Anton’s Fetifes Adventure - Chapter 1: Maria Nagai?
No, I’m sorry. This article does not, in fact, involve me meeting Maria Nagai. I know she’s in the thumbnail, but I’m afraid that little detail is due to me engaging in what’s known to comic fans as “Wolverine Publicity”. Just as Wolverine would get slapped on a Marvel Comics cover to boost sales of lagging titles (even if he did not actually appear in that issue of the book), so too have I just tricked you into clicking on this article by displaying Maria in all her callipygian glory. And yes, I know, her callipygian qualities are actually a matter of great controversy, as evidenced by the recent discussion in a previous article we published here, but leaving aside all comments of bigorexia and what hath man wrought, I hope, even if I have no pictures of Maria and myself side by side, the pics I have within this article will keep you all interested long enough for me to sell you on the actual contents of this article series.
You see, the whole reason I chose Maria and not some other JAV actress is that, after my wonderful night in SOD Land with June Lovejoy, June was impressed enough with my article on the establishment to invite me to write an article on the Fetish Festival (or Fetifes, as it’s more colloquially known), believing it deserved whatever publicity that our site could provide. I was certainly game for the idea, but I had one small reservation, which is that in order for me to write about Fetifes, and for me to justify a train ride and hotel stay to Tokyo to the big boss man on my monthly invoice, the festival would need to be JAV-related in some way, to which June replied that plenty of JAV stars show up regularly to the event, and said it was likely I could meet such big names as Ayaka Mochizuki (don’t know who that is), Mion Hazuki (may have heard the name but can’t recall a face), and Maria Nagai (oh snap yeah I know her!).
And yes, as you can see from the social media pics I’m displaying in this article, Maria Nagai has in fact gone to Fetifes before, and seems to have enjoyed herself quite a lot. I never got to meet Ayaka Mochizuki face to face, but that isn’t to say that she wasn’t at Fetifes this year. And as for Mion Hazuki, well… I’ll get to her when I get to her.
For now though, all you need to know is that Maria Nagai was a big reason why I got the go-ahead to do this article from on high. And while she ended up not being at this year’s Fetifes, she may end up at it next year. So in the future you may be getting an “I met Maria Nagai at the Fetish Festival!” article coming out from whomever they get to replace me when I leave.
So, uh, I guess the moral of this chapter of the story is that I’ve got to meet Maria Nagai at some point before my return to the States, so that I can finally post a thumbnail of the pair of us together. I don’t know if that’s at all possible. I know Maria is a very big name, and given how abysmal my chances are of meeting Mayuki Ito (who’s so A-list she gets to hold events in South Korea and Taiwan) or Ai Hongo (who charges 2-man-en for 10 seconds’ conversation with her), I don’t know how likely it is for me to see Maria in the rapidly shrinking time window I have. But hopefully I can make it in time. And hopefully that will please our readers to see.
永井マリアがフェチフェスに出るってよ🥺9/17(日)ですよ!皆さん! pic.twitter.com/D1hXLvEcWW
— MARIA-BLACK DIAMOND💎研究生(永井マリア) (@NAGAIMARIA1218) September 8, 2023
But leaving that aside, you all may be wondering just what is Fetifes? Well, basically, it’s pretty much what it says on the tin. It’s a Fetish Festival, wherein perverts of various shapes, sizes, and stripes can congregate, collaborate, and communicate in a safe environment. Think like an anime convention, except all the anime is smut and every t-shirt is of the ahegao variety. Okay, that’s not quite true. A lot of the t-shirts were of company names and logos, but since said companies all specialized in manufacturing some sort of smutty content, they weren’t exactly the sorts of shirts you could wear to work, if you know what I mean, unless you work specifically in the adult industry. Or you’re this guy, I guess. Anyways.
I genuinely did not know what to expect from the festival, since information is sparse and there aren’t a lot of photos of past events. This makes sense, given how most of the attendees would surely want to protect their privacy, but it also made it so that I was going in pretty much blind. But, since I was also going in without any stomach bugs or colds or late trains or any of the other various issues that have plagued me before in past events, I was okay with not knowing what to expect from the event. That made it easier for me to go in with an open mind.
The event started at 12:00, but press were supposed to show up at 11:30 to hand over their business cards in exchange for press badges, and I like to head towards my destination especially early in case I have trouble finding the location. So when I got to the address of the event at 11:00, I was surprised to find it already packed. A line had formed of people in various costumes that denoted the sorts of activities they were into, and when I presented my recently printed business card (fun fact, you can still find Kinko’s in this country, but that’s neither here nor there), I was given a badge and let in.
Once inside I was given a pamphlet with a layout of the event. They had rented out several floors of the building for use, but I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to go. Given how the event was still almost an hour from starting, I wasn’t sure where I was allowed and where was still off-limits to those who weren’t part of the event. Still, since I had a map with me, I figured the best course of action was to check out each floor and nose around until someone came to chastise me.
And so, trying my best to look like I knew what I was doing, I slid into the elevator alongside a batch of folks, and while we all crammed in like sardines I stretched my arm to press the button to the 6th floor.
