Privacy vs. Pride for a Grown Adult Getting Circumcised

The elevator going up to the third floor of the nondescript office building in front of Chiba Station was old. The doors closed so slowly after the third-floor button is pressed that I had to wonder if the maintenance work, and indeed if the whole thing will just stop working in its equally slow accent to the third floor that at some point, users will be trapped for hours. The building itself looked to be falling on hard times too, with unidentifiable companies of unknown business scopes occupying its equally unidentifiable office spaces.

But once I reached the third floor, a whole new world appeared. A bright reception desk, topped with the stylish logo of the clinic, was manned by a middle-aged man in a typical blue uniform of a medical practitioner. To the side of the reception desk was a long hallway with doors to both sides leading to small waiting rooms. No one was outside in the hallways, and staff members, once sure that the new visitor had his hands sanitized and temperature checked, ushered him to the closest available waiting room without meeting any other client in the hallway.

The emphasis on separating clients visually is intentional at this establishment. It is a cosmetic clinic for men looking to get circumcised, often as adults embarrassed by potentially disparaging remarks from their sexual partners. While hospitals offer services at a cheaper price, covered by medical insurance, to those who experience pains and other health-related troubles due to their uncircumcised genitals, cosmetic clinics like this one go much further, reconstructing the generals entirely under the knife to provide both health and beauty. Of course, the prices are not nearly as cheap.

It seems plenty of men undergo the knife to get the beautiful penis that they were always looking for. According to the doctor who operated on me, he does 2-5 operations per day, even though he is by no means the only doctor doing this line of work in the city of less than a million residents. With various beautifying procedures thrown in, each man is expected to pay upwards of half a million yen, which can be two months of salary for some workers. Clearly, many men are motivated enough to show off beautiful private parts that they are willing to spend that money on it.

Yet, paradoxically, the desire to show off cosmetically enhanced genitals is only limited to sexual partners, at least in the clinic's understanding. The fact that the clinic has structurally designed the whole office to ensure different patients avoid any contact suggests that their privacy is of utmost importance. For those who are willing to shell out significant sums to create something worthy of impressing sexual partners, it is perplexing that they do not want to at least let others know that they have something worthy of showing off. Considering that 70% of Japanese men are born with a foreskin, the taboo shouldn't really be there.

One could easily argue that the desire to keep one's identity hidden while getting private parts enhanced is just a natural part of privacy concerns. Japan, in particular, is often marked by laws and practices that ensure the identities of private individuals are not publicized without the explicit approval of the individuals in question. In this line of logic, surely the most private part of the body deserves the most privacy. If faces and names can be blurred out in TV shows and newspaper articles, there is no reason that genitals should be shown to others without consent.

Indeed, the very idea of getting a better penis as a personal vanity project can be questioned. Men may not want to spend so much money on circumcision, but are instead forced to do so but social pressure that value certain shapes and looks as "masculine" and "clean" even if there are no significant practical differences in health between a circumcised and uncircumcised penis. In this view, men are only getting rid of their foreskin because women silently judge them if they do not, for the same reason that many women surgically remove body hairs to satisfy what they think are men's preferences.

What is certain is that, whether circumcision is good for health or vanity, the market for the procedure is big. High costs and falling incomes do not yet seem to deter men from acquiring what they think is a more visual symbol of sexual prowess. And with many adults still not yet circumcised until their old age, the market remains big despite falling birth rates. If more people will be prodded to go under the knife to remove a piece of skin in a procedure that costs two months of salary, then to guarantee them privacy is a small price of pay for the pride that comes with the end result.