Buying Vintage Erotica in Tokyo's Jimbocho Book Town
Jimbocho Book Town is home to nearly 200 used bookstores that offer everything from accordion-style orihon-bound books to exquisite kinky pornographic magazines.
Visitors to Tokyo who want to peruse bookstores with shelves and carts full of antique used books should visit Jimbocho district.
Jimbocho Book Town is home to nearly 200 used bookstores that offer everything from accordion-style orihon-bound books and Meiji-era books with mesmerizing woodblock prints on their delicate pages to textbooks, foreign language books, and, of course, exquisite kinky pornographic magazines.
Bookstores began sprouting up in Jimbocho when universities were opened there after the Meiji Restoration. The Hongo campus of the University of Tokyo opened in 1884 and is renowned for its architecture, including its Akamon (Red Gate) and its library with high ceilings and polished wood walls. Other nearby universities include Gakushuin, Ochanomizu, and Senshu.
I visited Jimbocho during a six-hour layover in Tokyo while transferring on a flight to the U.S. Even with a shorter layover, it is easy to visit the city from the Haneda Airport. A new line completed in 2023 from terminal 3 connects to Shinagawa Station in just 18 minutes.
The Jimbocho district includes many hilly residential neighborhoods with beautiful views of the Kanda River and many crisscrossing railway tracks and bridges. Across the river is the Tokyo Dome, which houses the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame and the fairgrounds.
Most of the used bookstores are situated on the east-west-running Yasukuni Street outside of Jimbocho Station exits A1, A2, A3, and A5. More bookstores can be found on the north-south Hakusan Street and some on the alleyways north of Jimbocho Station.
One store you won't want to miss is the Amour Shop, located outside of Jimbocho Station exit 4. Inside, you'll find classy adult books and magazines with scintillating images of women sitting on men's faces and more.
I found two thick book-like magazines that I just had to take with me.
One was a copy of Erochika EROTICA's American Sextom from Showa year 44 (1969). (The publications are dated with era names and are read from right to left with vertical lines.) It has text-heavy articles accompanied by small, tame photographs and illustrations. There are fewer than a dozen shots of bare breasts and no full-on shots of genitalia.
The topics in the table of contents are about high-brow things like:
Historical Background and Current State of Sexual Conflict: Black Sexual Power
Erotic Painting Highlights: From Seien to Utamaro
Artists of Chaos: Yoshikazu Hayashi
It's not the magazine to turn me on, but the vintage design on the pages and the order form for future issues still tucked into a center page are interesting.
The one to turn me on is the 女神の愛 (Love of Goddesses) magazine, Volume 14, spring edition of 2017, which features on its cover a photo of a woman in black leather boots and black gloves holding a crop and sitting her two ass cheeks on either side of the nose of a man who'd been let out of his cage.
There's no facade of intellectualism here. It bills itself fully as a porn magazine, and it doesn't disappoint. The first ten pages are all full-page professional photos of women dominating men in a bedroom studio.
Then there are pages of illustrations, including some of Namio Harukawa's big, beautiful giantesses using men as seats at the bar and some by Sardax illustrating professional dominatrixes as Disney princesses.
Deeper inside the magazine, readers will see longer-form erotic stories, fiction, first-person narratives, and comics. Although the written works are all in Japanese, they include plenty of full-page cartoons and interspersed photos.
One of the most interesting sections is that which contains the reader-submitted content from page 35 to 65. Readers, including kinkster hobbyists, bloggers, and professionals, submitted photos and stories about their sessions and experiences.
Chiaki shows off her huge collection of toys she had collected on her international trips, enough to cover a queen-sized bed. Nanami-sana, a blogger and owner of a studio, is shown wearing a Zentai bodysuit while playing with someone who is tied up. Later pages showed her electroshocking a man's cock, tantalizing him with her feet, and sitting powerfully on his face.
One woman wrote an article and shared photos of her Hunter rubber rain boot collection. There was an informational promotion for Studio Allin, a place where a women can bring their men and practice spanking and caning them together!
One man had a fetish for being completely enveloped in mohair (from a type of goat) sweaters, turtlenecks, and comforters. A submissive male writer who calls himself "Licking Dog" shared the story of his session with a woman who met him through his blog.
He even got to post his personal ad at the end. Listen to this:
Announcement from Licking Dog
I am always looking for women who want to train me or use me. Please check out my blog "M-Man X Licking Dog X Cunnilingus" (mdanshi.blog137.fc2.com) and contact me
Love of Goddesses was published by Sanwa Publishing. Sadly, neither "Licking Dog" nor Love of Goddesses seems to be published anymore. Sanwa still publishes other titles about BDSM. The dog's blog link leads to a dead page, and I was unable to find any issues of Love of Goddesses past 2018.
More Photos from Jimbocho
A group of women display their doll collections at Starbucks.
Jimbocho is hilly and includes many train tracks.
The tempura udon restaurant where I had my first Japanese meal of the trip.