Ah, Japan. The country of delicious sushi, beautiful cherry blossoms, crazy yet ingenious fashion trends, and also weird fetish cafes.
In Akihabara, Tokyo, the district where one can find the famed maid cafes, there’s also a bizarre outlet that offers lonely people the chance to cuddle with its female employees.
Soineya (translation: ‘sleep together shop’) has a variety of ‘cuddles’ for its customers to choose from: you can have a girl pat you on the back, sleep in her arms, or you can let the girl sleep with her head on your lap, and it all depends on how much money you’ve got in your wallet. The minimum duration of a cuddle is 20 minutes, and the longest time you can have with a girl is 10 hours, and it’ll set you back about 50,000 yen. There’s no hanky-panky here though, nothing more can be expected other than an exchange of body heat, as sexual acts are absolutely prohibited in Soineya.
The demand for these ‘cuddle’ services seem to be pretty high as a second Soineya branch opened fairly quickly in Shinjuku after the launch of its initial outlet late last year. A new attraction of the second branch is the ‘butt pillow service’ (oshiri makura) and its name is as direct as it gets: you can pay to rest your head on a girl’s butt cheeks.
Nothing that happens in the Land of the Rising Sun really shocks us anymore, though, what with bagel foreheads being a top Japanese beauty trend, 3-D face imprints on chocolates as the preferred Valentine’s Day gift and a man marrying his beloved pillow – we’d only be shocked if being normal suddenly becomes fashionable in that country.
Watch CNN’s video on the Soineya cafe here:
