Hello, Anyone Home?

Japan is obsessed by high school girls. They dominate fashion and the media and initiate new trends. In short - they dominate the culture. For the Tokyo media, the fascination never seems to wear off. Everyone is familiar with the clichéd image of short skirts, dyed hair, heavy suntans, and vacant expressions; of girls only one loose-socked step away from the prostitution industry. Although the details of their fashion are sure to change, kogyaru are not about to disappear or relinquish their hold on the Japanese media.

To high school boys, they are an initiation into adult life. To office ladies they are objects of envy. I won’t bother to spell out what they are to middle-aged salarymen – just take a look down any sleazy side street in Tokyo’s entertainment districts around bonus time. To the wives of these same middle-aged salarymen, they are a subject of horror and fascination. To foreign men, they are exotic 'baby women' and quite often their excuse for coming to Japan.

Whatever the reason, everybody seems interested in them but also somehow ashamed of this interest. This forces the media to couch much of its coverage of kogyaru in terms of pompous social concern about the decline of contemporary mores. As for the late night jerk-off programs, this supposed moral decline is a cause for celebration.

Whether people love them or loathe them, there seems to be total agreement that kogyaru are incredibly stupid. I strongly disagree. If there is any stupidity, it comes from society. A girl with a good brain might shun hanging around Shibuya tanning salons and relegate make up and fashion to an ancillary role in her life. After years of study, she might even graduate from a top University and make it into an elite company, but here, of course, her talents will be poured down the drain like a cup of cold ocha.

While she wafts her way around the office photocopying and counting paper clips, her male colleagues will make all the decisions and get all the promotion. After a few years she will be expected to get married. Unfortunately, all the years of self discipline and trying to be professional have taken their toll. Now too dowdy to catch Mr Right, she will be condemned to a life of regret, while the kogyaru mop up all the eligible males.

In a male-dominated society, the path of success for most women lies in learning how to appeal to and manipulate men. Kogyaru are at least intelligent enough to understand this.

Tokyo Classified
(under the name Linda Hontoeniko)
March 13, 1999

Read More...

Ero Manga

Comics are forever associated in the Western mind with the innocence of childhood. The same is true in Japan, but in more complicated way. While comics here cater, as elsewhere, to the undeveloped imaginations of children, there is also a vast market in ero–manga, the Japanese term for erotic comics many of which treat the innocence of children as a subject for sexual titillation.

Beyond its modern facade and imitation American skylines, Japan is a radically different culture from the West. The country’s most famous artist, Hokusai, when he wasn’t producing his famous views of Mt Fuji or portraits of Kabuki actors, was creating shunga (erotic prints), including one that shows an octopus performing cunnilingus on a woman. Indeed to understand this culture and its collective subconscious, it is best to ignore the thick, dusty academic tomes, and turn instead to the well–thumbed pages of manga. It is here that the Japanese are at their most natural and unguarded.

It is also, apparently a very good way to learn the language according to "Japanese Eroticism: A language Guide to Current Comics," translated and edited by Jack Seward. If you ever wanted an excuse to read kiddie porn, for example, then there’s probably no better cover story. However, it would be a bad idea to look up every word you encounter in the dictionary as many of them are gi–seigo (onomatopeia) and can’t be found in any dictionary. Seriously, however, ero–manga are a good way of delving deep into the heart of the Japanese psyche, a place that some people don’t really care to go.

The stories featured in "Japanese Eroticism" include tales of gang banging, sexual slavery and incest. “Tenshitachi wa Tomaranai” or Angels Can’t Stop features what appears to be two elementary or junior high school girls. Kana–chan, who can’t stop playing with her exceptionally large clitoris, and her friend Non–chan, who helps her in all kinds of ways.

