The potato is a
versatile tuber, used as a pessary, contraceptive, and masturbatory aid by
women, although somehow it always manages to get stuck – at least according to
contemporary legend.
Sabine Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control
in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 72.
Many middle- and
upper-class educators, physicians, and social reformers suspected female
factory workers to be promiscuous and “undutiful.” Physicians who examined
female factory workers believed that many of them masturbated regularly. In
light of the lack of education among workers in general, they assumed that
there were more women in factories than among the upper and middle classes who
were prone to sexual indecencies. […]
In 1925, Hosoi
Wakizō, the author of The Sad History of
Factory Women (Jokō aishi), reported on women who had secretly taken short
pieces of pipe home from the factories and inserted them into their vaginas.
Others used potatoes for the same purpose and eventually had to see a doctor
because the potatoes could no longer be removed. Tall girls pressed their bodies
against the machines, thus sexually arousing themselves while working (Hosoi
1996 [1925]: 317). […]
Hosoi Wakizō had
been working in a factory since the age of thirteen and remained a worker and
socialist activist at a cotton spinning factory until his death at the age of
twenty-nine. In his book he wrote that female workers and a factory physician
with whom he was acquainted had told him these stories.
Hosoi Wakizō. 1996
(1925). Jokō aishi (The sad history
of factory women). Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.
Cf. Elissa Henken,
"Escalating Danger in Contemporary Legends." Western Folklore 61: 3&4 (Fall 2002): 271; Mariamne Whatley
& Elissa Henken, Did You Hear About
the Girl Who...? (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 137.