Tenga is not only one of the top adult brands in Japan, it is also one of the most savvy in terms of its marketing strategies. It is known for adopting headline-grabbing, viral publicity tactics, not least launching a rocket into space. But sometimes these are more sincere. Tenga has provided a gamer called Jeni (or Shunya Hatakeyama) with sex toys after the brand heard that he uses Tenga toys to cushion his homemade chin controller. Jeni has muscular dystrophy and uses his chin to operate a stick for playing games. He has been a wheelchair user since second grade and finds empowerment in ...

Tenga is, as regular readers will know, one of Japan's leading adult toy brands, and surely the one that has the most success overseas, helped by its very clean and universal design (a far cry from the kind of highly Japanese style of hentai illustrations you find on box art on releases by Tama Toys, Toy's Heart, and so on). A Tenga-related topic we often like to discuss here on this blog are the various marketing campaigns that the company does, such as the rocket it launched into space or its hat for dispensing tissues. In addition, Tenga also does serious research related to sex and ...

This is something we don't talk about enough on this blog: sex and the disabled. Luckily, the non-profit NOIR is doing work to raise awareness of the issue. Since the release of film The Sessions, the idea of how disabled people can have sex drives has gained more positive traction in America. What about Japan? Of course, sex dolls were once available as "rental" and some of the main clients were disabled men who could not have sex otherwise. In Japan, the film Caterpillar took the theme of a disabled war veteran and his sex drive to an extreme. More recently, the ...

Happy New Year! Here's an interesting eye-opener into lesser-known side to the Japanese erotic. Minorities and Sex: Strictly Personal Way of Love is a new film directed by Makoto Sasaki about sex and minorities, a topic mostly ignored by mainstream Japanese society. It will be screened from February 14th at Uplink in Shibuya, Tokyo's top venue for non-mainstream cinema. The meta-film is part fiction, part documentary. Divided into three parts focusing on different characters who are social minorities. While obviously filmed on a low budget, we love the sound of this. Here's the ...