Japan gets weirder...

[Non Aligned States]

I'd say sort of. This sort of behaviour is not so much a result of the NEET issue, but rather both are related symptoms of Japan's social ills.

I posted this earlier, but for those who missed it, here's an interesting essay covering the wider issues:
http://www.feer.com/essays/2009/july/wi ... er-grow-up

To quote from a discussion of on fuckedgaijin.com the article I posted above:

I saw the essay, though I do wonder about that. Is it really an indicator that a highly regimented schooling system with a strong focus on conformity produces socially inept people or that the social outcasts stick out a lot more in such a system, and thus resort to more drastic means of addressing social needs?

[Daistallia 2104]

Not really. Not all people over there are so fucked up. Actually, the fucked up people are a minority, as far as I saw.

I have met so many fucked up people from so many countries that I have realized everyone has its own, the only problem in Japan is that people is usually more open about it, perhaps due to the lack of a religious background against it, and they get more publicity and media attention.

To take just one example, Japan has long been a center of child pornography. When I first arrived here it was enterly legal. I remember walking into the back section of a local video shop in Niigata where the porn was divided into bukkake, scat, rape, etc. - and there in the middle of it was a series of videos featuring 12-13 year old girls from SE Asia. In fact, it was still legal to own child pornography here as of last year. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/10/japan

See also:
http://www.crin.org/violence/search/clo ... foID=18088
http://www.safernet.org.br/site/noticia ... child-porn
http://www.japanlaw.info/law2004/JAPAN_ ... RIMES.html
http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/japan.htm

[Allbeama]

If japanese guys are dating pillows then that should help nerdy white otakus who dream of loving a japanese girl in the pursuit of happiness.

[Daistallia 2104]

I saw the essay, though I do wonder about that. Is it really an indicator that a highly regimented schooling system with a strong focus on conformity produces socially inept people or that the social outcasts stick out a lot more in such a system, and thus resort to more drastic means of addressing social needs?

A bit of both I'd say. The odd balls do stick out more, and the pressure to conform also creates a pressure to diverge more strongly. People who get into a sub-culture here often seem to take it to the deep end.

OTOH, pressure towards conformity in the school system, and in society in general, also push people in the direction of inter-sexual ineptness.

An additional ingerdient in the stew pot here is sex segregation. A lot of high schools are still sexually segregated. And even at schools that aren't, you'd swear that you were observing grade schoolers. The boys sit with the boys, the girls with the girls. And this often continues well into adulthood.

(I could go on for much longer, but I've gotta go shortly. I'll be Bach. )

[Redwulf]

Since there is so much talk about how bad it was that americans used atomic bombs against japan lets bring up the fact that the Japanese did not have clean hands in WW2... the Bhaatan Death March ring a bell anyone?

Once more lets not.

Blah blah thread jack blah blah geeks hot for cartoon chicks blah blah . . .

THread jack... yes...

Excuse me, but does your nation name draw inspiration from Red Bull, by any chance?

My nations name was used by me for other purposes before Red Bull existed.

[Redwulf]

Not really. Not all people over there are so fucked up. Actually, the fucked up people are a minority, as far as I saw.

I have met so many fucked up people from so many countries that I have realized everyone has its own, the only problem in Japan is that people is usually more open about it, perhaps due to the lack of a religious background against it, and they get more publicity and media attention.

To take just one example, Japan has long been a center of child pornography. When I first arrived here it was enterly legal. I remember walking into the back section of a local video shop in Niigata where the porn was divided into bukkake, scat, rape, etc. - and there in the middle of it was a series of videos featuring 12-13 year old girls from SE Asia. In fact, it was still legal to own child pornography here as of last year.

Wasn't that partly to do with Japan having an insanely low age of consent?

Edit: At least at the time such things were legal.

[Omega Uliza]

This is why we should have dropped a third bomb.

This is a joke, for the love of God.

Cute...hiding the joke part.

[NERVUN]

Not really. Not all people over there are so fucked up. Actually, the fucked up people are a minority, as far as I saw.

I have met so many fucked up people from so many countries that I have realized everyone has its own, the only problem in Japan is that people is usually more open about it, perhaps due to the lack of a religious background against it, and they get more publicity and media attention.

To take just one example, Japan has long been a center of child pornography. When I first arrived here it was enterly legal. I remember walking into the back section of a local video shop in Niigata where the porn was divided into bukkake, scat, rape, etc. - and there in the middle of it was a series of videos featuring 12-13 year old girls from SE Asia. In fact, it was still legal to own child pornography here as of last year.

