Topic : KNICKERS MAY MEAN END OF THE LINE FOR JAPAN'S VENDING SPLURGE
Tokyo Postcard : Complaints of a booming knicker fetish have
roused the law at last.
By Ben Hills, THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD - Tuesday, October 12th, 1993
They clog highway parking bays, vacant lots and crowded footpaths of every town and city in Japan - vending machines which are huge half-tonne mechanical monsters selling everything from cabbages to bed sheets, cold sake to warm instant noodles.
Japanese buy more of their consumables from these machines than anyone else in the world - sales were a booming $A95 billion last year - and for years, consumer groups have been trying to get them off the streets.
Now, thanks to the latest fetish among Tokyo's dirty raincoat bridgade, the campaign to return the footpaths to the people has been given a boost. "We have to draw the line somewhere, and 'buru-sera' is it," said a police spokesman in Tokyo's eastern suburbs.
'Buru-sera'? It's Japlish for schoolgirls' knickers - the 'buru' is an abbreviation of "bloomers" and the 'sera' is the "sailor"-style blue and white uniforms worn by Japan's high-school students.
The second-hand pastel-coloured panties - along with the girls' bras, slips and the uniform themselves - have become the hottest item in the porn shops of the swinging suburb of Shibuya. The street where they are sold is known locally as "buru-sera alley".
"Business is good," says Mr Shouichi Masuda, proprietor of a 'rori-kon' shop called Lollipop, snapping the elastic of a pair of pink panties, which sells for $A60, complete with a picture of the previous owner wearing them. 'Rori-kon' is Japlish for "Lolita Complex", a fashionable Japanese fetish.
Sales were so hot that the vendors decided to bypass the shops and package the undies under labels such as "Young Girls' Secret Scent" for sale around the clock in vending machines. By last month, no fewer than 40 machines had sprouted in the Greater Tokyo area, selling knickers, alongside cigarettes, soft drinks and other more conventional merchandise.
Enough is enough, decided the residents of Machida City suburb, when they discovered 'buru-sera' in vending machines near their local elementary school. They collected 3,000 names on a petition demanding the machines' removal, and enlisted the support of their local mayor, who called in the police.
"We do not have ordinances prohibiting the sale of pornographic videotapes and magazines," said a spokesman for the petitioners. "But we never anticipated the question of girls' second hand clothing coming up."
Last week the police swooped, closing down all the 'buru-sera' machines they could find, and arresting three Japanese businessmen they claimed were responsible.
The charges? Violation of the Antique Dealers' Act (the men did not have licenses required by the local Public Safety Commission) and possibly fraud. Police say they have evidence that at least some of the knickers were not second-hand, as represented.
Several hundred pairs of knickers have been seized, and police are looking into the profits they claim have been made by the 'buru-sera' syndicate - more than $A150,000 in a matter of months.
They have also clamped down on the supply side of business. In a series of swoops in Shibuya, they rounded up 101 teenage girls - many of them from elite Tokyo private schools - and gave them official reprimands for selling their knickers and posing for pornographic pictures. As for the remaining 5 million vending machines in the country: "Our campaign [against them] will continue," says Mr Susumu Asano, a lawyer and spokesman for the Association for the Elimination of Illegally Protruding Vending Machines.
Mr Asano claims that around 70 per cent of the machines have been installed illegally in the streets. As well as choking pedestrian traffic, they place perils of tobacco and alcohol - some machines sell beer and sake - in the was of children, he says.
Last Monday, Mr Asano's group lodged an official complaint with the Tokyo police against some of the biggest names in Japanese vending sales: the Government owned Japan Tobacco Industry monopoly, Coca Cola, Asahi brewery and Calpis, the food and soft-drink conglomerate.
But not the Japanese knickers-manufacturers - the 'buru-sera' sales were done without their knowledge .. and, anyway, the police seem to have solved the problem already.