Said floor was the highest floor of the event, and was filled with people setting up their booths. The 5th floor was largely the same, but on the 4th floor I found June! We exchanged pleasantries, they introduced me to their team (whose names I promptly forgot, which caused me no end of guilt and grief), and I let June and their crew get on with their business as I made my way down to the 3rd floor.
This floor seemed a bit odd, but for reasons I’ll get to later. At that point all I noticed was that this didn’t seem like a place to hang about, so I went down to the 2nd floor, which funnily enough was completely blocked off, prompting me to head down to the 1st floor (ground floor, for all you confused Commonwealth folks), back where I’d first started, which was a breath of familiarity, as, like the 4th, 5th, and 6th floor it was filled with vendors setting things up.
Of course, now I was faced with a slight dilemma. I still had a long time until the Fetish Festival began in earnest, and since all the heavy-lugging-of-objects part of the vendor setup was already finished, there didn’t seem to be much assistance I could lend anyone in preparing things. It looked like all that was left for me to do was find a nice corner to sit in and not bother anyone until noon rolled around, so I asked a staff member if there was a place for me to sit, to which they responded I could try the 3rd floor.
I was a bit worried about this. See, while the 2nd floor was completely cut off to people, the 3rd floor had plenty of people in it. They just were all staff, that floor being the tatami changing and rest room for all the vendors and organizers and such there. And since I was not staff, I wasn’t sure if I’d be allowed into the staff waiting room. Still, if a staff member had recommended the place to me, it couldn’t hurt to try.
So soon I found myself at the door to the staff room, face to face with a middle-aged woman with brown hair and glasses. I didn’t know who she was, but she had this bearing and gait that gave the impression of her being the baddest bitch in the room, so I figured once she gave me the go-ahead to enter and find a corner to sit down in, I was okay.
The floor was hot. Quite hot, in fact. I began to break out in a slight sweat. But, since this was where people changed clothes, such warmth made sense. The baddest bespectacled bitch in the room was gabbing away with everyone, it seemed that she knew every single staff member of the event. And despite being old enough to be my mater, she had the animated excitedness of a tot on candy. When someone blew up some tenga-shaped yoga “balls”, your one had soon mounted one of them and was bouncing up and down and giggling, smacking the rear of the bouncy ball and riding it like a rodeo cowgirl.
I texted June to ask if they knew who this person was, and from my description June said it sounded like someone named Mari Aoi. As if on cue I noticed one of this woman’s assistants had a t-shirt with her face on it and the name Mari written in katakana on it. I couldn’t tell if the kanji read Aoi (trying to decipher how to read a Japanese person’s name from kanji alone is largely a fool’s errand, given how many different ways you can write and read names), but I had a feeling June was right.
I also remembered then that Sade Satou, who knows the big boss man and has several of his videos hosted on our site, was supposed to be at Fetifes, but I didn’t know what he looked like. I asked June if they knew, and they responded that Sade-san had glasses and was often dressed in black. That gave me something to go on, so I asked a staff member if they knew where Sade-san was.
“Sure,” they grinned, and pointed towards a corner of the staff room where a video camera was set up, and a group of people were sitting at a table excitedly telling people how excited they were now that the Fetish Festival was starting.
“He’s filming the intro over there. The guy with the glasses and the black t-shirt.” There were three men with glasses and black t-shirts over there.
“Oh,” the staff member blinked in surprise, before laughing and realizing how vague that description was. “Yeah, sorry, the third one from the left.”
Alright, I grinned in thanks, and struck up a conversation with two ladies there as I waited for Sade-san to finish with his video. One of them was an absolutely gorgeous woman who came up over my shoulder (no mean feat, especially when one remembers she wasn’t wearing shoes), and the other was in charge of the Love Piece Club, of which she gave me a little booklet. Inside the booklet it said that LPC believed in sisterhood, and it proudly proclaims itself as the first and still the only feminist own sex toy shop in Tokyo since 1996. That may seem like an overly narrow superlative, but the basic gist I got from it and the rest of the booklet was that the LPC is a sex toy shop whose catalog is aimed specifically at women, selling toys and instruction manuals centered around women’s pleasure and women’s experiences, which sounds pretty groovy to me. After flipping through the booklet exchanged business cards with the LPC representative and the tall, beautiful staff member, before Sade-san finished his video, and I got to exchange pleasantries and cards with him as well.
“So, Sade-san,” I asked. “Which floor would you recommend?”
“Well,” Sade-san spoke softly, “The 6th floor is good.”
“Alright. 6th floor. Okay.”
“But,” Sade-san turned his head to one side, “The 5th floor is also good. And so’s the 4th floor. And the 1st floor. I… geez, they’re all great!”
And soon Sade-san and I were laughing, your man unable to put a single floor above the other in importance.
As the last of the people in front of the camera chanted “Yoi, start!” I checked my clock. It was now high noon. The sun had reached its peak, and the Fetish Festival could begin in earnest. With that, the prologue of my adventure was at an end, and the beginning was just commencing. But that, dear readers, is a story for the next article.
In the meantime, here are the social media links to the various people I ran into at this time. I hope you all will check them out and show them some love. And I’ll see you in the next one.
June Lovejoy (https://twitter.com/June__Lovejoy)
Mari Aoi (https://twitter.com/ryuryunoryu)
Sade Satou (https://twitter.com/sade_sato)
By Anton Algren @ June 2nd, 2024