He Designs Sex Toys to Look Discreet and Dignified, Because He Wants a Business That "Faces Desire Without Shame"

"Sexual desire, like appetite, should be something anyone can enjoy openly. It shouldn't be obscene," says company president Koichi Matsumoto.

In March 2005, Koichi Matsumoto founded Tenga Co., Ltd., a Japanese company that made sex toys for men. In its first year, the product sold 1.7 million units in Japan. Tenga's toys for men and women have now sold more than 50 million units in 41 countries, making it one of the most recognizable adult-toy brands in Japan.

Matsumoto gave an exclusive interview to QDaily at the Swissôtel Grand Shanghai, near Jing'an Temple. In the interview area, a coffee table between two red sofas was covered with Tenga products for men and women.

Because everything had to go through an interpreter, Matsumoto spoke slowly. He seemed to weigh each word, so that what came out sounded restrained and calm.

Matsumoto was born in Shizuoka Prefecture in 1967. Before he got into sex toys, he spent more than a decade around cars. He graduated from a vocational auto-repair school at 20, just as Japan's bubble economy peaked, and became a mechanic who customized luxury cars for rich clients — Porsches, Mercedes-Benzes, Ferraris, Lamborghinis. Later he moved to classic cars, taking them apart piece by piece, putting them back together, and handing them back to their owners. He loved the work: "It meant I was making something, and then giving the thing I'd made to a customer," he says.

The good years were short. He had been restoring classic cars for barely six months when the company hit a cash crisis. For the next six months he was paid nothing, and the money he had left barely covered food and a roof. It was then, he says, that he discovered a truth: "appetite and sexual desire are the two most basic human needs."

The insight did not turn his life around. He stayed at the classic-car shop a while longer, then, deep in debt and broke, had no choice but to switch to selling cars.

The new job changed things immediately. As his income recovered, Matsumoto began wondering whether he could make something of his own to sell. "I went to a lot of places looking for ideas — appliance stores, household-goods stores, auto-parts shops," he says. Then one day he walked into a sex shop, and the men's products packed onto the shelves left him with one strong impression: masturbation is something obscene.

"I asked ten friends of mine, and every one of them had masturbated. So the act is actually very common, very ordinary. But this shop displayed these products as something special and set apart, which didn't feel good at all. On top of that, the packaging carried no company name, no QR code, no contact information. All of that bothered me," Matsumoto says.

Fifteen minutes passed between the flash of an idea and the decision. What he wanted to do was simple, he says: take this apparently shameful "underground product" and put it out in the open, so that buying a sex toy would be as unremarkable as buying an iPhone, a television, or a lipstick. That is why he named the product Tenga — the Roman-letter spelling of the Japanese pronunciation of a word meaning "elegant."

Tenga started on 10 million yen that Matsumoto and his wife had saved. He quit selling and repairing cars and put himself full-time into developing the cup.

Tenga's first product was a disposable masturbation cup for men. It is still on sale, and it is still the brand's best seller. (In the interview Matsumoto said the disposable version sells better in Japan, while in China the reusable one does.)

The classic Tenga Cup has two parts: a red plastic shell on the outside and white silicone within. Like most new inventions, the design was settled only after countless attempts. The hardest part of developing it, Matsumoto says, was "balancing looks and function."

He picked up a Tenga Cup from the products in front of him and explained it phrase by phrase, seeming to hunt for the right words: "A masturbation cup is usually designed as a straight cylinder. That does look very good. But to get a snug feel, and to make it easy to hold — after repeated testing, we ended up making the middle of the cup's outer profile curve inward."

In a 2007 interview with Forbes, Matsumoto mentioned that in the early days he did product development at home. The article put it this way: "Sometimes he had to resort to Viagra," he admitted with a laugh.

According to a report by the Japanese outlet ITmedia, Tenga's founding team also included Masanobu Sato, who joined Matsumoto in December 2005. Sato won the World Masturbate-a-thon two years running, in 2008 and 2009, masturbating with Tenga products for more than nine hours straight.

Unlike the lifelike, true-to-anatomy toys people tend to picture, Matsumoto's designs are conspicuously discreet: a plastic cylinder with a curved profile, silver and red stripes on the shell, the word Tenga printed across it — so discreet that anyone who doesn't know the brand cannot tell at a glance what it is for. That restraint is Matsumoto's way of making the purchase of a sex toy an ordinary, unembarrassed act, and it holds for the later cups, with their more elaborate functions, as much as for iroha, the women's line launched in 2011.

That was not enough on its own. Matsumoto decided Tenga's products had to keep striking people as novel and fun, so that seeing one made you want to buy it. So he and his design team kept developing new kinds of cups.

