A Fad is Born

So you thought that Houston, Texas was the birthplace of breast augmenttion.
Think again.

In the book "Yakuza: Japan's Criminal Underworld, by: David E. Kaplan, Alec Dubro, the authors report that the practice of breast enlargement was first used by the Yakuza on Japanese prostitutes in order to make them more attractive to large breast loving American GI's. They go on to state that the Yakuza used raw industrial silicone stolen from the US military docks. This was not dissimilar to what unscrupulous Mexican "plastic surgeons" servicing the border area with S. California were using as recently as the late 1990's for facial wrinkle removal. They were using automotive grade liquid silicon injecting it into the faces of vain, cost conscious but completely moronic women, with predictable results. They ended up looking like Quasimoto instead of Heidi Klum.

The poor post-war Japanese prostitute had not much say in the matter I wager. The Yakuza pimps almost certainly forcibly injected the women's breasts with liquid silicon leading to a plethora of complications, not the least of which could be the complete necrosis of the breast. I find it hard to believe that the women especially in conservative Japan, would do it willingly.

It appears to me that the practice might still be going on. As recently as 2000 I saw a filipina stripper in Houston, that had horribly misshapen breasts that I attributed to the same practice. I was purchased a lap dance by a friend who being half asian likes asian women. I almost jumped out of my seat when she bared her breasts. They looked like something you's see on the Bride of the Toxic Avenger, not a stripper in a Houston Gentlemen's Club. Never in my 40+ years have I seen a pair of breast that looked like those!

So it makes me wonder how much the actions of the Yakuza contributed to the idea of using silicon had on the inventor of the modern encapsulated silicone breast implant Drs. Thomas Cronin and Frank Gerow of Houston, Texas. I could not find any biographical info on them to see if maybe they served in the post-war military. They worked for Dow Corning, so maybe word got back about the inventivness of the Yakuza in using Dow's products and they decided to go it a step farther. They introduced the implant in 1962. I remember living in California at the time and the publicity sensation Carol Doda made when she bared her new set of augmented hooters in San Francisco.

The rest is history.