“Switching” The New Era of Vibrators
Director：(Ryohei Sasatani)
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Producer：(Shuji Takeoka)
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Language：Japanese
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SYNOPSIS
A documentary film about vibrators.
Here, we can hear ‘queer’ sounds at a room in Tokyo, Japan. A man is carving a piece of green paraffin. He is the only-a-few vibrator maker in Japan. The texture of his vibrators is very close to the real genitals. He says, “it’s a part of human body.”
A question comes to my mind. Is the vibrator a replacement of the genitals? What du the vibrators exist for? Is it for fulfilling the man’s domination? Is it made for the women’s masturbation?
People rarely talk about vibrators in their daily life. But now, a documentary on the world of vibrators is produced.
The theme of this documentary based on ‘the voices from the maker and the user’ and ‘the man and woman seen from the vibrators’ view’.
Director Biography
Born in 1986 and brought up in Kyoto, Japan. A typical last-born. Graduated from Doshisha University(Philosophy). Released a DVD ‘Pilgrimage to “Showa” Sacred Places’ on an independent film in 2007, which received excellent feedback. After that, he started to create magazines and promotion videos. After coming to Tokyo in 2008, he started to issue “Meicog Magazine” with a documentary DVD. Interested in pornos, ‘strange’ museum, vibrators, ‘otaku’, wax dolls, folk art, all of which are a little far from the main stream in Japanese society.
Director's Statement
(Frankly speaking) Fortunately, ‘Switching’ was screened at ‘Kansai Queer Film Festival’(Japan) in 2011. However, I did not refer to ‘LGBT people’ on this film. It refers only to the diversity of the gender between heterosexual men and women (sex dualism) in Japanese society. So I received a lot of criticisms from the gay group, and I’ve spent a hard time to make up my mind to join the Beijing Queer Film Festival this time. However, I believe that you could find how noticeable is the distance between the patriarchy which has been deeply set up in the Japanese people’s mind especially since the pre WWII periods and those ‘ordinary life’ which the female group is proposing now. In other words, those kinds of problems such as ‘how can the relationship between the majority group and the minority group be?” need to be argued either in Japan or China.
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