Nippon It In The Bud

Jen Hawkins is hanging around the living room without any clobber on. I’m not complaining, just saying.

Emergency Contact bought the magazine that features Jen, oh-so-bravely (cough) going without her smalls or air-brushing. I can’t see what the fuss is about. She’s not actually bearing all. More importantly, she’s in her mid-late-twenties and is hot. No-one needs airbrushing at that age or at that temperature. I reckon the undies advertisements where she skips off to work in just an overcoat fastened down to the navel, knee-high boots and a pair of knickers is far more provocative.


I know I’m not alone. I was in a pub with three mates recently and that ad came on. We all just shut-up and gazed respectfully at the screen. When it was over, we centred back on each other and nodded slowly as we came back to our realities.

But it wasn’t Jen that got the magazine into the house. No, it was Lisa Katayama. She wrote an article called, "She’s My Girlfriend. I Have Real Feelings For Her", and it’s a fatal car accident of an article. You are not supposed to slow down and gawk at this sort of stuff - but we couldn’t tear our eyes from the tragedy.

I quote the lead paragraph: Struggling to navigate modern romance, Japanese men are turning to two-dimensional “girlfriends” printed on pillowcases.

The article follows a growing trend where Japanese uber-dorks, having given up on reality, have settled for printed images of young anime women on pillow cases and believe they are having real relationships with them. They go on dates with them. In public.

Actually, I’m being far too polite. They are not images of young women. They are little girls. Google the word otaku.

Vive la difference and all that, but I’m going to hang cultural sensitivity here and say, "Not all things are of equal merit". Chucking cultural relativism is sometimes necessary.

Not all cultures are entirely equal. Burning to death five-year-olds because your culture sees them as witches (Nigeria) is not as good as my culture’s tendency to go into a lather of finger pointing when a kid at risk gets missed by DOCS and dies. Both bad. Ours is a preferable type of bad. It goes to intent.


Those two examples are at the extreme of human behaviour, but if you know anything about the trends in Hentai (adult anime), you will know that rape, child exploitation, bestiality, hermaphrodite crime-leagues, non-anthropoid aliens and incest are big sellers.

Rape is rape.

I won’t criticise the hermaphrodite thing too much, assuming that all the chicks-with-dicks are consenting. But the Japanese male’s interest in coquettish girls with truncheons between their legs doesn’t scream well-balanced-heterosexuality to me. Just hanging it out there… as it were.

The incest taboo doesn’t seem to be as strong as it is in the West but if I‘m going to be truly open minded, my only real worry there should be the power differential between the participants. Modern medicine can deal with the rest of the consequences.

Tentacle penetration seems to get an amazing run and I guess if the octopus from another planet is consenting, well, it's not that bad. But you know who is rarely consenting? You guessed it, the young woman tied to the pole being tentacled. I’m going to leave that one too, partly because you don’t have all day, but also because it is so obviously impossible, it has to be a fantasy. We should be able to tell the difference.

But here’s where Japanese men have a completely fucked-up way of thinking about their relationships with women and should be encouraged to think of it as a national disgrace. The amount of doe-eyed, short-skirted, pre-pubescent schoolgirls who are the lead characters in this “art”, is a worry. I don’t think we should mince words about it. The bulk of these characters are underage schoolgirls and they are the objects of fantasy for grown men.

From the article again:

… at the World Congress Against Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents… Japan was singled out for its lax laws relating to child porn. But others claim there’s little connection between paedophilia and “pillow love”, and that the phenomenon has far more to do with the failure of some Japanese men to navigate modern romantic life.

And I can understand how you might fail at navigating modern romantic life if your hobbies were Japan’s national sports; rubbing up against unsuspecting females in the train and appearing on reality shows where you’re rubbed down with banana essence and thrown to some Orang-utans. Biting the pillow seems an obvious choice.

So, as I close the magazine after writing this little rant, there’s Jen Hawkins again. Nearly thirty, nearly nude and totally delicious. She doesn’t appear to be anybody’s fool and I cannot for the life of me understand what the Japanese male sees in an animated, child substitute.