Kiss Day: Japanese couples celebrate by kissing though plastic panels

Joining the recent silliness of Condom Day in the (ever-increasing) list of odd anniversaries in Japan, “Kiss Day” is celebrated on May 23rd because it is the day that the film Hatachi no seishun (20-Year-Old Youth) was released in 1946.

In case you’re not a film buff, that’s the movie that featured the first ever kiss scene, though the stars may have had gauze between them.

To celebrate, Edition Aoyama, a club in Akasaka, Tokyo, is holding an event on Saturday where couples (not necessarily male-female, it seems) are invited to kiss each other through an acrylic plastic panel.

It’s basically a gokkon group blind date event, though with this “kissing” gimmick thrown in as a kind of novel ice-breaker.

Kind of like those movie scenes where couples kiss between a window panel.

Needless to say, no tongues are allowed.

Who says romance is dead?

There is actually a precedent for this, it seems. Here’s an example from a wacky Japanese TV show (no shortage of those).

Even Japanese male baseball players like to do the “acrylic kiss” sometimes, it seems.

All this isn’t doing much to dissuade those loud proclaimers of “sexless Japan“.

Can the Japanese even kiss? Anyone who’s ever seen Japanese TV will know that kissing in dramas is basically 1950’s-style — a slightly sustained lip-contact only.

And even in Japanese porn, who doesn’t find the kissing strange sometimes? Like the man just wants to lick the girl’s face. At best, they just seem to poke their tongues out and have them lap at each other like mating snakes.

Take a look at Sora Aoi demonstrating a Japanese porn “kiss”.

Much of the focus seems to be on licking, being “dirty” and “wet” — and exchanging bodily fluids through the mouth. Is there any porn without a gratuitous drool shot?

Donald Richie wrote in 1983 about Japanese kissing.

Over 100 years ago the brothers Goncourt apparently heard that “the kiss did not exist in Japanese love-making”, which might explain a few things.

The kiss was certainly not official sanctioned until modern times. Kissing was a kind of perversion, “something one did only when carried away by passion itself.” Translators of western books into Japanese initially had to resort to the word “one lick” (hitoname) to try to convey the practice.

Today everyone says kissu but the “real” Japanese word is seppun, since to use the borrowed English “sanitizes by endistancing”. The action is not quite socially okay, but a euphemism makes it permissible.

The Japanese, since they don’t kiss family members, view it only as a deeply dirty or erotic act — certainly not something to do in public.

Even today, couples almost never kiss each other in public — even just a peck. (Likewise for family members.)

Here’s something even stranger, in 2011 there was also this “kiss transmission” device for remote snogs.