Wasn't that partly to do with Japan having an insanely low age of consent?

Edit: At least at the time such things were legal.

I wouldn't say so, no. However, Japan has had a very long history of more or less open sexual practices. Unlike the West, Buddhism and Shintoism don't really have a great deal of sexual taboos and some practices where a bit hair raising to say the least.

Even now, Japan is far more open in terms of male sexuality than female, though that is changing. It's, not exactly acceptable, but tolerated, for a married man to visit sexual service shops.

[North Suran]

This is why we should have dropped a third bomb.

This is a joke, for the love of God.

Cute...hiding the joke part.

A joke tends to lose its punch if you have explain it.

I didn't expect people to take a comment like that as an advocation of genocide.

Anyhow, it spurred on some bloody debate on whether it was right to use the bomb against Nagasaki and Hiroshime, so it backfired regardless.

[Daistallia 2104]

Wasn't that partly to do with Japan having an insanely low age of consent?

Edit: At least at the time such things were legal.

More due to the lolicon culture here.

At this point I would like to stop for a second and point out that yes, the "2-D Love" article does have some significant problems. See:
http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=11681
http://www.mutantfrog.com/2009/07/27/ne ... etishists/

However, pointing out that a poorly written and researched piece that exagerates the scope of a socio-sexual problem does not at all mean that there are not significant and real problems with sexuality in Japan. Nor does it mean that because exterme examples of sexual perversions and fetishes are not mainstream, that milder forms aren't either. Japanese media sends very mixed messages on things like child pornography.

I wouldn't say so, no. However, Japan has had a very long history of more or less open sexual practices. Unlike the West, Buddhism and Shintoism don't really have a great deal of sexual taboos and some practices where a bit hair raising to say the least.

Even now, Japan is far more open in terms of male sexuality than female, though that is changing. It's, not exactly acceptable, but tolerated, for a married man to visit sexual service shops.

Indeed. But as I mentioned above, that's got overlayed, superficially, with a set of Victorian mores during the Meiji period and beyond.

Victorians: OMFG! you people all bathe in the same tub! That's perverse and backwards.
Japan: Oops sorry. We'll stop.
Victorians: Homosex is OK? No way.
Japan: Oops sorry. We'll push it underground. Eventually we'll use it as a a steriotype to make fun of. (cut to a scene of RRHG - @WoooOOO!")

Fast forward to the 50s...

Japan: OMG the Olympics are coming. The world's gonna see the Yoshiwara, quick close it down officially and push the sex industry barely underground. Oh, and outlaw genetals in porn (just remember everything else is OK).

BTW, for anybody interested, here's some hard data regarding some of what I was onto about a bit earlier:
http://www8.cao.go.jp/youth/english/wor ... 2-4-1.html

Note that significantly fewer respondants in Japan had "close friends of the opposite sex" than in the US and European countries in the survey.

To pull some of the threads together...

Many children are brought up in families where the father is out of the home for much of the time, and thus lack a close male role model. They also don't see the interactions between the sexes (not sex, but how men and women interact) close up.

They go to high schools where social pressure prevents them from intermingling and learning about each other.

Sex ed is woeful, both from parents and schools. And it basically covers the mechanics only.

However, porn is widespread, easy to access, and diverse.

Social pressure to conform is high. Differences must be hidden. If that's not possible, one must go all out in embracing them.

Hopefully that helps explain some of Japan's socio-sexuality problem.

[NERVUN]

I wouldn't say so, no. However, Japan has had a very long history of more or less open sexual practices. Unlike the West, Buddhism and Shintoism don't really have a great deal of sexual taboos and some practices where a bit hair raising to say the least.

Even now, Japan is far more open in terms of male sexuality than female, though that is changing. It's, not exactly acceptable, but tolerated, for a married man to visit sexual service shops.

Indeed. But as I mentioned above, that's got overlayed, superficially, with a set of Victorian mores during the Meiji period and beyond.

Victorians: OMFG! you people all bathe in the same tub! That's perverse and backwards.
Japan: Oops sorry. We'll stop.
Victorians: Homosex is OK? No way.
Japan: Oops sorry. We'll push it underground. Eventually we'll use it as a a steriotype to make fun of. (cut to a scene of RRHG - @WoooOOO!")

Fast forward to the 50s...

Japan: OMG the Olympics are coming. The world's gonna see the Yoshiwara, quick close it down officially and push the sex industry barely underground. Oh, and outlaw genetals in porn (just remember everything else is OK).