The 3D cup, launched in 2012, was a set of five white silicone cylinders that looked like 3D-printed architectural models. Their textured surfaces suggested small sculptures rather than sex toys. In use, a man turns one of the soft white tubes inside out through the hole in the middle; the textures, now on the inner wall, produce different sensations and help him reach pleasure.

The 3D cup went on to win a Red Dot Design Award in Germany in 2012 — the first time the prize had gone to a sex toy for men. The same year, the Tiani™ couples' toy from the Swedish company LELO also took a Red Dot product design award.

A Tenga product had in fact been shortlisted as early as 2006 for the Good Design Award, Japan's most important industrial-design prize, only for the organizing committee to disqualify it in the second round. One judge called it an "inappropriate" product.

"Tenga is a manufacturing company. I am very disappointed by this result, but it will not change Tenga's original commitment to manufacturing," Matsumoto wrote in response on Tenga's official blog.

In the years that followed, Tenga kept looking for ways to present itself as a consumer-goods company "no different from any other household product." That included counterfeit verification and after-sales service. Customers who bought a Tenga product through an authorized channel could go back to the seller's online store for an exchange or a refund if they felt any discomfort using it, or found it damaged.

Because sex-toy makers are not allowed to run television commercials, Tenga put out a wide range of spin-offs in Japan instead: TengaGirl, a cartoon character for each cup; its own animated series; product placement in Japanese TV dramas and films; and its own merchandise — mugs, T-shirts, hats.

In Japan, besides selling online, Tenga sells mostly through physical stores — but not sex shops. It is stocked in convenience stores, drugstores, and mainstream general-goods retailers such as the discount chain Don Quijote.

China has gone a little differently. In Matsumoto's words, the brand's early years in the Chinese market were mostly about "building a relationship and mutual trust with consumers." But given the category, Tenga's arrival in China can only be described as silent.

Tenga entered the Chinese market officially in 2011. It never advertised at all, selling mainly at wholesale to China's big sex-toy websites, upscale supermarkets, pharmacies and similar channels.

In 2012 it quietly opened an official store on Tmall, its only channel selling directly to Chinese consumers. Matsumoto thinks online sales matter more than stores in China, because "we've found that a lot of physical stores sell fakes," while on e-commerce platforms "it's easier to sell genuine goods with anti-counterfeiting marks."

Fakes aside, if you search "masturbation cup" on Taobao, you will have trouble finding a Tenga product in the first five pages. This finely made, almost sculptural object is buried under a flood of products promising "highly realistic," "electric heating," "3D effects" and "background sound." Matsumoto insists that being open and aboveboard is what a good sex toy needs. But this is a need everyone has and most people cannot admit to, and "hidden and shameful" is itself, sometimes, a way of stoking desire.

Not until November 11, 2016, did Tenga open its first directly operated store, on Wenhui Road in the Songjiang University Town area of Shanghai.

The shop is hidden on the second floor of a street-front building, under the name "All-Out Game." You are inside it only after finding the easy-to-miss entrance and climbing the stairs. It carries everything Tenga makes apart from a few limited editions, and unlike the Tmall store it also sells the brand's merchandise. "The reusable cup is our best seller online," a shop assistant said. "The women's products sell well too. They're not only sex toys — the vibration mechanism is similar, so as long as you keep them clean, they work as beauty and massage devices for the face and neck."

"We actually wanted to open near a science and engineering university, where there are more male students," the assistant added. "But then we thought about the number of international students around the foreign languages university and the foreign trade university, and the more open atmosphere there, so in the end we opened here."

Even so, the shop felt quiet. In the hour the assistant spent being interviewed, no other customer came in. He said the store sells "three or four cups a day on average." Couples come in together; so do young women who stand outside murmuring for a long time before cautiously climbing the stairs to look.

On October 14, Tenga held a press conference in Shanghai and ran a one-day pop-up where its products were displayed but not sold. About 1,400 curious visitors came through — some to see what it was all about, some fans of the brand who came on purpose.

"I've always thought Tenga's products are beautifully designed, so I keep collecting its T-shirts and other merchandise," a visitor who goes by the handle Sato Ichigo told QDaily.

Matsumoto said in the interview that the company's recent market research in China showed that 17% of Chinese consumers now recognize the brand. That has given it the confidence to promote and expand further in China; it is preparing to open stores in Guangzhou and Shanghai.

"Tenga is 12 years old now, and you could say half of what we expected has happened and half has not," Matsumoto said at the end of the interview. "The half that happened is that we sell in more than 40 countries. But those markets differ. Every time, we have to bring a new set of values into a market, and some markets accept those values easily, while others have not accepted them well at all."

Cover image from Tenga Global; images without a credit were provided by Tenga.