BEYOND THE IMPLODE 3 - BRITISH AIRWAYS 0

I first came across Nanami Kurasawa in Tokyo's Aki Habra electronics district. In between all the shops punting robot dogs, reclining toilet seats and spare bionic eyes, there lies a massive porn store, literally five floors of filth. Me and N found ourselves being swept inside by a rush hour human wave attack, plus it was raining and we needed to kill a few hours.

This joint was the Harrods of hardcore porn, stuffed with tens of thousands of DVDs, mags, videos and implausible sex 'toys', such as a battery operated cyborg wanking hand for those too tired or lazy to knock out their own 5 knuckle shuffles, and a dildo that would eviscerate a Blue Whale - seriously, it was the length and breadth of a child. As far as fetishes go, the DVDs had them all ; women being tortured by fish-hooks through their noses and eyelids, period sex, coprophilia, pony girls, lesbian cops, girls in Power Ranger costumes, train groping, pissing into flowerpots, My Little Pony, vomit fetish, burger bar rape, androids....a lot of it seemed geared towards the subjugation and humiliation of women, but then this is the country where women are obliged to remain standing on the tube when someone vacates their seat, so that a salaryman can waddle across the length of the carriage to park his arse.

"Martin, come here, look at this", N spat for the 39th time. And then I saw it - the vile plastic-wrapped hellish trash that I knew existed, but had never guessed I'd actually see. Kid porn.

The front cover of the DVD featured a photo of a girl who looked about eight at oldest, sitting on what looked like concrete steps, her face contorted into a grizzly howl, her arms yanked to the right-hand side, her wrists in handcuffs. The back cover featured snapshots of the contents, some fat ugly Jap forcing himself into her mouth, pinning her down with his beergut, sneering as her face twisted into more hideous screams.
"We have to buy it". I can't even remember which one of us said it first.
"You sick cunt" - that was both of us.

So we drifted off, but kept gravitating back to this one particular DVD. We couldn't actually believe it existed, when you see it in front of your eyes it's so out there, you feel you're hallucinating.

"Don't be so stupid. This isn't allowed on Earth, it belongs to Spaceship Tokyo, along with all these hilarious shrinkwrapped packs of schoolgirl knickers (complementary photos of the supposed 'wearers' thrown in). Customs at Heathrow might find it, then that's it, your whole life down the drain. They wouldn't understand we simply wanted to view the horror out of an unquenchable desire for the truth, or even that it was post-ironic carcrash curiosity, they'd just see us as a couple of nonces."
"We could buy a portable DVD player, watch it over here, then throw it away."

Reader - how can I convince you that despite our urges to view this real-life nightmare, we 're actually not bad people? Like, you could trust us with kids and stuff? A hip hop track was booming out over the shop, some misogynist stuff about porking Puerto Rican bitches, or smoking Korean bitches, I can't remember. Three salarymen in suits were milling around, going 'Ohh', and passing DVDs to each other on their post-work smut trawl. One of the DVDs had a pic of 4 Japanese girls in latex NYC cop gear brandishing guns. That was one of the ones I ended up buying.

"We could just throw away the cover, and...what are we saying? This is out of order, this is way too fucking sick!"

A vision - customs, Heathrow Terminal 3 ; trying to tell the cops, "We had to see it, so we could believe it , know it was real! We weren't going to wank over it". And then being bundled into a van full of prematurely balding, salivating weirdos, stinking of milk and glaring through coke-bottle glasses. "Ah, your first time!" one of them grinning through a couple of yellowing, chipped teeth, pulling a stained child's mitten from his anorak pocket. "You get used to it after a couple of decades, the sublime pleasure far outweighs the punishment beatings!", and he pulls his cardigan up to expose a network of razor scars across his ugly paedophile chest -

So we left that DVD well alone, the filthy exploitation of children could remain Aki Habra's guilty little secret. I bought another DVD, a bukkake one, and N bought a mag. He went bright red at the counter, though the little guy serving us didn't seem to give a toss either way. There were T-shirts hanging up by the door, mostly cartoon graphics of tied-up women, and one of a blonde, European kid's face, wearing oversized shades, and underneath, in punk scrawl, Baby Fuck. Imagine wearing that one down the street.

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N opened his mag up back in the hotel room, the mid-pages had a laughing, naked Japanese girl arching her back and unleashing a spray of brown diarrhoea into the air. The next two pages were just close-ups of shit-splattered bedsheets. N ran into the bathroom and gagged his lunch into the space-age toilet.

