Flat-grilled pig vaginas! They’re…[censored]-lickin’ good?

Part of what’s helped Japanese food become so popular with international travelers is that, by Western standards, the cuts of meat usually aren’t anything too exotic. Walk into a restaurant in Tokyo and order some tonkatsu (pork cutlet), karaage (fried chicken), or gyudon (beef bowl), and you’ll generally be dining on the same part of the animal that you would when eating out in English-speaking countries.

However, if you go a little deeper into cuisine, you’ll come across some more challenging ingredients. For example, horumon, grilled or stewed pork organs such as hearts and intestines, are popular enough to have their own dedicated restaurants in Japan. But even at a horumon joint, you’re unlikely to find what Japanese Twitter user @49jzx recently encountered at one of his local markets: plastic packs crammed full of pig vaginas.

▼ @49jzx’s tweet has since been deleted, but another Twitter user shared a snapshot of the pack he bought at the same store. The label informs customers that these are “domestically sourced” (国産).

The pack identifies the product as something called “ringeru,” and being written in katakana (the type of Japanese script used for foreign loanwords), it’s possible that ringeru is derived from the English word “ring,” referencing the morsels’ circular shape. Still, since ringeru isn’t a common part of Japanese vernacular, the store was helpful enough to include a written explanation on the label, telling customers that the packs contain “female pig pu**y,” with an easily decoded censor over the central syllable of the Japanese word manko, a vulgar word for “vagina” in Japanese.

The label also touts ringeru as a “shockingly rare item,” though its scarcity belies a very reasonable price of just 100 yen (US$0.90) per 100 grams (3.5 ounces). Actually, we can’t say for sure if that’s a good price or not, seeing as we’ve never personally been in the market for a fistful of pig vaginas.

Once again, we’d like to stress that pig vaginas are, by no means, commonly sold or eaten in Japan. The market where @49jzx took the picture seems to have a rather unique product lineup, as it was also selling Zimbabwean alligator.

Getting back into the pig vagina topic, despite the affordability and rarity of the ringeru, @49jzx said he felt too embarrassed to carry a package up to the register, and just bought the regular cuts of chicken he’d come to purchase in the first place (prompting one commenter to lament that he missed his opportunity to come home from shopping with a printed receipt that included “pork pu**y”). As such, he still has never personally chowed/gone down on ringeru, and can’t comment on their taste. Titter user @IZMD, though, who was bold enough to buy a pack, describes them as having a pleasantly crunchy/crisp texture.

For anyone with an extremely adventurous palate and a complete lack of self-consciousness, the ringeru pack label recommends cooking them yakiniku-style (i.e. flat-grilling them). Unfortunately, it doesn’t suggest any side dishes, but a few pieces of shirako (fish sperm sushi) seems like a logical pairing.

Source: Twitter/@49jzx via Otakomu
Top image: Pakutaso (edited by SoraNews24)