Masturbation - manzuri (10,000 rubs) for women and senzuri (1,000 rubs) for men - as a kind of pre–sexuality, is of course a convenient way to introduce children into this kind of material. Jack Seward, who has received the Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Japanese monarch for his efforts to deepen understanding and friendship between Japan and America struggles to explain the Japanese predilection for depictions of underage sexuality: “Perhaps the girls are seen as easier to dominate in male fantasies. And perhaps because they are virginal but sexually curious, they incite in the male reader an urge to introduce them to the joys of sex with him exclusively.”

“Dorei Shitei,” Brother and Sister Slaves, also features very young–looking protagonists, a boy and his big sister who are forced to perform acts of incest to entertain a young mistress. The action takes place at a large, ersatz European stately home. In a country where family members live in cramped proximity, incest and incestuous desires are, of course, a great unspoken issue.
Another story, this one with the English title “All Is Vanity,” also features an ersatz European setting and seems to play off the Sound of Music with a young nun basically being gang–banged and humiliated by a group of soldiers and learning to love it. This clearly plays up to the sexist male fantasy that many women want to be raped and enjoy it. However, it should not be imagined that ero–manga are solely for men. Its origins are traced to the makura–e, or pillow books that doting parents used to place under their daughters’ pillows before their wedding.

Considering that ero–manga basically started off as how–to–guides for prospective brides, it really shouldn’t be a surprise that there is today a vast market in erotic manga designed for women. These are usually called 'Ladies Comics.' Kaoru Yoshida at Ai, one of the leading publications in this field explained the main difference between female ero–manga and the male variety.
“In mangas for women there is always a happy end for the lady. Stories are written from the woman’s point of view, which usually translates into more action by women and less passivity.”

The fact that they are written from the woman’s point of view doesn’t mean that they are only written by women.
“Our writers are very diverse, men and women, married and single, young and old. Generally they are professionals who also do other kinds of mangas. The interesting point, however, is the fact that male writers use female names.”

Unlike the old makura–e, however, 'ladies comics' are more of a post–nuptial than pre–nuptial aide. Most of our readers are females between the ages of 20 and 40, and mainly housewives. While hubby works late at the office, the neglected spouse is giving herself ‘ten thousand’ rubs often fantasizing about having sex with foreigners if some of the pages of Ai are anything to go by.

The latest edition features a foreigner with a long schlong and a cute cover shot of a blonde couple canoodling. So are Japanese ladies wild for foreign men?
“Not really. Like in commercials, we're creating a dream world, different from reality.”
No surprise - were just being used again!

With ero–manga Japan's vague and logically inconsistent censorship rules are even more unclear. Different from photo magazines, there are no concrete rules for porno mangas.
"It varies from prefecture to prefecture how mangas like this are judged and the censorship is handled. While something is OK in Tokyo, people in Asahikawa might think that it’s bad for the little ones, so there it will be banned."

One final difference between men and women's ero–manga is the way the protagonists are depicted. Men's ero–manga will often feature old, ugly, or fat men fucking beautiful young girls. In ladies' ero–manga the men, of course, are handsome and very attentive, but the women themselves are almost always depicted with beautiful bodies, especially with large breasts - more as the readers would like to be than they really are.

Tokyo Journal
April 2000

Read More...

A Rose by Any Other Name

Late 1943 – after a few successes, the war in the Pacific is now going well for the Americans, but casualties are mounting. Following landings on the tiny Pacific island of Tarawa, in which over 1,000 US Marines had been killed by 2,600 heavily outnumbered Japanese, it is starting to sink in just how long and drawn out this war is going to be.

From the very beginning, this was the Japanese plan – to grab a vast defensive perimeter, then doggedly defend each and every inch of it in the hope of breaking America’s will to attack. This war is not just about firepower. It is also about which side can take the most punishment, and, here, the Japanese think they have detected a key American weakness, a weakness they aim to exploit to the utmost.

Their key weapon in this struggle is a 27-year-old native of Los Angeles, a Japanese American stranded in Japan on the outbreak of WWII while visiting relatives and interned. The ‘Zero Hour’ starring Iva Toguri as Tokyo Rose is about to take to the airwaves.

