Oh My Facts

“Please retweet. I am offering my male genitals (full penis, testes, scrotum) as a meal for 100,000 yen…. I will prepare and cook as the buyer requests, at his chosen location.”

This was the tweet that started it all. Sugiyama, who calls himself an ‘asexual’, is a 22-year-old illustrator who aspires to be so devoid of sexual features that he will be able to publicly wear transparent clothing. To achieve his goal, the young man decided to remove all his genitalia. For the sake of argument, let’s just say you could somehow understand his wish, but what comes next is even more shocking. At first, he considered consuming his own genitals, but later decided to offer them up on Twitter, for ¥100,000 to the first person or group interested. He got six orders…

After his tweet went viral, Mao announced he was organizing a public banquet, in which he would cook and serve his own organs as per the request of his clients. Called “Ham Cybele – Century Banquet”, the event took place at the Asagaya Loft A event space, in the Suginami Ward of Tokyo. If you’re pondering the name of the event, Cybele is the name of an Anatolian goddess whose priests were all eunuchs, while “century” is a homophone for the Japanese word “genitals”. The day before the event, the artist tweeted “I’m starting to thaw them out” along with a very graphic photo. On April 13, a crowd of about 70 people showed up at the banquet location. One of the six buyers was a no-show, but the rest were ready to get what they had paid for.

Dressed as a cook, Mao Sugiyama sliced and cooked his own genitalia and served it to his curious customers. Calorie Lab, the website that broke the news in the US, thoroughly describes the look and taste of the ‘dishes’ and even has some photos of them. I’m not going to go into details here, but I can say the guest found them almost inedible. In order to be completely devoid of any sexual features, Sugiyama also removed his nipples and was planning on serving them as well, but after burning them with sodium hydroxide, there was apparently not much left to cook.

Before going through with the banquet, the Japanese illustrator had himself tested for sexual diseases. The five people crazy enough to eat his genitalia also had to sign a waver releasing Sugiyama and the organizers of the event from any liability arising from the consumption of human genitals. Since the whole event, Sugiyama has been constantly defending his actions and answering questions on Twitter. He’s talking about his operation, his decision and the corset he’s currently wearing to help maintain an androgynous shape as his female hormone therapy progresses.

After news of this bizarre event became popular in Japan, the Tokyo police was apparently notified by concerned citizens, but they were unable to pursue the matter because there is no law against cannibalism in Japan.