Into the Rising Sun 11

                              ‘The Chinese will eat anything, and the Japanese will fuck it.’                                                                                                                                                
                                                                                                                      Anon

Some of the still conscious salarymen in our carriage were immersed and engrossed in what might have passed for comic books back home. Except for the subject material, which fell somewhere between sex and death. Soy sex. No sex.
One of the most confusing polar ‘but also’s’ of Japanese culture has been the dichotomous rigorous buttoned-down conventionalism and unhinged kinky depravities that characterize their fantasies. Anthony Bourdain once asked the question in a slightly different way. I totally don't understand the porn here. Why is it you can't fuck somebody with a penis, but you can fuck them with an octopus tentacle? The answer lies in the furthest part of the Japanese erotic spectrum.
There is a three-tiered hierarchy of Japanese sexual activity. The Standard Stuff includes the brothels and massage parlours, strip clubs and sex shops, fellatio and vibrator bars, and a huge adult movie industry, within which although hardcore sex acts are allowed to be filmed, the genitalia of the performers is required to be blurred out, in adherence to moral laws. The Innocent and Adorable slide into perversity comes from the five-year-old girl pink-purple, fuzzy, fluffy, sparkly, hearts-and-stars cute kawaii aesthetic that begins to bleed into the world of sex. All the temptress employees behaving like hyper-sexualized schoolgirl cartoons, in the French maid-themed cafes, clap and jump, sing in high-pitched voices, converting Hello Kitty into meow.
But its in the Dark and Rapey where the monsters live. The erotic manga comic book stories in the laps of our salarymen, the anime animated final fulfillments, and the eroge erotic video games that combine cartoons and pornography and gaming into an outlet experience for suppressed illegal desires, are the media that allow our salaryman to experience things that he would never have the courage to do in real life- homoerotic indulgences, shibari bondage, rapes, violations by demons and tentacles, fetishism, S&M, shinjū love suicide, necrophilia, and any other hentai perversion you might prefer not to imagine. Child pornography, adding to the stressful slide of the kawaii rage, was legal until 1999. The country with the most powerful social norms on the planet, is the one with the most wicked fantasies.
None of this yet answers Bourdain’s question about tentacles. In order to do that, you must look at the long history of pornography in Japan. Nudity has never been taboo in Japanese culture. Women were topless, everyone got together naked in communal onsen spas at the end of every day, and, because of Buddhism or the absence of Christianity or whatever, the Japanese traditionally had a much more open, nonjudgmental, less puritanical view of sex. As far back as the Heian period, which ended about the time that King Henry II began using the London safes of the Knights Templar to store part of his treasure, what we call porn was simply another common book genre, like cooking or travel. Artists were simply making pictures of people enjoying sex, and no social stigma was attached to the eroticism of shunga. Initially inspired by Chinese medicine manual illustrations, ‘shunga’ is a contraction of shunkyū-higi-ga, the Japanese pronunciation for a Chinese set of twelve scrolls depicting the twelve sexual acts that the crown prince had to carry out as an expression of yin yang. Translated literally, the Japanese word means ‘picture of spring,’ spring being a common euphemism for sex. 
Samurai, chonin townspeople, and housewives all owned shunga; they all experienced separation from the opposite sex. The samurai lived in barracks for months at a time (in the sankin-kōtai system of required annual conjugal separation in Edo), and the merchants' needed to travel to obtain and sell goods. In the same way that it was a talisman against death for a samurai to carry shunga, it was also considered protection against fire in merchant warehouses, and the home. 
Because nudity was not inherently erotic, and the reader could more easily identify courtesans and foreigners, characters were fully clothed and shown in nonrealistic positions with exaggerated genitalia for psychological impact- a 'second face' expressing the primal passions that the everyday face is obligated by giri to conceal. Plum blossoms were used to represent virginity, and tissues to symbolize impending ejaculation. Francis Hall, an American businessperson who arrived in Yokohama in 1859, was shocked and disgusted when his Japanese acquaintances and their wives showed him shunga at their homes, and described them as ‘vile pictures executed in the best style Japanese art.’ 
From the 16th to the 19th century, the shogunate tried to suppress these works, but not very hard.
In 1814, Edo artist Katsushika Hokusai produced a famous woodcut of a young ama diver sexually entwined with two octopuses. The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife depicted a mutually pleasurable interaction, unlike what was to follow almost two hundred years later. Shunga production fell with the rise of pornographic photographs in the late 19th century. But the technology came also with Western morality, which coerced the Japanese government into cracking down on traditional public nudity. In the 1907 Censorship law that followed, Article 175 of the Criminal Code banned the publication of obscene materials. Images of male-female intercourse were strategically ‘pixelated,’ and what had once been considered normal sexual genital portraiture became more influenced by western monotheistic mores- sterilized and demonized and idealized into long legs and large breasts.