Gone are the days of kissing and holding hands. Only in Japan would eyeball-licking be a thing. Japanese school children have cottoned on to this trend recently, but it seems the trend comes with its downfalls. According to information gathered from 12-year-old learners, eyeball-licking is supposedly part of young children’s dating rituals.

From the start of the school year, teachers started noticing an increase in the number of students who were wearing eye patches, but they could not detemine the cause. A teacher known only as Mr Y caught two pupils in the act. Mr Y said:

After class one day, I went into the equipment store in the gymnasium to tidy up. The door had been left open, and when I looked inside, a male pupil and a female pupil had their faces close together and were kind of fumbling around. Could it be bullying? I wondered, but when I had a good look, the boy was licking the girl’s eye! Surprised, a shouted “What are you doing? Stop it at once!” and the two of them were so shocked they jumped apart. The girl burst into tears, and the boy just went bright red and was shaken up. At any rate, to try to calm them down I took them to the janitor’s room and listened to their story.

The two pupils explained to Mr Y their reasoning for engaging in this bizarre behaviour. The male pupil responded, “because it’s popular in our class. It’s not just us two anyway. Everyone’s doing it.” After this encounter, Mr Y found the cause of the increasing number of eye patches.

A possible explanation for eyeball-licking as a courting ritual is that the eyeball could be an erogenous zone. But this practice has also led to increased numbers of teenagers having bacterial conjunctivitis – hence the eye patches.

[Source: Japan Crush]