I was eating at a ramen restaurant a couple of weeks ago with a friend of mine. It was some where in down town Tokyo and the food was great and there were the usual ecstatic cries in Japanese every time anyone came in or left. I noticed a guy sat at the counter reading a comic. The comic was a little larger than the usual ones you see people reading, but I thought nothing of it. My gaze shifted to a table of Japanese girls briefly and then the man left. He dropped his comic off on top of a large pile by the entrance (which was next to where I was sitting).
Drawn to the face of a Japanese girl on the cover, I picked up the comic to take a look. It was more like a magazine than anything. When I opened it I was a little surprised, and then amused, to see pictures of naked Japanese girls. It was a porn mag! In a restaurant! I couldn’t believe it. There were some comics in the magazine, mostly hentai, but the thrust of the publication was naked Japanese girls, more often than not wearing some kind of uniform.
I looked at some of the other “comics” in the stack, and sure enough, there were naked girls in almost every one of them. I knew the Japanese have a reputation for being a bit kinky, but I never would have guessed they’d be keen on looking at porn over a bowl of miso ramen. Is this normal in Japan? Having never been, I can only speculate. The restaurant was by no means seedy, and the man reading the magazine looked fairly well-to-do and didn’t appear to have been particularly excited by the young flesh on display.
I banished the thoughts of naked girls from my mind and concentrated on finishing my dinner.
