Please retweet. I am offering my male genitals (full penis, testes, scrotum) as a meal for 100,000 yen…. I will prepare and cook as the buyer requests, at his chosen location.

On Sunday, April 13, 2012, Tokyo illustrator Mao Sugiyama (who goes by the nickname “HC”), publicly seasoned ond braised his own genitals on a portable gas cartridge burner, and then served them to five eager diners who each paid about $250 for the meal (a sixth was a no-show). The genitals had been returned to the asexual Sugiyama, frozen and double-bagged in plastic, following elective genital removal surgery (“gender nullification”) on his 22nd birthday on March 31.

After initially considering eating them himself, Sugiyama offered the meal on Twitter in mid-April to the first person willing to pay 100,000 yen (about $1,250). But after the notoriety that his tweet caused, he organized a public banquet, dubbed “Ham Cybele — Century Banquet,” at the “Asagaya Loft A” event space in the Suginami Ward of Tokyo. Century in Japanese is a homophone for the Japanese word for genitals; “Ham Cybele” refers to the Anatolian mother goddess, prefixed with an appropriate word for tough meat to create a phrase whose initials match Sugiyama’s artist name of HC.

The banquet

The day before the event Sugiyama tweeted, “I’m starting to thaw them out,” and posted a photo. On the day of the event a crowd of about 70 mostly twenty-somethings gathered, five to a table, to listen to a piano recital and panel discussion before the dinner.

Although only five servings of the genitals were available, the other diners were served alternate beef- and crocodile-based dishes, with additional items available for purchase, including rice, cream cheese and crackers, strawberry parfaits, waffles with blueberry sauce, grape juice, and milk. The cooking was done by Sugiyama himself, dressed as a chef, under the supervision of a licensed food preparation specialist.

The diners

The five genital eaters comprised a 32-year-old male manga artist (there for “research”), a 30-year-old white-collar couple (who were “curious”), an attractive 22-year-old woman (who wondered how it would feel), and 29-year-old event planner Shigenobu M. [last name redacted], who tweeted before the event, “It’s a once in a lifetime chance, so I decided on the spur of the moment to do it.” Shigenobu M. posted a detailed blog post on April 14 after the banquet, including about 20 photographs (the source of the photos in the original version of this article). He boasted on Twitter that he was getting twice the traffic he’d gotten when his blog was once profiled on prime-time Japanese television. But on May 19 he suddenly deleted the post and replaced it with a new post explaining that the removal was due to privacy considerations. (Sugiyama himself had linked to and seemed to endorse the blog post.)

Diners were required to sign a waiver releasing Sugiyama and the event organizers from any liability from the consumption of the genitals. Sugiyama stated that before his operation he had been tested to be free of any venerial diseases (although during the panel discussion he admitted that he had gone on a one-month sex binge with anonymous internet partners just to make sure that he wouldn’t regret the operation.) He stated that he had not yet started receiving female hormone therapy at the time of the operation. He also added that the pre-severed penis could attain an erect length of 16.1 cm (about 6.3 inches).

The entrée

Close-up photos of the braised genitals showed a sliced penis shaft with clearly visible corpora cavernous and uretha, a sliced testical with the look and texture of sea urchin sushi, and scrotal skin with about 3 mm of pubic hair growth. Rounding out the presentation the chef garnished the genitals with button mushrooms and Italian parsley.

Sugiyama told the tense but giggly crowd during the pre-dinner interview that he would be contributing his genital recipes to the Japanese recipe website CookPad. After CalorieLab’s coverage of the event was picked up by a wire service and went viral a photo from Sugiyama’s Twitter stream of two large, meaty balls together on a plate were misidentified by some websites as his testicles. They were actually beef steak cubes that Sugiyama used to develop his recipe his recipe before the real event. And on June 6 Sugiyama tweeted that a Reuters photojournalist bought him some variety meat at the market in order to stage a recreation of his pre-event cooking rehearsals, although we have not seen any such photos materialize.

Sugiyama had also intended to include his nipples on the menu, but his attempt to burn them off with sodium hydroxide did not result in anything usable. (His nipple areas and some spots surrounding them where the lye spilled have now healed into smooth scar tissue. He told the dubious dermatologist and plastic surgeon that he consulted that he had a “work accident.” He footnoted this section of the transcript of his Ham Cybele talk with an assurance that he properly pays into the national health insurance program, which covers 70 percent of medical expenses, but we’re pretty sure it doesn’t cover nipple removal accidents any more than it covers gender nullification surgery.)

Delicious?

