Due to censorship, Japan is infamous for using a wide variety of stand-ins for the phallus. The use of tentacles for example has a long history, dating back to the 19th century when Edo period artist Hokusai was one of the first to depict tentacle erotica with The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, and the following sub-genre of women engaging in sexual activity with sea creatures.

In what appears to be porn that only a locksmith can appreciate Door Knob Girl has appeared on the scene, and bless her E. coli licking heart. Door Knob Girl is a website gone viral that features, you guessed it, a collection of photos of girls licking doorknobs.

It begs the question – has Door Knob Girl been spawned by all of the pixelation and mosaicing required by the Japanese censorship laws to obscure genitalia in Japanese pornography or is she just another one of those “Only in Japan” fetishes? According to it’s creators – artist Ryuko Azuma and photographer Ai Ehara – Door Knob Girl is simply psychosexual art.

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Okiku and the Nine Plates is a story about the tragic suffering of a plate-counting, well-dwelling ghost called Okiku. It is a famous Japanese folktale that can be traced back to the Kabuki play, Banchō Sarayashiki (Broken Dishes at Banchō Mansion). There are many variants to the story of how Okiku’s tortured soul came to inhabit the bottom of a well. Following is the folklore version.

Yoshitoshi's The Ghost of Okiku at the Dish Mansion

As the tale goes, Okiku was a beautiful servant maid who worked for the samurai Tessan Aoyama. Aoyama attempted to seduce Okiku making amorous advances, which she rejected. In anger, he hid a precious ceramic plate that belonged to a treasured collection of ten heirloom plates. He then ordered Okiku to fetch the plates and count them in front of him. She counted only nine plates. Aoyama blamed the loss of the plate on Okiku however, as a concession, he offered to overlook the small matter of the missing heirloom if she relented and became his mistress. Okiku again refused and so an enraged Aoyama killed her, disposing her body down a well.

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The first instance of tentacle eroticism (aka squid porn) is largely attributed to legendary Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai who created an erotic woodcut of the ukiyoue (‘pictures of the floating world’) genre around 1820 called The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (aka ‘Pearl Diver and Two Octopuses’) depicting a woman entwined sexually with a pair of octopuses.

The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife