This article is reproduced from the discontinued, but much loved Mainichi Waiwai column by Ryann Connell (article below by Masuo Kamiyama). Read more about this at the bottom of this article.

“This young woman arrived at the hospital with a green pallor to her face,” recalls Masahiro Matsushima, a urologist at Tobo University Hospital. “I could tell from her face right away what her problem was. It was late at night and I suspected she had inserted something.

I took a look and there, protruding from her urethra, was a rounded glass rod that turned out to be a mercury thermometer. She had been playing with herself and it had become lodged in her urethra and she couldn’t remove it. She was weeping with shame and fear when she came to the hospital.

“You don’t want to be sticking things up there,” Matsushima warns Shukan Jitsuwa (Sep. 29) readers. “In some cases we’ve had to operate to remove them.”

Thanks to the easy availability of adult-oriented entertainment on the Internet and elsewhere, it seems young Japanese are becoming initiated to sex from an increasingly younger age. Some are wont to experiment and it is the nation’s urologists who are often summoned to the rescue when foreign objects become lodged in one orifice or another.

Recently Dr. Matsushima published a report in a medical journal of his more noteworthy experiences in extracting these objects.

“Patients are embarrassed and don’t have anyone they can talk to,” he tells Shukan Jitsuwa. “Doctors are bound by medical ethics to maintain confidentiality, so not much of what they see in the course of their work gets disseminated to the public at large. But the fact is, quite a few people engage in what could be described as foolhardy activities.”

Accidents involving the male organ, for example, generally fall under one of two possible categories. The first occurs when the penis is inserted into a ring or hole from which it cannot be extracted. The other involves objects that become jammed into the urethra.

“In either situation, if left untreated, it can cause the penis to putrefy,” says Matsushima, who relates the case of one patient who came to him in agony from a metal band bound tightly around his member.

“I couldn’t get it off with an ordinary surgical tool,” he relates. “So I wound up using a diamond cutter used by fire department rescue teams. He was lucky; a smaller clinic might not have had any recourse but to …,” he makes a cutting gesture with an open hand.

So many mishaps have occurred due to experimental masturbation that Dr. Minoru Ikeda, operator of a urology clinic in rural Kumamoto Prefecture posts advice on his Web site to disseminate correct information about ED (erectile dysfunction) and other matters related to sex.

“Thanks to adult videos, more people are getting their hands on vaginal speculums to use as sex tools,” says Ikeda. “There are also sites on the Web that introduce self-stimulation by insertion of objects into the urethra. This is highly unadvisable,” he says, shaking his head.

Most jammed objects can be extracted by means of an endoscope and forceps, but some require greater effort.

“Some men fasten things to the root of their penis to keep them erect, and doze off to sleep with it still on. Some older men do the same thing to prevent bedwetting, but this can really cause serious problems. And allowing foreign objects to remain in the urethra can cause stones to form in the bladder. When we go in for surgery to remove the stones, that’s when the other objects turn up.”

Another specialist recites to Shukan Jitsuwa a litany of objects he’s removed from people’s apertures, including mini rotary vibrators, old used condoms, light bulbs, phallic-shaped vegetables, eggs, cigarette filters and dry cell batteries.

“A vagina should be kept clean,” he cautions. “If you start putting strange things in it, they might stay put. And this can cause all kinds of grief.”

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(The Mainichi Waiwai column ran online from April 19, 2001 – June 21, 2008. It was a much loved form of entertainment amongst foreigner in and outside of Japan. To any reader it was obviously not serious news, but it was a set of articles that portrayed quite well how the Japanese tabloids actually write about their own country. In 2008, a small number of Japanese people bought it to the attention of rival news groups that Mainichi was running an anti-Japan column on its website. With the bad publicity, Mainichi was forced to shut the page down, and take punitive measures against the journalists that were working on it, claiming that it was receiving opinions that were critical of the column, such as “its contents are too vulgar” and “the stories could cause Japanese people to be misunderstood abroad”. A perfect example of how Japanese consider what they write in their own script to be an acceptable secret code, that the rest of the world cant understand. When that same tabloid rubbish gets inconveniently translated to English to make light of some aspects of the Japanese people, it gets canned. Stippy.com finds this unacceptable, and will reproduce as much of the Waiwai content as possible in order to bring it once again to our computer screens for a good laugh. Of course we claim no credit for this content, and attribute it to it’s writers who were former Mainichi employees. Waiwai in its true and glorious form has been discontinued, but it’s legacy will live on at stippy.com for all to enjoy.)