What was the verdict by the eaters? According to the deleted blog post by Shigenobu M., the hard, rubbery penis root almost bent his fork, and he spit it out after a few chews. The only taste was of the red wine that it had been pre-stewed in. The scrotum was surprisingly even harder and more rubbery than the penis, but tasteless. (Shigenobu M. didn’t mention the pubic hair.) The testicles were hard on the outside, soft and glutinous in the middle, with a fishy or gamey taste. One of Shigenobu M.’s friends in attendance asked for a piece of the penis and ate it, but after the event became distraught and expressed regret that he had lost his common sense in the heat of the moment.

A commenter to our original article with culinary expertise recommended that tough organ meats be soaked in milk, then cooked sous vide at 50 degrees Celsius for 8 hours in a vacuum; they’ll become spoon-soft, he said. And Managing Culinary Director of Serious Eats J. Kenji Lopez-Alt in an e-mail to CalorieLab wrote, “The first thought that entered my mind when I read your article was the chef didn’t cook it right. What a waste of a perfectly good penis! Penis is pretty tough and needs to be slow cooked, either sous-vide or in a braise. Testicles need to be cleaned, washed, membrame removed, then very gently cooked so they retain their soft, creamy texture. Check out some of Chichi Wang’s ‘Nasty Bits’ columns on Serious Eats. She cooks both testicles and penis.”

Japanese media coverage and legal ramifications

Shortly after the event broke on the Japanese Twittersphere a spokesman for the Suginami police told CalorieLab that they had received inquiries and complaints from concerned citizens, but that they would not be getting involved because they considered it a case of cannibalism, which is not in itself illegal in Japan (nor is it in the United States, but it is outlawed in the U.K.). The spokesman nevertheless said, “We’re going to talk to the people at Asagaya Loft A and ask them what is going on and why they hosted such an event.”

On June 1, two weeks after CalorieLab’s report, the Japanese media finally discovered the story. Japanese tabloid website Zakzak reported that, at the behest of the Suginami police the Suginami health department conducted an on-site inspection of Asagaya Loft A. Although the venue is primarily used for live music, it also has a license for food service. The proprietor explained to the health inspectors that the venue was rented for the purpose of putting on a show, that the event was private and closed to the general public, and that none of the venue’s food preparation equipment, utensils or kitchen facilities were used. The health department issued a warning to the venue’s proprietor not to allow food service activities to be done outside the kitchen area in the future. In addition, the health department said it was considering drafting administrative guidance on the issue. Zakzak also spoke to former public prosecutor Masaru Wakasa, who said that the event might also have violated obscenity laws if the genitals, despite their severed state, were still clearly recognizable as genitals to the attendees.

The same day as the Zakzak report Japanese wire service Kyodo News moved a short article about the event quoting a Suginami Ward official that they do not permit this sort of thing and are looking into it in consultation with the police. The next day the number 2 newspaper in Japan, the Asahi Shinbun, published a short item quoting Suginami Mayor Tanaka as calling the event “deplorable.” The same day the tabloidy Sankei Sports afternoon sports newspaper said that L’Affair Sugiyama’s “grotesqueness recalls the Sada Abe incident,” the inspiration for Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, and several other print, web, and television outlets began speculating that the mothballed criminal investigation might be reopened. On this day Sugiyama was interviewed by the police about the incident; he had not retained an attorney at that point. On Twitter Sugiyama began to come across as extremely stressed out.

On June 5 Zakzak reported on an e-mail it received from Sugiyama attempting to explain things. Sugiyama wrote of two years of planning for the event, conceived of as an artistic statement. Sugiyama wrote that as an artist he had no need of genitals to reach his life goals. Sugiyama said he received an appearance fee of 100,000 yen ($1,250). Sugiyama said that he tried his recipes on several sets of cow and pig genitals that he obtained (which may revive the suspicion that this was a hoax for some people), and that he did “image training” to train himself to eat genitals by eating dozens of bananas ?with a knife and fork (apparently he sampled his own cooking at the event). Sugiyama told Zakzak that one of the benefits of his operation is that he no longer has to worry about getting drunk and inadvertently getting arrested for indecent exposure, which may have been a joke. (Sugiyama denied that he gave any domestic Japanese media “interviews,” but this e-mail rang true and was largely confirmed by the “official report” manifest that Sugiyama later published.)

On June 6 J-Cast News ran a long, mostly accurate, non-tabloidy take on the event, including a run-down on the widespread, embarrassing-to-Japan overseas coverage (although they credited the initial breaking of the story to the Huffington Post, rather than to CalorieLab).

Meanwhile Mayor Ryo Tanaka of Suginami Ward, the Tokyo city in which Asagaya Loft A is located, was getting more and more irate about the situation, pressuring the police and other authorities to do something. What the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department finally came up with was charging Sugiyama, and three others involved in the event, with indecent exposure, on the theory that he exposed his genitals, albeit separated from his body and braised in red wine. Sugiyama tweeted about the new approach by police:

A new detective was put in charge of investigating Ham Cybele. He’s not pursuing the the facts related to the concerns of the health and food safety authorities, who had contacted the police after citizens made inquiries after reading reports in gossipy tabloids. Rather, he’s turned his attention to investigating me on suspicion of exhibiting obscene materials, and to that end he’s pressuring me to cooperate in preparing a document of confession to the violation of obscenity laws.