The ‘Zero Hour’ had actually been running since March 1943. It was a typical by-the-book propaganda radio show, featuring popular music, punctuated by messages from POWs, snippets of genuine news censored by the Allies, and occasional calls to surrender or sabotage the war effort. Just like the broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw from Nazi Germany to Britain during the London Blitz, it provoked a mixture of disdain and amusement.

Nevertheless, there were good reasons why the Japanese decided to continue with the program and develop it. Unlike the situation in Britain, where the nation’s contempt for Lord Haw-Haw’s sneering tone had been steeled by the threat of imminent invasion, the Americans in the Pacific were fighting a long way from home. With the war turning into a grueling, island-hopping campaign of attrition, there was every reason to expect American morale to erode. This reflected the opinion of the Japanese military caste that US troops were basically selfish individualists unwilling to risk their lives in a long-term, high-risk war that didn’t directly concern them. The key was to simply speed up this process of demoralization through the skillful use of propaganda.

The decision taken in November 1943 to use a female announcer was in line with Japanese propaganda objectives. The basic message being sent out to the average grunt was that he was a long way from home, and putting his neck on the line in a war from which he personally had nothing to gain and plenty to lose. Major Shigetsugu Tsuneishi, who had devised the program, rightly guessed that US troops would find it harder to ignore this message if it was ‘sugar-coated’ in a female voice.

Iva Toguri, who had been surviving by working as a typist at Radio Tokyo, agreed to do the broadcasts. She had already struck up friendships with several POWs working on the program, like Major Charles H. Cousens of the Australian Army, who had been threatened with execution if he did not cooperate. Toguri’s motivation seems to have been a feeling of sympathy for these prisoners. Perhaps, like them, she managed to convince herself that the program would have little impact on the war.

Ironically, the sympathetic tone that Toguri imparted helped ensure the program’s popularity and thus made it more effective as propaganda. Although it was still seen as a hopeless attempt to undermine Allied morale, the mere fact that it was listened to ensured that its message got through. The romantic tone of the music played made it easy for the program’s controllers to foment feelings of homesickness, separation from loved ones, and even jealousy, as the scripted messages reminded GIs that many of their wives and girlfriends back home were probably feeling just as lonely as they were, and in a position to do much more about it. This, clearly, would have engendered feelings of cynicism and have made many GIs think twice about risking their lives.

Whatever the show’s direct effect on the war, Tokyo Rose’s voice became something of an aural pinup, a soundtrack to go with the posters of Betty Grable or Ginger Rogers posted on barrack lockers or stowed away in kitbags. This star quality, however, was to backfire badly following the Occupation. In September 1945, Toguri was arrested, but quickly released as there was no more evidence against her than there was against people like Major Cousens, who had written many of her propaganda segments. Believing that she was now safe, Toguri began to trade on her name as ‘Tokyo Rose,’ selling stories to the media and declaring that she was the one and only Tokyo Rose, although several other female announced had also filled the role.

When it was announced that she was returning to the States, the broadcaster Walter Winchell, the Rush Limbaugh of his day, denounced her as a traitor cashing in on her infamy, stirring up a media storm that even President Truman couldn’t ignore, leading to a trial on charges of treason. Although concrete evidence was hard to come by, Toguri was finally convicted on one lame count of mentioning American shipping losses on her program, receiving 10 years in a US prison. Learning the lesson that the nail that sticks up gets hammered down even in America, Toguri spent the rest of her life living quietly in Chicago, helping out in the family store. She was pardoned in 1977.

While some still see her as a traitor who willingly collaborated, others take the opposite view that she was in fact a patriot and a heroine, who only worked on the show to help the POWs and did everything in her power to subvert the broadcasts by using odd pauses and ironic intonation. Even if the show did reduce American fighting spirit, it is still hard to blame Iva Toguri for what she did. The only crime she was really guilty of was becoming too famous, and this had as much to do with lonely GIs separated from the wives and girlfriends as it did with the odd circumstances that placed Iva Toguri in front of a microphone.

Metropolis
October 22, 2006

Read More...