Japanese Pedo-fascination

The first thing that comes to mind is Kabooom!!, followed by a series of images and thoughts about the wisdom of dropping bombs on civilians. Beyond that, I think their manufacturing base is a model of cooperation that has kept industry alive and well in Japan while American industries have failed. It's surprising that American industry has continued to ignore Japan's successful cooperative model of industry, preferring to continue with competitive and predatory models.

In the world of art, I don't have much experience with the Japanese culture. My mother used to have an original Hiroshige. Now, whenever I see 'wave' art, I think of Hiroshige because of that art my mother had hanging on a wall.



I've always been fascinated by Geisha. When I was younger, they had a reputation for being exotic prostitutes. However, the myth doesn't match what I've read. Instead, I've read that they are entertainers and about the enormous amount of hard work required to earn the right to be a geisha. I've always been fascinated by origins. The geisha had to emerge from some cultural phenomenon.

When I think of Japan, the first idea that forms is the idea of 'tradition'. I have this idea that Japan is a very traditional culture. Those traditional values have waned in the face of modernity, but they still provide a foundation. Most of what I see about Japan comes though media channels. I have to be honest, some of it is a bit weird.

Some of it reminds me of that weird period in the 80's when Americans were experimenting with fashion, following the strange ebbs and flows of a then-new visual phenomenon called MTv. Remember Boy George and A Flock of Seagulls!! We had weird hair and parachute pants. Japan is experimenting with cicada shells.

It appears Japan is experiencing their own period of experimentation. I occasionally see images that show new Japanese fads. There was a contact-lens fad where girls were wearing oversized contact lenses in order to mimic wide-anime-pupils. I also remember a fad where girls were dressing themselves life-sized human dolls, also wearing big black doll-eye contact lenses. There is also a comic-style art called Lolicon (Lolita complex) that sexualizes children. And finally, I recall an article I once read where girls' panties were being sold in vending machines to capitalize on sexual fetish. And I suppose what people do in their own privacy is 'private' for a reason.

A trend that is geared toward objectifying women, and particularly one that naturalizes pedophilia grants cultural permission for the exploitation of minors and suggests that just beneath the surface there are deep and disturbing fissures running through Japanese culture. I think those deepening fissures might be caused by incongruities between tradition and post-modernism.