If he sees his job as expanding the police department’s power and looking at this case simply as the stripped-down facts, ignoring the context, and all he wants is for me to sign a bare-bones confession of the facts for the use of prosecutors without any explanation of the circumstances, then it looks like I’ll have to retain an attorney in order to protect not only myself, but to put forward the the whole truth of the situation, since the police are acting no differently than the contemptible mass media.

Unable to extract a confession, police forwarded the results of their investigation to prosecutors on September 18. A charge of indecent exposure could have landed Sugiyama and the others in jail for up to two years, with substantial fines to boot. The months dragged on, the incident fell out of the news, and Mayor Tanaka calmed down and moved on to other issues. Japanese prosecutors have a very high conviction rate, and they keep it that way by not pursuing iffy cases. Everyone “exposed” to the “indecency” was attending a private function and knew what to expect. The matter was quietly dropped in Februay, 2013, and Mao Sugiyama was finally able to relax.

Gender nullification

One of the confusing aspects of this case to many observers was the concept of gender nullification. Most people are familiar with transgender women and transgender men, and perhaps even congenital intersex cases, where both male and female or ambiguous genitalia are present. But where does Mao Sugiyama fall in this spectrum? He self-identifies as asexual (we have chosen to use the pronoun “he” throughout this article), or “X gender,” with no sexual feelings, attraction, or urges. As an asexual and an artist, Sugiyama felt he had not use for genitals.

What does an X gender person do in Japan to get rid of his genitals? There are five university hospitals in Japan that perform sex reassignment surgery. They follow a protocol that requires that surgeons work in tandem with psychologists and an ethics panel. The would-be male-to-female patient often has to live for a year full-time in the role of the desired sex before receiving hormone therapy and then for another couple of years before receiving surgery, just to make sure the patient can cope with the reality of his choice. Asexual nullification surgery falls outside these established guidelines. Most Japanese seeking a quick and inexpensive, no-questions-asked operation travel to Thailand, but some patients are uneasy about using a non-Japanese surgeon, and there have been stories of antibiotic resistant bacteria outbreaks. These patients have the option of going to one of a few private clinics in Japan. The first such clinic in Japan was operated by the late Dr. Koji Wada, whose first patient was Japanese entertainer Ai Haruna.

Mao Sugiyama has not publicly revealed where his surgery took place, but an investigation by CalorieLab based on scraps of information from Sugiyama’s Twitter feed around the time of the operation led us to a clinic in a small city on the scenic Sea of Japan coast of western Honshu where a sole practitioner cosmetic surgeon, Dr. S., had been performing various sex reassignment surgeries for a year or two after studying the procedures used at a nearby university hospital gender clinic as well as by Thai surgeon Dr. Sanguan Kunaporn and the late Dr. Wada. Unlike the university hospitals, Dr. S. was willing and eager to perform MTX (male-to-X) surgeries. When CalorieLab contacted Mao Sugiyama with Dr. S’s name, his reply implicitly confirmed our guess.

On his blog Dr. S. recounts a trip to the Philippines in 1999 while working on staff at a plastic surgery clinic in Yokohama. “I actually met a 14-year-old boy who I felt was intersex, neither male nor female.” Speaking to the locals he heard that in some parts of the Philippines students are classified from elementary school into three sexes, male, female, and the “third sex.”

At his own clinic he met with men who lived outwardly as men, but had feminine mannerisms and ways of speaking. They were not gay, nor did they want to become women. “They do not internally recognize themselves as men … but rather they live as X, cross gender, neither man nor woman … We would call this a third sex.”

After first blogging about X gender patients in January, 2011, Dr. S. received many inquiries about non-traditional sex reassignment surgery, and the number of such patients began to outstrip his traditional male-to-female sex reassignment patients. Rather than having a simple desire to be turned into a simulacrum of an anatomical woman, such patients have unusual requests that most gender clinics are reluctant to accommodate.

“I recognized anew the importance of made-to-order medical treatment in sex reassignment surgery, such as not creating a vagina or leaving the penis intact while also creating a vagina, rather than uniformly changing all genitals from one sex to the other just because that’s the way it’s usually been done in gender identity disorder cases.”

