Pornzilla

According to the "Asian Heroes" article in the April 28, 2003 issue of Time magazine, Hideki "Godzilla" Matsui isn't just a New York Yankees baseball superstar - he's also an avid collector of porn tapes, which he often trades with Japanese reporters! It's considered the workaholic baseball star's lone eccentricity. Otherwise, the (highly priced) Salaryman is just a steak-eating average Joe. His love of meat no doubt stems from his affinity for such Japanese cultural institutions as the no-pan shabu-shabu (steakhouses where the floors are mirrored and the waitresses wear short skirts sans panties). But it is Matsui's weakness for raw meat that led one Japanese journalist to observe, "Matsui is a horny guy. All of us are horny, more or less. But Matsui doesn't attempt to hide the fact."

Dirty Dining
By the way, shabu shabu is Japanese for "swish-swish," and refers to the swishing sound made when whisking thinly sliced pieces of beef through a boiling pot of water. It is also Japanese slang for fellatio. According to an article on the practice in the Mainichi Daily News, no-pan shabu shabu joints offered guests as much alcohol as they could drink (namihodai) and other perks.

Side dishes of skin were on offer. For a 5,000 yen tip, one of the establishment's young waitresses would stand up and collect a bottle of whiskey stored in a rooftop rack. As she did so, guests were treated to a glimpse underneath the ultra-short miniskirt covering her naked flesh.

To make sure nobody missed out, as the woman stood a gust of wind was forced out of a fan in the floor, sending her skirt skyward a la Marilyn Monroe.

For an additional tip of an unspecified sum, the girl would cover the lower half of her body with a quilt. The guest was given a penlight and permitted to flash around under the quilt to look up the waitress's skirt.

Where's the Beef?
At the famous members-only Roran restaurant in Tokyo's Kabukicho district, video cameras built into the tables enabled diners to leer at the waitresses legs while they dined. (And, following a Mad Cow Disease beef panic in 2001, the addition of steamed crustaceans to the menu actually meant that pantyless waitresses had to ask diners if they would "care to have some crabs tonight?"!) Alas, the practice had to go on the down-low following Japan's 1998 financial scandal when it was revealed that Finance Ministry officials were being bribed with lavish spreads at no-pan shabu shabu dining establishments.

Too bad Matsui didn't land a "Beef, It's What's for Dinner" endorsement from the National Cattleman's Beef Association.

What's In a Name?
OK, now about Matsui's nickname...the former Yomiuri Giants All-Star apparently got it while growing up as a pock-marked teen in Japan.

It was at Seiryo High School in Kanazawa, one of Japan's famous baseball factories, that Matsui was first nicknamed "Godzilla"—a moniker which, at the time, was as much for the severe case of adolescent acne that plagued him as it was for his tape-measure blasts.

Too bad his skin didn't get him a Pocky Sticks endorsement, either.

See full Time magazine article: Godzilla Vs. the Americans