Very much so, yes, but it was and is still around and just winked at. In fact, it's interesting to see how it works out that whenever there is international attention on Japan's sex industry, it suddenly gets pushed underground... until the attention passes and then we're back to normal.

To pull some of the threads together...

Many children are brought up in families where the father is out of the home for much of the time, and thus lack a close male role model. They also don't see the interactions between the sexes (not sex, but how men and women interact) close up.

They go to high schools where social pressure prevents them from intermingling and learning about each other.

Sex ed is woeful, both from parents and schools. And it basically covers the mechanics only.

However, porn is widespread, easy to access, and diverse.

Social pressure to conform is high. Differences must be hidden. If that's not possible, one must go all out in embracing them.

Hopefully that helps explain some of Japan's socio-sexuality problem.

I'd say you more or less nailed it. If I may add though, there's also the issue of the dichotomy between the idea of a 'perfect' romance that has been borrowed mainly from Western images and the reality that you have described above. I'd say that you end up with a system where not only do you have a bunch of males and females who have very little experience in interacting with each other, but who are also being told by the media and other people that if they want to get married, it has to be romantic and a storybook wedding, which is daunting to say the very least!

[Saint Clair Island]

In all seriousness, it is a result of the lack of sexuality amongst today's generation.

Really? I've never heard of any such lack.

[Anemos Major]

Well, as in the idea of settling down and having a serious relationship.

[Saint Clair Island]

Well, as in the idea of settling down and having a serious relationship.

That's not a lack of sexuality -- in fact, it often seems to me that there's too much sexuality going around, and too much emphasis placed on sexual activity whether you're in a relationship or not. Besides, the fact of many people being unwilling to commit is at least in part related to ... something society does. <.<

[Grave_n_idle]

Since there is so much talk about how bad it was that americans used atomic bombs against japan lets bring up the fact that the Japanese did not have clean hands in WW2... the Bhaatan Death March ring a bell anyone?

You remember when they nuked two major US cities?

No - because that's never fucking happened.

No, but the Japanese did use chemical and biological weapons on civilian populations, among other atrocities, while seisening the fuck out of China. It is also worth noting that more than twice as many Japanese civilians were killed by conventional, strategic bombings than by the nuclear attacks. In the vast ocean of misery that was the 1930's and 1940's, nuclear weapons were just a particularly flashy teaspoon.

Amusingly - this proves my point. If casualties or warlike targetting were the goals, then conventional arms would have been more efficient.

That just reinforces the fact that the US rushed through two nuclear tests on innocent civilians.

[Grave_n_idle]

I notice you didn't actually provide any proof.

You want proof we dropped nuclear devices on two Japanese cities?

Or... you want proof that they were two different nuclear weapon technologies?

Or... maybe it's the 'only two nuclear weapons employed on civilian populations' bit you want proved?

[Grave_n_idle]

I'm not eager to jump in and say that japan was innocent and the big mean US came and bullied the poor militaristic authoritarian state.

And yet, it wasn't the state that we nuked. Or even the army. It was civilians.

[Grave_n_idle]

Since there is so much talk about how bad it was that americans used atomic bombs against japan lets bring up the fact that the Japanese did not have clean hands in WW2... the Bhaatan Death March ring a bell anyone?

You remember when they nuked two major US cities?

No - because that's never fucking happened.

Which wasn't for lack of trying. They did use WMDs against civilian populations however.

Since 1940, in Chinese theater, Ishii Shiro had led his Unit 731 to engage in biological warfare by attacking Ningpo, Chinhua, Chuchou of Chechiang province (during the Japanese-Soviet war at Nomonhan, Mongolia in the summer of 1939, Unit 731 was dispatched to the front to make bacterial assault). To retaliate the U.S. air raid of Tokyo led by Col. Doolittle in April 1942, from which over 60 U.S. airmen were rescued in Chechiang area, Japan launched a largescale mopping-up campaign, in which several hundred men from Unit 731 and its subsidiary Unit 1644 of Nanking took part. Early in November 1941, Unit 731 dispatched an airplane to spread bubonic plague at Changte, Hunan, which was verified by Dr. E. J. Bannon of American Presbyterian Church hospital at Changte. The event was well known to American and British intelligence agencies at Chungking and besides the Chinese government had fully informed the American and British government of it through its ambassadors Wellington Koo at London and Hu Shih at Washington. Chinese authorities had long learned that Japan used biological warfare against China and had repeatedly appealed to international communities for help. Before making their escape at the time of Japanese surrender, Japanese in Unit 731 set free scores of thousands of infected rats that caused widespread plague in 22 counties of Heilungchiang and Kirin provinces that took more than 20,000 Chinese lives.

http://www.centurychina.com/wiihist/germwar/731rev.htm

Groundbreaking work by Sheldon H. Harris, a Cal State Northridge historian, helped establish that Japan's infamous Unit 731 had conducted large-scale biological warfare experiments in northern China. Harris, who died last year, had filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests to gather information for his 1994 book "Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-1945, and the American Cover-Up."

