Aroused Man Does the Unthinkable With a Turnip

The Japanese have historically had a…different view on sex from the Western, Judeo-Christian view. But have you ever wondered what the ancient Japanese thought about gooning? Did masturbation happen a lot? Were they ashamed of it? Did they have favorite methods for it?

Well, to be honest, I can’t answer that, but I do know of a story that suggests that, yes, the ancient Japanese pleasured themselves, and they weren’t particularly shy about it.

This story comes from a collection known as the Konjaku Monogatari Shu 今昔物語集, a collection of folktales compiled in the mid to late Heian period by an unknown person. This story is specifically from the 26th “scroll” and is the second story on said scroll. It tells the story of a nobleman heading out into the countryside from the capital of Heian for some unspecified reason.

On the road, he suddenly gets hornier than a horny toad blowing a horn but not having any women nearby to sate his lust, he improvises. He enters a vegetable patch on the other side of a fence not far from a large house, finds a sizable turnip, bores a hole into it and then…well, the story isn’t exactly detailed here, but it doesn’t need to be.

Probably realizing that cream-filled turnips likely won’t be very appetizing for the buying public, he tosses the turnip aside and continues on his way.

Fast forward an hour or two and some servant women are out in the very same garden harvesting vegetables, when an innocent young maiden happens upon, wouldn’t you know it, a really big turnip with a mysterious hole.

Finding this amusing she devours this turnip and, long story short, she mysteriously becomes pregnant and gives birth 9 months later to a healthy baby boy, because that’s where babies come from, kids.

Fast forward again a few years later, and the lustful lad is on his way back to the capital from the countryside with a group of friends when he passes by the very same fence, vegetable patch and house from before and, feeling like it would be amusing to tell his bros, he very rambunctiously relates to them his story about his vegetable venture in order to get a laugh out of them.

While the story eventually ends with this man meeting his unexpected son and properly marrying the girl that he got pregnant by way of turnip, the interesting thing about this story is how nonchalantly this man not only goons with a turnip but also how openly he admits to doing it among his friends and even to his future mother in law who asks him about it after overhearing him blithely blathering on about his “turnip time.”

While it’s quite unlikely that this story is true, (I mean people willingly eating raw turnips? Absolutely ludicrous, who even does that?) it does offer a glimpse into how the people of Heian Japan thought about getting yourself off with vegetables, and no one seems particularly surprised or bothered by it.

Quite the contrary, the main character thinks it’s a perfectly reasonable topic to announce loudly in front of his friends and all the people he can clearly see working the vegetable patch just on the other side of a small fence.

We learn two things from this story: number one, the ancient Japanese felt little embarrassment about pleasuring themselves in unconventional ways, and likely even less about pleasuring themselves in much more normal ways. And number two, don’t go randomly eating vegetables with mysterious holes in them and if you somehow just can’t keep from doing that, then please at least stop when you realize that the turnip has filling.

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This is a guest post from Tales of Dawn and Dusk! Check out his video on it here: