Magical colours of Japan 2: Yashio Hihokan & pink fantasies ピンク

1. Introduction

Whenever I travel, I find myself drawn less to landmarks than to the edges of cities – the places hidden behind unmarked doors, preserved by someone’s passion rather than an institution. In Paris, I skip the Louvre and visit the tiny Ossip Zadkine museum. I’d much rather go to a concert in a smoky bar than at a stadium. So when I found myself in Tokyo with limited time to see the city, I skipped the Tokyo National Museum and went to Yashio Hihokan instead.

2. Yashio Hihokan and the theatre of artificial desire

The museum, the name of which can be roughly translated as “Yashio Adult Museum”, is de facto a house of Yoshitaka Hyodo, a 50 year-old collector of dolls. Located in Yashio, Saitama Prefecture, it seems unremarkable – nothing from the outside distinguishes it from all the other houses on the quiet street of the sleepy, slightly run-down suburbs. But step inside and the ordinary world disappears almost instantly.

Yashio Hihokan is not a place one simply stumbles upon; first, you must email Mr Hyodo to arrange a visit. Given the fact that the museum is apparently only open 3 times a year, we were lucky to get in, and the admission of ¥1,000 (less than €6) seemed more than reasonable. The website (which doubles as a blog and a personal newspaper) has instructions for how to get there; we chose to take the metro from Ahihabara to Yashio station and walk from there (approx. 20 minutes). Compared to the crowded centre of Tokyo that provides a layer of anonymity, here we immediately felt like tourists, walking uneasily next to dilapidated houses, many of them open, with cats roaming outside. I had made an appointment for Wednesday 8th November at 16:30 and when we arrived, Mr Hyodo was waiting for us in front of his house. Not without trepidation, we walked inside the Yashio Hihokan, and were instructed that we could access the whole house and take photographs. And boy, was there stuff to photograph.

Yashio Hihokan is like a cross between a hoarder’s house and a meticulously curated art display. Calling it a collection of dolls is gross understatement, for there is so much more. From medical paraphernalia to old radios; anatomy charts and bodily parts to military regalia; little boy’s action figures and toy tanks are juxtaposed with floating mannequins and dolls – some in fetish gear, some in military uniforms, some wearing pearl necklaces and holding guns, some in fairytale costumes, some naked. There are stuffed animals, vintage clocks, bottles, artificial flower garlands, disco lamps, skulls, parrots, Geisha figures, chandeliers, lingerie suspended from the ceiling, all bathed in pink, purple and blue fluorescent light. It’s a theatre of the bizarre and surreal.

Some of the dolls appeared deliberately childlike, their oversized eyes and tiny limbs creating a significant discomfort. The blurred boundary between innocence and fetishisation is not unique to Yashio Hihokan; it exists elsewhere in Japanese visual culture too, from manga aesthetics to the controversial market for childlike sex dolls, which are defended by some under freedom-of-expression arguments and condemned by others as normalising exploitation.

Walking through Yashio Hihokan, I could see how easily tenderness could coexist with violence, theatricality with the ordinary – and Japan is a great example of such contrasts. Beneath its polished surfaces, there are countless private worlds like that, all devoted to fantasy, simulation and escape.

The house was quiet; being the only people visiting it, I was reminded of those small town museums on a weekday morning, where the museum assistant shows you in and turns on the lights, to then disappear and leave you alone with the space. Relieved to be by yourself, you proceed to examine the exhibited works. But at Yashio Hihokan, there’s no feeling of easiness, the space is so disturbing and the experience so immersive, that you can’t help but feel tense as your try to manoeuvre your way through the cramped space.

Freud described the uncanny as the moment when something appears both familiar and profoundly strange at once. Walking through Yashio Hihokan, surrounded by countless frozen faces illuminated in fluorescent pink and violet light, that sensation became almost overwhelming.

Despite the abundance of objects, there is a deep sense of melancholy and loneliness at Yashio Hihokan, and I found myself increasingly wondering about the owner.

According to interviews with Kyodo News, Hyodo Yoshitaka is fascinated with cyborgs and artificial life forms as something that gradually became inseparable from his identity. In 2021, he started his own political party which he called the “Great Japan Love Doll Party,” a symbolic initiative aimed at defending love doll culture and countering what he perceived as misrepresentation in mainstream media. His resentment towards private broadcasting industry was fuelled after the suicide of a cast member of a tv show who had been targeted by online abuse, especially as Hyodo has had several brushes with death himself – as a teenager he was caught up in a yakuza conflict and during adulthood has suffered from numerous heart attacks and health complications since being diagnosed with a tumor in his pituitary gland 10 years ago.

The Yashio Hihokan collection began almost accidentally, after Hyodo discovered a burnt mannequin in a vacant lot over 20 year ago, which triggered what he later described as an irreversible accumulation of objects. Over time, dolls were added not only through purchase, but also through informal circulation, i.e. gifts from acquaintances who no longer needed them after major life changes such as marriage or caregiving. Most of them are from Orient Industry, a Tokyo-based company that has specialized in producing high-quality adult toys since 1977. And now the “collection” is not limited to a part of the house, for the house is the collection, and that includes Mr Hyodo’s bedroom, toilet, etc. There’s no space for anyone (or anything) else; it’s a statement of a solitary life and deeply personal desires.