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I freaked out on the 12-hour flight back, partly due to lack of sleep and too much booze. I was convinced customs were going to find the bukkake DVD and arrest me. It was, after all, 'hardcore' and UK laws still governed this sort of thing. I had another vision -

Customs ripping my bag apart, as a disgusted-looking tall young man, hair neatly shaved and in pastel clothing, passed by and gave me a withering look. His bag would be packed with paper lampshades adorned with pictures of dragons, little Buddhas he'd bought at numerous shrines, a set of chopsticks, books, pieces of art, clothing and cultural objects. My bag would spill open to reveal weird Spiderman dolls, menus stolen from fast food joints with mad manga designs, tapes by the Japanese Oi! band Cobra, a rare Japanese copy of The Pop Group's How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? CD, a translucent umbrella and some cartoons of samurai that a drunk Damned fan had drawn for me in a bar in Shinjuku - as well as a bukkake DVD. This well-adjusted, normal, intelligent man would 'tssk' as he strode unhindered through customs, planning his first authentic 'Japanese party' in his flat, where he'd slip on a kimono, serve his guests sake in small bowls, put on some traditional Japanese music and tell them all about the wonderful, lush volcano-riddled islands, and what a shame it was that Old Japan- the REAL Japan - was gradually being eroded by gaudy technology, streets heaving with pedestrians, ear-splitting pachinko parlours and neon-washed noodle bars, where me and N had spent all of our time, stuffing our gobs in the rain and pretending to look for replicants. Said man would endeavour to learn to speak Japanese, find a Japanese girlfriend, perhaps attempt to write a book about his travels and the humble fishing peasants he met on the way. I'd be taking a kicking in some West London police station, for bringing gratuitous sperm-sodden muck back to Airstrip One

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The DVD features Nanami Kurasawa, a beautiful, rather thin-faced woman with jet black long hair. If you were ever going to level the 'drank so much sperm they had to be stomach-pumped' jibe at a celebrity, you probably couldn't go wrong with her. She seems to be the SAS of the Japanese Bukkake underground, the one who undertakes the most daring missions, and gets splatted the most. Incidentally, while looking her up on Google, there appears to be a 'Nanami Kurasawa' active in the dolphin conservation movement. I don't know if it's the same person.

Kurasawa looks a bit older than her co-stars. This isn't so much in terms of age, she just has a resigned maturity about her. You keep expecting her to suddenly say, "I really don't belong here", and walk off set, leaving her two giggly fellow actresses giving "WTF?" shoulder-shrugs to the camera.

Maybe Kurasawa's star has waned since. There's probably been tonnes of younger, more hungry actresses, keen to tear up the ranks and stake their claims to being Queen Bukkake. Maybe they go in for more extreme stuff than Kurasawa did, in an attempt to knock her off her perch, in a constant bid to ride the porn rapids before they suck all these glorious starlets into whirlpools of oblivion. Either way, the DVD's not very good. I'm not going to lie and pretend I felt 'nothing', but 20 minutes later, I felt the desire to make a cup of tea. There isn't a great deal going on. The worst part is when one of Nanami's co-stars sticks her tongue right out in anticipation of a drenching, and you can see it's all green and furry. In another shot, Kurasawa blows a spunk-bubble like it's Hubba Bubba.

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Ages after, me and N were sitting in Amsterdam, in a pub off Rembrandt Square. We were laughing at a load of people who'd just announced they were off downtown to check out some porn shops.
"Pah", we sneered, "We've seen it all. You're wasting your time, you should have seen what we saw in Aki Habra, it would fry your minds!"
We were irritating the fuck out of everyone. We told them about the DVD with the kid, what, about 20 times. They just wanted to go and explore their own thrills, but we were now porn experts. We'd seen the depths of capitalist pornographic exploitation. Like magi hunched over grimoires, we'd looked hardcore porn in its mascara-blushed but rheumy eye, and come out unscathed. Everyone else knew nothing, we were unshockable!
"You should have seen this place in Aki Habra, Amsterdam's shit, this is tame in comparison", we ha-ha'd. Everyone bristled at our self-obsessed arrogance, but we knew we were right and they were wrong! We might have been a couple of cunts, but we had PhDs in Porn, and were still laughing at all the greasy Red Light District punters' attempts to break their own limited taboos as we bought more beers and played "Pacman".