Iroha: not your average vibrator

Sat on the table, they look more like some kind of traditional Japanese sweet. Each one is roughly the size of a small pear: plump, pastel-coloured and soft to the touch. Push a button on the underside and they start to vibrate, emitting a barely-there hum while they do so. Meet the Iroha: the future of female sex toys.

We're sat in the office of Tenga Co., the adult goods company founded eight years ago by former car mechanic Koichi Matsumoto, with the aim of (to quote their official website) ‘bringing sexual wellness to the mainstream for everyone to enjoy.’ Shelves around the room display some of Tenga's eponymous masturbation aids: various iterating of its pioneering Deep Throat Cup, the packaging for which often more closely resembles a protein shake; a basketful of Eggs, which can be peeled to reveal textured elastomer sheaths; a display case of the Tenga x Keith Haring range, adorned with pictures by the late artist and social activist. If you thought sex toys were all about love dolls and lurid simulacra vaginas, you're in for a shock here.

The new Iroha models – the company's first products for women – take this understated design aesthetic even further. ‘People were commenting on Twitter about how tasty they look,’ says Yuko Watanabe, who works in Tenga's research and development department. ‘They're like something your grandma might try to eat.’

Watanabe is one of the four-woman team who were tasked with developing the ‘female Tenga’ – a mission that ended up taking three years in total. Sitting alongside fellow team member Shizuka Ito, she describes the difficulties of developing a product to satisfy a need that many women are embarrassed even to talk about. ‘I'd arrange to go for coffee with a friend, and then be like, "So, do you masturbate?",’ she says with a laugh. ‘When you're talking about sex, women are fine discussing the things their boyfriend does. But they don't want to talk about masturbation, because that's something you just do by yourself – it says something about your own sexual desires.’

It's hardly an ideal dinner-table conversation topic in the West, either, but when Tenga started to do market research, they discovered more openness in Europe and the US than they were finding at home. 'The market for female goods is more developed in the West,’ says Watanabe. ‘You'll see sex toys displayed in the windows of high street shops, and you'll find sex shops in areas frequented by children. They're just seen as normal.’ The range of products was impressive, too: Tenga would have to compete with the likes of Jimmyjane, a California-based company whose innovative Form vibrators are regularly voted the best in the world.

The three Iroha models: ‘We don't want to make something that looks too much like a penis.’

Being the best in the world doesn't mean you're perfect, mind you, and the Tenga team was soon noting limitations with the products currently on the market: maybe the size was wrong, or they felt too cold against the skin. Finding the right material for their own vibrators would prove the most time-consuming part of the development process: they needed something that retained its shape but also yielded slightly to the touch, and could be easily cleaned. ‘We tried to make sure it fit as comfortably as possible in your hand while you were using it,’ says Watanabe; ‘that it felt warm and sensual.’

The surface of the Iroha is made from silicone – turned inside-out to conceal the seam – but there's a soft layer underneath that feels almost like one of those squishy executive stress toys. Watanabe won't say exactly what this substance is, but she reveals that the manufacturer approached Tenga first – apparently one of its employees was a big fan of the company‘s products.

Material aside, choosing an ideal shape was a more complex task than you might expect. With typical candour, Watanabe explains the importance of not making the Iroha appear overly phallic. ‘At Tenga, we don't think masturbation is a substitute for sex,’ she says. ‘We think of it as a kind of entertainment, so we don't want to make something that looks too much like a penis.’

As development progressed, the team began to enlist help from other staff, both male and female. The Iroha was to be Tenga's first electrically powered device, so they recruited a technician to take care of its motorised core – especially figuring out how to make it as discreet as possible. ‘The prototypes during the first phase were pretty noisy,’ says Watanabe. ‘We saw how that could pose a problem, especially if you've got next-door neighbours.’ Later on in the development process, they added further testers to provide feedback, highlighting potential problems that the development team had overlooked.

Of the three models due to go on sale on March 3, Watanabe and Ito say they think the white, doll-shaped Yuki version will sell best, followed by the pink, prong-tipped Sakura; the green Midori version, intended for ‘absolute beginners’, comes at the bottom of the pile. Both women, however, admit that marketing is going to present a challenge.

‘With the male version of the Tenga, we were very upfront about the masturbation part – "The future of masturbation is here!", that sort of thing,’ says Ito, who handles the company's advertising and PR. ‘But with the Iroha, there are women who feel a real resistance to the idea of masturbation, or just get grossed out by it. So rather than making a big noise about it being a totally mainstream thing, we're pushing the idea that it would be nice to live in a world where it's as normal to masturbate as not to masturbate.’

‘You have to start by changing people's mentality,’ Watanabe concurs. ‘It's a very delicate problem… We're not going, "Masturbation! Banzai!" We just want to put the idea out there that, you know, it's an option that people have.’

The three Iroha models go on sale in Japan on March 3, priced at ¥6,800 each. An international launch is planned in April. For details see iroha-tenga.com/en/