Tenga opens official Zozotown store
The mainstreaming of Tenga, Japan’s most famous and design-savvy adult brand, continues now with the opening of an official store in Zozotown, one of Japan’s biggest online shopping platforms, from September 3.
It will sell around 150 types of original Tenga apparel and other items normally available exclusively at Tenga Land (the brand’s flagship store inside Tokyu Plaza Harajuku) and Tenga Store Tokyo. Until now, these have never been available online. It will also offer its intimate body care, sexual wellness, and massage items.
To mark the opening, Tenga is also selling some Zozotown-exclusive T-shirts emblazoned with a literally “adult” message.
However, none of the pleasure items that made Tenga so successful are available on Zozotown, possibly for legal reasons or because Zozotown mainly sells apparel. This is very much Tenga lite, an adult brand reconfigured into fashion, though it takes some gusto to walk around town wearing accessories that clearly belong to a sex toys brand.
Many of Tenga’s products are now widely available outside Japan thanks to the local distribution, though some are still limited to the Japanese market. Those toys can be purchased through our friends at Kanojo Toys.
While most famous for its male toys like the Egg and Cup lines (none of which resemble the usual pocket pussy onahole design commonly associated with male sex toys), Tenga has branched out in recent years to offer the Iroha line for women and also toys for couples. It has done more than other single brand to make adult toys more acceptable and its busy, well-oiled PR engine has ensured its regular presence in the mainstream media (the Zozotown opening was widely reported, for instance).
On the other hand, by making adult toys so stylish and pop, and by pursuing such a mission of mainstream success, there is a risk of moving away from the goal at the core of the industry, which is sexual pleasure, and this is never going to be fully permissible to conventional society. After all, some might argue, what’s the point of a Tenga store on Zozotown if it doesn’t even sell sex toys?
