Late-night convenience stores in Shibuya, Tokyo, are always playing out urban fables. In the glass window, a man in a suit with half his face in the shadows is putting a full body sex doll into a black paper bag printed with the words "adult toys". This scene is cut into fragmented symbols by neon lights, reflecting the most obscure codewords in postmodern society.
Contemporary men's obsession with dolls begins with collective amnesia of touch. When touch screens replace the warmth transmitted by handshakes, and when video conferences erase the possibility of physical collisions, those interpersonal relationships compressed into data packets are decompressed into concrete desires at midnight. A programmer from a game company wrote in his blog: "When I finished debugging the 327th virtual character's skeleton parameters, my fingers longed to penetrate the pixels to touch the real arc." This tactile hunger syndrome has given rise to the industrialization of full body sex dolls. Those bodies made of silicone and memory foam are filling the tactile vacuum left by the evolution of civilization.
The popularity of the torso sex doll coincides with the carnival of deconstructionism. At a Tokyo otaku culture exhibition, simulated bodies with missing limbs unexpectedly became bestsellers. Curator Yuko Yamada believes this is a rebellion against perfectionism: "When social media requires people to always maintain a complete persona, limb incompleteness becomes an outlet for releasing pressure." Just like the dismembered Orpheus in Greek mythology, contemporary men complete their identity reconstruction by assembling doll bodies in a fragmented self-cognition.
When creating the "Japanese-style fat sex doll" series, Osaka toy designer Takashi Imai deliberately increased the waist circumference data by 27%. This precise number comes from a questionnaire survey of 3,000 male users. The final rounded curve is both a resistance to the "white, young and thin" aesthetic and a gentle dissolution of body anxiety. Those body perceptions alienated by fitness app data regain breathing space in the soft curves of fat sex dolls.
When night falls, the eyeballs of the full-body dolls will reflect the cold light of the city neon. Those silicone bodies placed on the bed of the single apartment are both the emotional mirror of contemporary men and the yardstick for measuring the loneliness of civilization. When dawn comes, the starlight solidified in the pupils of the dolls will eventually melt in the morning mist of Tokyo Bay, and a new round of doll-making movement has quietly started on the assembly line.
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