「海外の反応(gawker編)」の編集履歴(バックアップ)一覧に戻る
The made up stories are always the best ones anyway.
We became more and more suspicious after the last article involved a donkey blowing santa with a banana stripping to jon denver songs.
Next you're going to tell me the Penthouse Forum letters are made up too.
Next you are going to say the Penthouse and Hustler letters were written by starving novelists and screenwriters who later went on to great success using their real names.
There goes my pet theory about the repression of Japanese businessmen and sexual perversity. Though the theory still holds remarkably well when applied to i-banker douchebags.
When will Penthouse Forum be admitting to the same thing as the Mainichi Daily News just did.
wow, cultural racism isn't true?
wait till spiegelman hears about this bombshell.
Just cause they made it up doesn't mean it's not true.
Michael Weiss! Where have you been hiding lately? Sometimes I fear the NY Mag Sex Diaries are guilty of this crime (or, at the very least, some heavy editing), too.
Is Two Girls and a Cup also made up?
but it still has truthiness
@Gregoire: If Two Girls and a Cup is made up, then the special effects guy needs a Webby.
damn, i guess i'll have to go back to the onion to get the real facts on japanese sex stories.
From the country that gave us hentai tentacle porn? Impossible!
Wait, what? They don't sell used girls' underwear from vending machines in the subway?!?!?
It's still all happening even if THESE instances were made up. Trust me, people are very inventive and the Japanese takes the cake!
Okay, fine. But I'm not taking down that story about the sailors using a school of stingray as a floating brothel.
So I can't go to Tokyo on my next servicey, sexicey vacation? Just as well, the dollar doesn't quite buy what it once did.
They're covering this "controversy" now to distract us from discovering that the English version of Japan's Three Non-Nuclear Principles was also a mistranslation.
All I know is they have a word in Japanese that means "guy who gropes women on the subway." This happens often enough on the packed trains to merit a word. My Japanese friend, who lived for a while in the U.S., called out guys for attempting to grope her, which was against the norm since most Japanese girls are too demure and shy to stand up for themselves in those circumstances.
Oh, there's also the Japanese comic "Rape Man." I don't see why they have to stretch the truth to uncover seedy sex habits over there, they seem pretty transparent.
@SlickaNicka: Far be it from me to try to somehow defend an entire culture as being without perversions or misogyny (you're right! They both exist in Japan!), but the word you're thinking of is 痴漢 ("chikan"), which means "molester/molestation [context gives you the part of speech]," though it has taken on the connotation of "groping on trains." If America used crowded trains to the extent that Japan does, my guess is that we'd have a word that referred to this specific behavior as well. After all, we have the expression "road rage," right?
And "Rapeman" is a comic that caused a scandal in the 1980s when it came out and is pretty much out of print and hard to find now; the scandal has fed a subculture of masturbating misogynist maniacs who think it's "hilarious" and have created a kind of mythology of its greatness; they comprise enough of market segment that a series of cheaply produced animated versions of it came out in the 1990s. I'm not sure that this constitutes proof of widespread and tolerated "seedy sex habits."
I mean, it's fun to think of an entire country as populated by sweaty, perverted salarymen molesting silent girls, and it's not like that fantasy doesn't expose its own kind of truth (much like The Clockwork Orange does for America), but I'm not sure calling it "knowledge about Japan" is quite called for. As I said, misogyny is quite present there, and you could even be justified in calling it a rape culture. But you could say the same thing about America, and for similar reasons.
I'm sorry if I seem humorless or ridiculously PC on this issue. I'm not usually (I linked to a picture of Kubota Shigeko painting with her vagina just today!). But I've reached my 'other cultures are gross and weird' limit for the day and ended up taking it out on you. I don't think less of you, but I just wanted to address these issues.
@BeRightBack: also, is "rapeman" anything like that shocking manga "yu-gi-oh!" which told me i could battle demons using a children's card game?
or is it more like sailor moon, which convinced me that young girls wear short skirts, fight demons and twirl a lot to show off their panties? because i totally believe all forms of animation and comic panel as "god given truth."
@SlickaNicka:
and you.
maybe you missed it, but rape isn't a big deal. the jezzies said so! get to williamsburg and grind up on the next Karen O-ish NYU sophomore you can find. it's cool!
why? because "rapeman" is a goddamn comic/cartoon. whose plot is so incredibly stupid that those who take it as "TRUTH" have real problems.
and seriously, character designs rip off ninja gaiden.
also. i'm incredibly trashed on bourbon. now is the time i wish to engage in debates about cultural fetishism and "new rape media."
@mitchel_stevens: Oh, come on. I don't think either of us was saying that comics are documentaries. But pretending that fictions don't have social meanings (or that only documentaries do?) is equally dumb.
And I'm sorry that Rapeman failed to live up to your exacting standards for mimesis, but you're not going to get me to say that it doesn't represent a misogynist fantasy at least to a certain extent, even though it's been seen by some as ironic or a "gag" comic.
My point is that extrapolating from one sensationalized text to an entire culture is a bad idea, which I think you'd agree with me on, somewhere under all the bourbon and the otaku-ish wishes for comics (and therefore your own engagement with them) to be somehow beyond interpretation.
SlickaNicka at 11:08 AM Reply by Email *
@BeRightBack: Well, I didn't mean to slam an entire civilization, or to even imply that wacko sexual behavior is widespread in Japan. Guess that came out wrong. I was more trying to say that there are enough oddball examples (the two things I said) that you don't have to fictionalize anything to find it if you are looking for it. Just like you wouldn't have to do that here, either, for that matter (two girls and a cup? ahem).
However, I do believe that women in Japan have historically been more shy (culturally) about standing up for themselves in regard to abuse. That's just from my personal experience with my friend.
My apologies to Japan for implying you are all sex fiends! (Except to the ones who are.)