Sinerama in Osaka

"We delight in taking this opportunity to extend our sincere felicitations for your midwinter prosperity," said the polite police edict to hotelkeepers in Osaka, Japan. "We also call your attention to a recent case in which a 'pink movie' leaped into the living rooms of some of our citizens from a hotel equipped with a video-tape recording machine. No such leakage will be repeated."

The "pinkie" that inspired the official prose was a film that Japanese censors consider a shade more acceptable than "blue," or hard-core pornographic movies. Pinkies can be shown legally to adult audiences, but this one had appeared without warning on TV screens in nearby homes when the hotel's closed-circuit video system accidentally converted a rooftop steel railing into a transmitting antenna. Police quickly zeroed in on the hotel and shut down the video system--but not before the incident became a cause celebre that pointed up the phenomenal rise in the use of pornographic video tape across Japan.

Glorious Fujicolor. More than 500 of Osaka's "avec" hotels--so called because the Japanese check into them with their lovers--feature the videotape extra. "This is an electronic age," explains Seishichi Sawa, manager of one of Osaka's avecs. "It's natural that our patrons would want to be electronically elevated to a romantic mood."

Operation of the pornetwork is simple. The tapes are run through a video player at the front desk. When customers drop a pair of 100-yen coins into a slot on a TV set in their rooms, the result is instant pornography, often in glorious Fujicolor. The odds are against tuning in at the beginning of the movie--the tape runs continuously. But picking up a show in midstream makes little difference; one popular pinkie simply follows an energetic coed as she hops in and out of a series of bedrooms.

Video-taped pinkies are beginning to face stern competition. In some of Osaka's hotel rooms, video-tape recorder systems have been installed. A flick of a switch near the pillow starts a video-tape camera recording activity on the bed. Afterward, another switch provides instant replays. Rooms so equipped are in steady demand: one couple attempting to sample the pleasures of an avec hotel was ordered by the maid to wait for a call at a nearby coffeehouse. "All the rooms are occupied," she said, "as usual."

Erotic Bliss. Despite the demand, the hotels charge nothing additional for the service. Most, in fact, offer a remarkable range of extras, including mechanized beds that make a bewildering variety of movements, and even tape recordings of the sounds of erotic bliss. "We Japanese have few fixed ideas when it comes to sex," says Psychologist Kazuo Shimada. "We tend to think anything good should prove good for sex life --even video-tape recording."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.