When we finished our tour, Mr Hyodo was waiting for us downstairs, sitting on the floor by a small table. We joined him to pay but also engaged in a slightly awkward (also because of the language barrier) conversation. And then we left.

3. The industrialisation of desire

Leaving Yashio Hihokan felt like emerging from someone else’s subconscious. Less than two hours later, we were back beneath the fluorescent lights of Akihabara, where fantasy no longer belonged to one solitary collector but had become a fully industrialised marketplace. Anthropologist Anne Allison has written about how contemporary Japanese consumer culture often produces “fantasy systems” that substitute for intimacy rather than simply represent it. These are infrastructures where desire is not hidden, but carefully organised, distributed and made accessible.

Our next place on the list was what might be one of the biggest sex shops in the world: the Adult Department Store M’s which also has branches in Tachikawa and Ikebukuro, and five physical shops in the Kanto region. Just like Yashio Hihokan, the exterior is mostly unremarkable (bar some pictures of JAV porn stars – but in this billboard-heavy city, they don’t really stand out), in stark contrast to the abundant interior.

Inside the store, floor after floor unfolds like a taxonomy of desire. The air smelled faintly of plastic and synthetic perfume, while upbeat pop music played quietly beneath the relentless fluorescent lighting. The basement and first floor are dedicated entirely to adult DVDs and Blu-Rays, their shelves packed densely enough to resemble an archive rather than a shop. Upstairs come men’s masturbation aids (there’s an entire floor devoted to artificial vaginas in every imaginable variatio), followed by vibrators, S&M gear, dildos, anal plugs and cock rings, all displayed beneath harsh fluorescent lighting with the organisational precision of a pharmacy. The 4th floor has lotions and condoms, on the 5th floor you’ll find lingerie, and the 6th floor has all sorts of fancy dress costumes. Whatever particular object or device you need, you’ll find it among the 3,000 products sold in the shop. Some are bordering on the absurd, such as onaholes and anus toys based on Ramen Noodles or used lingerie but the Japanese market is excellent at monetising the fact that human desires have no boundaries.

It was a strange change of scenery and vibe, moving from Yashio Hihokan’s intimate and private fantasy to the industrial fantasy and a sensory overload of a very commercial department store. For us, it was a continuation of sightseeing, but the vast majority of visitors were there to shop, baskets filled with goods like in a supermarket. What struck me most was not the explicitness but the banality. People browsed shelves quietly and methodically, with the same concentration one might encounter in a supermarket or an electronics store.

The anthropologist Marc Augé described spaces such as airports, supermarkets or motorway service stations as “non-places”, i.e. spaces of transit and consumption rather than identity. Walking through M’s, I had the impression of something similar: a space designed for transaction rather than encounter, where even intimacy is reorganised into aisles and categories.

In Japan, you’ll find entire buildings are devoted to similarly curated fantasies. The country’s famous love hotels – according to estimates, there are 10,000 to 37,000 of them – which are rented by the hour and often themed like film sets, palaces or tropical resorts, transform intimacy into something both theatrical and strangely anonymous. Like Yashio Hihokan and M’s, they occupy a space somewhere between private desire and a public performance.

Watching the crowds move silently between aisles, baskets gradually filling with products, I was reminded of Christiane Amanpour’s documentary Sex & Love Around the World, in which several Japanese interviewees spoke openly about difficulties with intimacy and emotional connection. Surrounded by dating simulators, host clubs, love hotels and endless shelves of manufactured fantasy, I couldn’t help but sense a deep tension between longing and distance.

4. Kawaii and the performance of innocence

One of the things one notices immediately in Japan are the omnipresent billboards. At night, enormous LED screens flicker above the streets, flooding crowds with bright lights and repetitive jingles. Faces advertising contact lenses, skincare products and idol groups hovered several storeys above pedestrians, their expressions frozen between innocence and seduction. In a place like Tokyo, these billboards are more than just advertisements – blending manga aesthetics, technology and pop culture, they define the city’s visual identity.

As I was walking through the streets trying to take in the vast amount of visuals, something struck me. Every billboard face looking back at me belonged to a young Japanese girl or boy. Besides the fact that while the Western advertising world pushes for inclusivity and diversity almost compulsively, Japan’s visual culture feels strikingly insular, what struck me most was their almost childlike softness. With immaculate skin, glowing cheeks, and enormous eyes, they didn’t seem different from the manga characters they were juxtaposed with.

