Partial Dummies Lend A Hand

Japan Ushers in a New Era of Personal Shoulders to Sleep On

Well, people have needs. We all need warm bodies. We all need lots of cuddling, huh? If we don’t, then we’re scared and we cry out and we loot stores.

I’ve seen this story around blogotown and I just love it. Kameo Corporation of Japan is a company which specializes in soft things and they have a quite popular pillow which is an angular arm, posed in a stiff and compassionate embrace, attached to an accompanying half-chest. The pillow comes with a blue shirt and a pink shirt. Which means part of the time you’re sleeping with a guy in business casual. And part of the time you’re sleeping with a wedding DJ.

Okay, yes, Japan always has stuff like this. It’s not totally unusual. What kills kills kills me are the convictions of Kameo’s President Tomoki Kakehashi, who has probably been nesting this idea since childhood.

From The Courier-Mail:

“My grandmother used to say that there is nothing more comfortable pillow than human,” Kameo President Tomoki Kakehashi said. “So, I thought that maybe women would want to sleep on an arm-shaped pillow.”

So Kameo is working up new models: muscular pillows for sleepers who like their pillows well-built; slender models for those after a more sensitive, vulnerable partner.

I really could use a mattress made entirely of dummies. I can’t sleep without having a huge pile of people with me. It makes me feel loved and appreciated in a full-body way. And, the best case situation for me would be an assortment of arms to choose from, jutting out of the bed, which I could Velcro into a very firm hug, securing me in my position and ensuring that the grip never loosens, which I would interpret as weakness and moral decay in a comforter. Sorry, I’m just like that.

For Ms Suzuki, who is estranged from her husband, the pillow has definite advantages: It doesn’t squirm or thrash in the night, and you know it’ll be there in the morning.

“It keeps holding me all the way through,” she said in her home outside of Tokyo. “I think this is great because this does not betray me.”

And yet, in seven years, when her arm buddy is all worn and emaciated and his ribs are pokin through, she’ll fold him into a compact contortion and huck him in the trashbin. She’ll betray that very arm that held her, lo, those many years.

Let’s hope we make it quickly to the time when pillows have flesh and subcutaneous fat and spontanenous generation of limbs to help them survive and find real meaning in Japan. (via Apartment Therapy.)

See also: Empirical Data That Robot Hugs Will Be Meaningful. The Queen-Sized. (comfort and pillow-related topics from the past.)