One of my favorite pastimes, besides donating 40 hours of my life to FF: Crisis Core, is analyzing cultural nuances in stories about porn, and this one hit the jackpot. First up in the disturbingly detailed account of one woman's journey to make money by planting hidden cameras in women's changing rooms: the word for peeping or spying via technology, tousatsu (tosatsu minus the long vowel, as romanized by the JT, means "slaughter," but I'm not touching that particular porn-culture area with any length of pole).

You gotta hand it to Yuko Inoue, who got into the underground biz when a creepy ex-boyfriend recruited her to get into a locker room with a peep-o-matic; she instantly recognized the potential of people who'll pay 100,000 yen for two hours of unaware public nudity, cut ties with the cheating cheapskate and went into business for herself. If I sound admiring, it's because I'm broke, and reading about the people online willing to pay the equivalent of thousands of dollars for very little effort on your part sounds better than those "Work at home for $50,000 a week!!!!!" Craigslist ads.

Unlike skeevy work-at-home scams, this business is real, and generates far too much money from guys - and girls, I'm legally obligated to suppose - who find it tastier than nude women who know they're on camera. There's a certain degree of inevitability here, because who, at the end of the day, really doesn't like boobs? I do have to wonder, though, about the appeal of nudity that gets its biggest kick from a sense of violation, if you will--customers who don't mind being unclothed in front of a few other women is one thing, but paying out the nose to peep at women who don't know you're seeing them after the fact, can't protest, are totally anonymous AND are just going about their business instead of playing with each other/vegetables/livestock? That's creepier than actual porn: again, at least most porn participants know the camera's there and are being compensated.

Come to think of it, does anyone here enjoy the idea of secretly watching women go to the bathroom? (Hint: Don't answer that.) Is it a Japanese thing, or is modern society so saturated with run-of-the-mill prepackaged nudity that off-the-cuff "stolen" voyeurism is the next logical step?