It is no secret that Japan loves “cute” (referred to as kawaii) – after all, the launch of Hello Kitty in 1974 and its subsequent popularity is not a coincidence. There are countless contemporary kawaii artists such as Takashi Murakami or Yoshitomo Nara, who are famous for creating bright-coloured works that the 10 year old me would have loved to have hanging in her bedroom. There are stationery shops selling cutsey washi tape; pastry shops selling custard tarts decorated with anime characters; kitchenware shops where you can buy bear-shaped bread stamps and rice moulds, eyes to put on vegetables, faces on sausage clippers, all sorts of pastel-coloured containers in the shape of cute animals etc. Japanese streets are filled with “lolitas” in frilly dresses holding lace parasols, though cuteness is not entirely gender-specific, for there are many men aspiring to a neotenic look. And while some examples are perfectly innocent, like the cute pink signage for the women-only compartment on the train, some can be quite extreme – blepharoplasty (double-eyelid surgery) has long been among the most common cosmetic procedures in Japan.

Interestingly, the first registered concept of “kawaii” goes back several centuries to Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book, i.e. a book of the writer’s observations, where the section titled “List of adorable things” contains many ideas that fit within the modern notion of cuteness (baby sparrow, dolls, a plump baby, etc.). Cultural theorist Sharon Kinsella described kawaii as a form of performed vulnerability – an aesthetic of softness, childishness and cultivated helplessness that spread through the Japanese consumer culture in the 1970s and intensified during the economic boom of the 1980s. For many young people, she argued, cuteness became a form of emotional escape within a society where spiritual, emotional, intellectual and sexual needs often remained unmet.

Looking at a digitised manuscript of The Pillow Book from Kyoto University Library, I was struck by how contemporary it felt. Written around the year 1000, the text consists not of a continuous story but of observations, lists, complaints and aesthetic judgements. Literary scholars classify it as zuihitsu – literally “following the brush” – a form that choses fleeting impressions over narrative structure. In many ways, it resembles more a blog than a medieval classic – instead of a plot, Shōnagon records things that delight her, things that annoy her, beautiful moments, awkward social encounters, etc. According to the Japanese writer Yoko Tawada, many contemporary Japanese essayists still write in forms that owe something to the zuihitsu and Shōnagon’s famous list of “adorable things” occupies a privileged place within Japan’s visual imagination. The kawaii eyes staring down from Tokyo’s billboards may belong to a twenty-first century advertising industry, yet the aesthetic appreciation of softness and fragility reaches much further back.

Walking through Tokyo at night, surrounded by these giant illuminated faces, I began to think that this facade of cuteness, serving as a shield against exhaustion, loneliness and social pressure, makes the distance between Yashio Hihokan and the glowing billboards of Akihabara not so big in the end.

5. The architecture of convenience

It is universally known that the Japanese are not particularly keen on human interaction, even in a completely innocent context. I witnessed this one evening, when I approached a couple of women on the street to ask them if they could translate a label on a vending machine which my Google translator was failing to decipher (spoiler alert: it was cocoa). As I made an attempt to make myself understood (all I asked for was to tell me what the label meant but the language barrier in Japan is quite noticeable), I immediately regretted this unsolicited contact, for the ladies were visibly embarrassed.

It is ironic that this awkward scene took place in the context of buying a drink from a vending machine, because vending machines are a staple in Japan precisely for this reason: they’re meant to minimise human friction. Just like the self-service sushi bars, where one gets a tablet and therefore can order independently whatever they want, vending machines allow us to make a purchase completely independently. And a lot can be obtained from a machine – from all kinds of tea and coffee (hot and cold!), to noodles and curry, fresh produce, anime merchandise, to neckties, umbrellas, deodorants, souvenirs, and all sorts of quirky gadgets.

Even desire could be automated, packaged and purchased from the glowing machines – the same desire that at Yashio Hihokan manifested itself through dolls, mannequins and meticulously constructed fantasy worlds. And not just streets, these machines are everywhere, in small towns and villages, and even completely remote places like the Aso volcano where we went a few days later. A can of corn soup and espresso after a hike in the mountains? Not a problem, here you are.

In Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes described Japan as a civilisation organised through signs, rituals and surfaces rather than explicit emotional disclosure. Everyday interactions often seemed carefully choreographed and mediated through systems: ticket machines, self-service restaurants, automated checkouts, convenience stores open through the night. Standing beneath the glow of vending machines humming quietly beside empty roads, I often thought about that observation. The machines did not simply offer convenience; they felt like part of a broader social architecture designed to minimise awkwardness and unpredictability.

Perhaps this is why they seem to be symbolic of modern Japan. Whilst offering efficiency, reliability and comfort, they also reveal a society increasingly structured around minimising human friction. In cities filled with curated fantasies, automated services and compartmentalised desires – from the fluorescent dreamscapes of Yashio Hihokan to the glowing machines besides empty roads – even the act of buying a warm drink becomes part of a larger choreography of solitude.

And yet, when I think of Japan now, what lingers most vividly in my memory is not one particular image, but this tension between two extremes: the artificial neon glow and the quiet nature with its seasonal hues. The beautiful redness of maple leaves, the gold of ginkgo trees, the quiet presence of deer moving through temple grounds in Nara exist in the same sphere as Yashio Hihokan and the screaming billboards. The contrast between artificial fluorescence and the subdued hues of Japanese autumn would follow me far beyond Tokyo.

Please click here to read the first chapter of my Japanese blog. The third chapter will be published later in 2026.