Ear hygiene is serious business in Japan. From cute designer mimikaki cleaning tools to high-tech endoscopic pickers, an entire industry has sprung up around sterilizing the ear canal. Weird as it might sound to foreigners, the ear-cleaning mania also has its roots in culture. Having someone else clean your ears is taken as a sign of intimacy, showing that you'd trust another person enough to allow them to stick foreign objects into your head.

It's not surprising then, that businesses have also sought to cater to customers whose ear-sanitation needs are rooted more in social contact than pure hygiene, with ear-cleaning salons and parlors offering customers the chance to lay their head on a pretty yukata-wearing lady's lap while she pick their ears and makes light conversation. That said, there's such a thing as meeting a customer's needs too well. Saitama city cops raided and shut down several "one-shot cleaning" parlors that were offering services extending far beyond simple earwax removal. One of the managers arrested ran similar outfits in different wards of the city

The whole ear-cleaning thing was unknown to me as I played the Steambot Chronicles PS2 game many years ago, so you can imagine how off-put I was when I found that one of the most romantic actions you can take while dating an NPC is to ask them to clean your ears. Maybe I was jealous, because I go into coughing fits whenever I clean my ears (some kind of tickle reaction), so having this whole thing done to me would probably be dangerous.

Hit the jump for a video of one of the ear-cleaning salons in action. Not the ones they shut down of course.

[Tokyo Reporter via 3yen]