Kancho: Another Reason To Be Weirded Out By Japan

Japan is commonly known to us in the west as the country that’s most like your little cousin that’s really in to making you think it has ADHD. The phrase “Lost In Translation” seems as though it were specifically created for the land of tactical rape. There’s just so much we in the west don’t get about them. For instance, did you know that there’s a playful little prank that friends pull on each other that involves having fingers spontaneously shoved in someone’s butt? It’s called Kancho, and it’s all the rage in Japan, just as it’s all the rage in particularly nasty western pornography.

Like the wedgie, Kancho is all about tormenting your friends with a forceful anal attack. Unlike a wedgie, however, the attack is all about making direct contact with the victim’s brown eye. So while with a wedgie you’re playfully splitting a person in half, starting from the anus, kancho is basically like giving someone an impromptu enema that replaces the cool stream of water entering their bowels with fingernails that probably should have been trimmed before they were crammed in to a soft, supple anus. Non-coincidentally, Kancho has its etymological roots in the Japanese word for enema, although it is commonly written in a character subset known as katakana to differentiate it from a medical enema, which is typically written in kanji.

But all etymological factoids aside, there’s still the fact that you can be standing in line to buy tickets to the latest Gackt concert, when all of a sudden you’re friend decides it’s time to make you feel just a little bit insecure about yourself.

One weird aspect of kancho – if Wikipedia is to be believed – is its level of popularity. Not only has the act been featured on such kid friendly shows as Naruto, but apparently, there’s a game show in Japan that puts celebrities on the street and has them randomly kancho strangers. By “celebrity” they probably mean “D-list,” because we can’t possibly imagine Japan as a land so desperately trying to be popular that even the A-Lister’s are putting their fingers in the butts of random people for some publicity. So we like to imagine that one day you can be hanging out in a park, and then have a Bronson Pinchot or Flavor Flav or Brett Michaels surprise you with mild anal rape.

This, of course, is something to keep in mind next time you’re hanging with the bros in Tokyo. Don’t allow your western preconceptions of masculinity get the better of you after a buddy performs a two-fingered poke on your butthole. While your Japanese friends will be laughing playfully, like members of Caligula’s personal orgy battalion, you should hold back your need to call them all gay and punch them in the face. Things are…different over there.