Dr. S. was internet savvy and made it easy for potential patients. On his website were consent forms (regular and parental, for minors), as well as a detailed, transparent, a la carte price list:

• Castration: ¥300,000 (add ¥100,000 for scrotum removal)
• Scrotum removal (a la carte): ¥200,000
• Castration, scrotum removal, simple penis amputation at the base: ¥710,000
• Penis amputation: ¥510,000
• Package deal of castration, scrotum removal, deep penile root removal, pudental cleft creation, and female-style urethra rerouting: ¥960,000
• The works (Castration, deep penile root removal, creation of female external genitalia and clitoris, and female-style urethra rerouting): ¥1,300,000
• Vagina (a la carte): Price ranges from ¥400,000 to ¥1,000,000, depending on how aggressive the surgery is, and jumps to ¥1,500,000 if a portion of the large intestine must be used
• Labia major, labia minora, and clitoris: These usually are not done alone, so a la carte prices are not established; consult for details
• Breast implants: Currently 30 percent off, ranging from ¥350,000 to ¥480,000, with additional breast-related services also available
• Female hormones: Various prices
• Artificial testicle implant: ¥180,000 per testicle

Dr. S. accepted cash, debit card, and several types of credit card, as well as partnering with a third-party medical loan company that would finance operations for anyone, including teens, students, and non-working housewives.

A little over a year after his MTX business began to take off, at the end of March, 2012, Dr. S. operated on a patient who would bring him lasting notoriety, 22-year-old Mao Sugiyama. Mao’s parents may have had an inkling of what was to come: Mao is a name given to both girls and boys in Japan.

The talented young illustrator from Tokyo, who dressed in an androgynous manner, peppered his Twitter stream with literary and artistic allusions, and professed to be asexual, came to Dr. S. to be made “tsuru-tsuru” down there, smooth and shiny. This itself was not new to the surgeon. Dr. S. had blogged about “men who want to become intersex because although they do not want to be women they loathe maleness,” and “who feel a sense of incongruity about the things hanging in their crotch.”

On Mao Sugiyama’s 22nd birthday, Dr. S. and his staff fulfilled Sugiyama’s wishes, and a few days later Sugiyama was returning home with a package of frozen medical waste in his luggage. He tweeted that the procedure cost him about ¥1 million (about $12,500).

Pictures, please, and journalistic lessons

CalorieLab’s initial report on Ham Cybele included many photographs, mostly from Shigenobu M.’s blog post. By the time that other media and bloggers discovered the story, three weeks had passed since Shigenobu M. had taken down his post and photographs, but we had grabbed them just before that happened. We decided to remove the photos for various reasons: They made the story much more lurid and graphic than our normal readership expects; we didn’t own the copyrights and the owner, Shigenobu M. obviously didn’t want the photos out there; and finally, one more thing: The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department asked us very politely (“It would be really appreciated … Thank you for your kind cooperation.”) to delete the article because it was “against the public order and morals in Japan.” The laws for obscenity, defamation, and privacy differ in Japan, and with this added to the other factors mentioned, we decided we were more comfortable in deleting the post for a while, later updating and restoring it without photos and with anonymized names, other than that of Mao Sugiyama, who had no problems with the article and linked to it with praise from his website. (Sugiyama has since changed his name to the equally sexually indeterminant Yuma Hamasaqi and collaborated under that name with Chinese artist Lu Yang on her Uterus Man project.) If you want photographs we ask you to make use of Google Images, because during the time that we had the photos online several websites around the world downloaded them and posted them, which in turn have been posted by yet others.

It wasn’t just the photos that others acquired from us. Two weeks after we published the original version of this article, the Tokyo office of Agence France-Presse ran a story that repeated points from our article, many of which could only have been sourced from us because the original material had disappeared, without crediting us. You may recall Agence France-Presse as the outfit that used photos from freelance journalist Daniel Morel without his permission and sued him when he complained (a court later awarded Morel $1.2 million). Megan McArdle in an article on plagiarism described a “much lamented” but journalistically “legal” practice in which a smaller publication’s work is recreated by a larger publication, without credit: “[T]here is your story: same sources, same facts, different byline. One of its reporters has gone through your article and pulled the research reports it took you weeks to find, called all the sources you had to painstakingly develop, and fished pretty much the exact same quotes that you got through strategic questioning, then written it up as an ‘original story’ for their much larger readership, without ever mentioning your name.” That’s kind of what happened to us.

The originial tweet

[Please Retweet] I am offering my male genitals (full penis, testes, scrotum) as a meal for 100,000 yen [$1,250]. I’m Japanese. The organs were surgically removed at age 22. I was tested to be free of venereal diseases. The organs were of normal function. I was not receiving female hormone treatment. The length at full erection was 16.1 cm [6.3 inches]. First interested buyer will get them, or I will also consider selling to a group. Will prepare and cook as the buyer requests, at his chosen location. If you have questions, please contact me by DM or e-mail.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2012 and is filed under Japan Diet, Fitness, Food. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Permalink.