Visiting a “porn village” in Osaka

Long before we started Tokyo Kinky, we used to live in a different kind of kinky — or rather, Kinki, as Kansai is also known (to amusing effect, unless you are a university bearing that name).

And it’s tales like this that make us pine for our former stomping ground in Osaka.

We’ve been trying to find out more about a notorious site in woodland near the Yodogawa, the river running from Osaka to Kyoto, that is a homeless encampment. While that is not atypical for large rivers (Tokyo’s Sumida River used to be similar, for instance,), this location is different because it has become what is dubbed a “porn village.”

Everywhere you turn in at least one of the makeshift structures, you are confronted by porn, which seem to be mostly pages from porn magazines. There are a few chairs and some practical tools hanging from the “roof” like brushes, helmets, and wire, plus a kamidana household altar (like in a regular Japanese home), but it’s otherwise all pornographic pics of Japanese AV stars.

We first heard about this apparently legendary place through a couple of viral posts on social media last year, from which these images are taken.

The Minions-themed decorations are a particularly fun touch. It’s almost as if Kevin, Stuart, and Bob built this incredible place. Or is this a lair where the supervillain Gru (or his Japanese counterpart) secretly lives?!

We found a more in-depth take on the location with this video, in which a YouTuber visits the site and even meets the 50-year-old resident, who explains he isn’t selling the porn, it’s just his “hobby.” Because it’s YouTube, the video censors the images, though this amusingly means you can only see the YouTuber’s face when he is venturing deep into the huts.

There is a well-established link between homelessness and porn in Japan. It features in adult videos as a common trope or setting, in which a porn star does “charity work” that ends in her having sex with the homeless guys in their tents. Sometimes, the budget even stretches to an overseas shoot in which the intrepid female protagonist goes the LA to fraternize with the local homeless population.

It’s usually a female performer and male homeless costars, though there are occasional titles with a homeless woman.