BY MEATMAN
There are songs that make you tap your feet.
There are songs that make you want to fuck.
There are songs about touching each other…
and then there’s songs about touching yourself.
Let’s rewind to 1980: Thatcher’s Britain. Reagan was warming up his B-movie war face. Punk had pissed itself into the mainstream. And suddenly here comes this twitchy, herky-jerky little new wave earworm with a riff like a pogo stick on meth:
🎵 “I think I’m turning Japanese, I think I’m turning Japanese, I really think so…”
Cue every uptight parent recoiling like someone just opened a SCREW magazine at the dinner table.
The band? The Vapors — a bunch of pasty British lads with just enough eyeliner and emotional damage to get airplay. The song? “Turning Japanese.” The meaning? Well… that’s where it gets slippery.
Rumors flew faster than a cum shot in zero gravity.
Was it about cultural fetishism?
Was it about an identity crisis?
Was it just catchy nonsense?
Nah.
It’s better than that: it’s about masturbation.
Specifically, the O-face.
More specifically, the racist, squint-eyed, vein-popping, teeth-clenching O-face.
You know, that face you make when you’re hammering the bishop hard enough to fog your own glasses, your face contorts—eyelids tighten, jaw clenches—and you start looking, well, “Japanese”, at least according to a 1980s British wanker with zero cultural sensitivity and a one-track mind.
Racist? Obviously.
Problematic? Without a doubt.
Accurate? Let’s just say… if you’ve ever looked in the mirror mid-stroke, you already know.
Now, to be fair, David Fenton, lead singer and alleged soloist-in-chief, has denied this theory harder than Pee Wee Herman in an adult theater. He’s claimed it’s about teenage angst, lost love, identity blah blah blah—whatever his publicist scribbled down after the BBC called HR.
But I’m not buying it.
Let’s look at the evidence:
That twitchy beat?
Pure anxiety jerk-off rhythm.
The lyrics?
“No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women.” That’s not rebellion. That’s a man out of lotion.
The obsession? He’s not missing her. He’s missing it — the grainy Polaroid she left behind, the one he’s been saluting twice daily until the corners curled.
Face it: this is not a love song.
It’s a stroke ballad.
It’s the official soundtrack of every horny teenager who ever discovered the joys of shame and privacy.
And honestly? That’s beautiful.
Because “Turning Japanese” isn’t about race. It’s about release.
It’s about that primal, lonely moment when the only thing holding you together is a death grip on your own dick and a half-dead AA battery in your cassette Walkman.
Do it enough, and your grandma might tell you you’ll go blind.
But your veteran grandpa?
He’ll lean over his lukewarm beer, scratch his stubble, and mutter,
“Keep that up, son… and you’ll turn Japanese.”
(Salute him. That man saw things.)
—MM