In it, Harris wrote that U.S. authorities protected high-level Japanese scientists from prosecution in exchange for their data. At the time, the United States was developing its own biological warfare program.

Activists charge that the U.S. government has reclassified some of the documents it had previously declassified. They also say the Japanese government has undisclosed records.

Harris said that as many as 12,000 people died in Japanese laboratories after they were infected with anthrax, cholera, typhoid and plague, and that more than 250,000 civilians were killed as a result of Japanese field tests in the Chinese countryside.

Last year, a Japanese court, ending decades of denial, acknowledged for the first time that Unit 731 "used bacteriological weapons under the order of the imperial Japanese Army's headquarters" in occupied China in the 1930s and 1940s.

But the court rejected compensation for the 180 plaintiffs, saying that the compensation issues had been settled under postwar treaties between Japan and China. Each plaintiff sought about $85,000.

Despite the court finding, the Japanese government denies that its Army ever used biological agents in China.

Yang Wanzhu, director of the Institute of Germ Warfare Research in Chengde, China, and a member of the visiting group, said he believed that the toll of Japan's biological warfare was much higher than previously thought. Thus far, in Chengde Prefecture alone, 7,643 deaths have been confirmed, he said.

But the full extent of the deaths is not known, he said, because so many people fled the town and escaped to the countryside after Unit 731's aircraft allegedly dropped "36 kilos of plague germ-carrying fleas to Chengde on Nov. 4, 1941."

http://articles.latimes.com/2003/aug/12 ... -warfare12

Chemical warfare and biological warfare aren't really anything new. No one before or since has deployed nuclear technology on civilians.

[Bottle]

It sounds almost sweet, with all these socially-inept virgins finding love in an unconventional place, until you realized that these are middle-aged men who seek sexual gratification with passive images of pre-pubescent girls.

Then it just sounds dull. Ho-hum, yet another cohort of old men who only want relationships with little girls who never talk back.

[Anemos Major]

It sounds almost sweet, with all these socially-inept virgins finding love in an unconventional place, until you realized that these are middle-aged men who seek sexual gratification with passive images of pre-pubescent girls.

Then it just sounds dull. Ho-hum, yet another cohort of old men who only want relationships with little girls who never talk back.

Why can't they have an interview with the guy who actually thought up the idea of making these things?

[Omega Uliza]

It sounds almost sweet, with all these socially-inept virgins finding love in an unconventional place, until you realized that these are middle-aged men who seek sexual gratification with passive images of pre-pubescent girls.

Then it just sounds dull. Ho-hum, yet another cohort of old men who only want relationships with little girls who never talk back.

Pedophilia is a little off...granted. But it doesn't make them child molestors. I know you didn't say this...but I see it so many times that I want to strangle someone...well...not really.

In all the facets of perversion, pedophilia is just a little more on the extreme side. But I'd personally rather have a pedophile jerk off to images of pre-pubescent girls rather than taking the other step and actually having sex with one. In the world of lolicon and shotacon, those who avidly are interested in these realms actually probably dislike child molestors more than fear-mongering mothers and fathers.

See...a child molestor is a pedophile, but a pedophile is not necessarily a child molestor. Just like an Oak is a tree, but a tree is not necessarily an Oak. It's like they just don't hear the analogy and only hear pedophile.

It's frankly disheartening.

[North Suran]

-snip-

I know I'm not contributing at all and this is an unnecessary nitpick, but it's paedophilia.

SS-Oberleutnant of the Rechtschreibung-Nazi, reporting.

[Omega Uliza]

-snip-

I know I'm not contributing at all and this is an unnecessary nitpick, but it's paedophilia.

SS-Oberleutnant of the Rechtschreibung-Nazi, reporting.

Actually either spelling works.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pedophilia

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/paedophilia

[North Suran]

Actually either spelling works.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pedophilia

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/paedophilia

But since most British people spell it as the latter, and most American people pronounce it as the latter, and it comes from the Greek "pais" and "philia", I believe that "paedophilia" is more correct.

[Kusatsu]

Good for them.

Maybe they won't reproduce since, you know, your imagination does not have a uterus.

Less humans is always a good thing in my book.