In twenty years of teaching foreign nationals in Japan, I had a number of (male) students who went looking for such things. Only one, a Norwegian student, found something that might have been such a vending machine and it was not a machine that one might imagine. It was one of those things that dispenses plastic eggs with toys inside. The sign was very coy and gave no definitive answer to what was in the plastic eggs.
Exotic vending machines is a standard story in the foreign press but in a quarter century in Japan I have seen very little other than soft drink vending machines. Beer vending machines used to be common outside off licenses but they are largely gone and now can be found only inside of hotels.
I’ve seen condom vending machines in public places, but not recently. I know a few places where there are vending machines for soft-core porn magazines but they are not on the street. You have to know where they are.
Further, the journalists and other writers who have played up this story have been engaging in what I call cultural racism - trying to show the Japanese as weird and deviant.
Do an English language search on “used panties” or “used knickers” and you will find that there are on line sites for this kind of thing in the US, the UK, Australia, and I would imagine other countries.
That these claims about such vending machines live on is, to put it bluntly, based on (cultural) racism, the idea that the Japanese are so deviant culturally you can find things in Japan that exist nowhere else.
Even if such machines existed they would not be outside on the streets and they would be a sign not of perversion but of technological backwardness, that Japan did not yet have the on-line marketplaces that exist in the Anglophone countries.
NOTE: This is an edited version of a response to a question posted on Quora. The original thread and response is here.
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