On October 6, 2026, Japanese condom maker Sagami and the Japan Open Poker Tour (JOPT) announced Sagami's sponsorship of the tour's Ladies Championship in Tokyo, a ¥30,000 (about $190) buy-in event scheduled for Monday, October 12. Prizes were to be paid in product on top of the cash. According to PokerNews, the winner was promised 12 boxes of Sagami Original condoms (10 per box), three boxes of Sagami Original Large and three bottles of water-based lubricating gel, roughly 150 condoms in total. Second and third place would also get condoms and lube, plus jewellery and merchandise.

Why It Matters

Condom and lube brands keep reaching for mainstream sponsorships to get in front of younger and more female audiences. This episode shows how that can go wrong. Women-focused sexual-health positioning works when the product is offered to women as a choice. It fails when women are handed the product as a prize ranked by finishing place, which turns "empowerment" into spectacle. The fix wasn't to drop the sponsorship but to recast the bundle as a neutral gift set. For brand teams, the lesson is the activation format, not whether to sponsor. Sexual-wellness brands sponsoring women's sports and gaming should expect the audience to judge whether they are being treated as competitors or as a target demographic, and that judgment now plays out on X in about 24 hours.

The backlash from players was immediate. "It's a tournament meant to broaden the base of female players, yet they're handing out massive quantities of sex products to the top three women," one widely shared post on X said. "It just looks like they're treating the winners not as 'players' but as sexual beings." Others said they supported Sagami's sexual-health message but questioned why it was aimed only at a women-only event. PokerListings reported that the Japanese poker community had begun discussing a boycott of the tour. The itemised prizes were removed from the JOPT website, and the partnership release now describes them only as "Sagami Product Gift Sets." On October 7 Sagami apologised: "We sincerely apologize to everyone who felt uncomfortable." It said the sponsorship was meant "to promote poker as a mind game, support the challenges of female players, and foster a culture of respect."

The irony is that Sagami's own history is a strong sexual-health story. PokerNews notes the company was founded by Saku Matsukawa, who in 1934 made Japan's first thin latex condom, motivated by the poverty and abandoned children that followed unwanted pregnancies. Its 0.01mm Sagami Original is among the thinnest condoms on the market.

Sources

Update — 2026-10-09

Initial entry — story first created.