about sex à la Japonais,
a close second is the shrines, many of which have collections
of erotic artifacts, statues, and phalluses.
Take, for example, the Kanayama-jinja in the city of Kawasaki
near Tokyo. This shrine is small and out of the way but
receives an inordinate number of visitors because it’s one of
the few places in Japan where you can still go to worship a
sacred penis. There are several on the shrine’s grounds, as
well as some shockingly lewd artwork.
The Kanayama-jinja enshrines two deities called Kanayama
Hikonokami and Kanayama Himenokami. These two gods appear
in Japan’s most ancient creation myth and are the children
of the brother and sister gods whose procreation gave
form to the world. As the story goes, Izanami had sex with
her brother, and gave birth to the main islands of Japan. After
the islands were created, the happy couple continued to
have sex, giving birth to the gods that looked after the world.
Everything was going well until Izanami gave birth to the god
of fire, Kagutsuchi, whose birth was, understandably, more
than a little painful. She was terribly burned, and two of her
children, Kanayama Hikonokami and Kanayama Himenokami
tried their best to save her. Because they were taking care of
her womb, they have become associated with birth and cures
for sexually transmitted diseases.
The shrine is visited by thousands of worshippers who rub
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