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Calling these fantasies "weird" gets the interesting part backwards. Nothing on the list below is unique to Japan as a desire. What is unique is that Japan has words for them — precise, widely understood, commercially load-bearing words — and a category with a name behaves completely differently from one without.
Two structural forces produced that vocabulary, and they explain more than any individual entry does.
The first is legal. Article 175 of the Japanese Penal Code criminalises the distribution of obscene material, and the industry's long-standing accommodation has been mosaic or bar censorship over genitals. The practical consequence is that the one thing Western hardcore organises itself around is the one thing Japanese adult video cannot show clearly. Emphasis migrated to everything else — costume, setting, facial expression, the premise of the scene. When you can't shoot the anatomy, you shoot the situation, and situations need names.
The second is cultural. Japanese fan communities are unusually taxonomic. Doujin culture, comiket-style distribution and decades of imageboard argument produced an enormous shared vocabulary for aesthetic categories, most of it coined by audiences rather than marketers. A Western studio invents a tag when it wants to sell something. In Japan the tag frequently exists first and the market forms around it.
With that in mind, here are ten.
1. Seifuku and the JK premise
The school-uniform scene is the most visible convention in Japanese adult media and the most misread abroad. It is a costume genre — the uniform is a recognisable silhouette in the way a nurse's outfit is elsewhere — and it operates alongside a hard legal line: Japan criminalised possession of child sexual abuse material in 2014, and mainstream production works with adult performers under industry age verification. The costume is doing symbolic work about a life stage, not about the performer. It is also the single genre where the gap between the symbol and the law is worth stating plainly rather than leaving implied.
2. Zettai ryōiki
Literally "absolute territory": the band of bare thigh between a short skirt and over-knee socks. Fans took it seriously enough to formalise a ratio between skirt length, exposed thigh and sock height, which tells you almost everything about how this vocabulary gets made. There is no English term because no English-speaking audience ever felt the need to specify one.
3. Ahegao
The stylised expression of being overwhelmed — rolled eyes, open mouth, protruding tongue. It began in manga and anime, migrated into live-action performance, and then did something none of the others did: it escaped entirely. Ahegao is now a streetwear print, largely detached from what it depicts, worn by people who could not name its origin.
4. Dakimakura
The full-length body pillow with a character printed on it. What makes it interesting is that it is not primarily a sexual object; it is a companionship object that happens to be sold in a sexual register. The two functions are not separable, and the market does not try to separate them.
5. Dutch wife
Datchi waifu is the Japanese term for a sex doll, and it long predates the current silicone industry — the phrase entered the language from European sailors' slang. Japan's doll manufacturers went on to become the technical leaders in the field, and the vocabulary stayed put while the product changed beyond recognition around it.
6. Kemonomimi
Animal ears, usually cat or fox, on an otherwise human character. The rule is strict: ears and often a tail, nothing else. A fully anthropomorphic animal character belongs to an entirely different category with its own separate audience, and conflating the two is the kind of error that gets corrected quickly online.
7. Chikan
The staged groping-on-a-train scenario, and the one entry here that needs a flat statement rather than an explanation. Groping on public transport is a criminal offence in Japan and a real problem that Japanese police and rail operators have run campaigns against for decades, including women-only carriages. The genre is fiction produced by consenting adults. The offence is not fiction, and the coexistence of the two is something Japanese commentators have argued about at length without resolving.
8. Omorashi
Desperation and loss of control, focused on the moment before rather than the aftermath. English-language fandom largely imported the Japanese word instead of coining its own, which is a reasonable indicator of where the category was defined.
9. Netorare
Usually shortened to NTR: the premise of a partner being taken by someone else, told from the position of the person losing them. It is one of the most divisive tags in Japanese adult media, to the point that consumers routinely filter it out entirely — the strength of the aversion is itself part of why the tag is so consistently labelled. Western porn has similar scenarios but no equally load-bearing name, and so no equivalent filtering culture.
10. Bukkake
Included as the counter-example. It is a Japanese coinage from the AV industry that exported successfully, entered English as a loanword, and is now produced worldwide by people with no connection to its origin. It is proof that the barrier was never the desire. It was the vocabulary, and vocabulary travels.
What the list actually shows
Read together, these are not ten strange things Japanese people want. They are ten places where a naming culture and a censorship regime intersected, and the result got precise enough to be catalogued.
If you want to see how the conventions play out in practice rather than in description, the Asian porn sites and premium Asian sites listings cover live-action production, hentai sites cover the animated and drawn side where most of this vocabulary originated, and live Asian cams are the one format where none of it applies, because nothing is scripted and nothing is tagged in advance.