Are they a nation of pedophiles? Sure, you can argue different tradition, Westerners shouldn’t judge, blah blah, but it really looks to me like middle-aged men lusting after barely pubescent schoolgirls. A pedo is a pedo is a pedo.
I just don’t get it. Is there no stigma attached to this at all? Aren’t parents concerned for their young daughters? If they did a Japanese To Catch A Predator would the audience be cheering on the predators?
Have the Japanese always had this fixation or is this a comparatively recent phenomenon? And BTW don’t get me wrong, I know there’s a large Western market for this school kiddie stuff too, but the difference is that in the West there certainly is a stigma attached to it.
Schoolgirl uniforms are sexy and all girls in the nation wear them. That’s really all there is to it.
If you walk down the street in Kabukicho in Shinjuku (sort of a red light district), you’ll see that the range of outfits you can get the girls in includes nurse, teacher, policewoman, and school girl. If you look on a UK porn website, you’ll find those same outfits. The only difference is that in the UK, they don’t make nubile young teens dress like that on a daily basis.
Now, this isn’t to say that Japan isn’t a country brimming with sexual frustration and a sporting very wide gap between any sort of communication going on between men and women. But, this particular occurrence is largely unrelated.
Sexy nurse, sexy stewardess, sexy cheerleader… the West has its own cosplay fetishes and YES it ALSO includes sexy schoolgirl. Look up Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time video or the beginning of Aerosmith’s Crazy video or T.A.T.U.'s one-hit-wonder All the Things She Said. Extra points for some of the performers mentioned actually being under 18 at the time.
Meanwhile, live-action Japanese schoolgirl porn is just adults dressed in uniforms, and Animé porn is… cel ink and computer graphics.
Sure, Japanese parents are quite concerned about their daughters, of course. Even in a low-crime society like Japan it’s a concern. And never mind a minor, I’m pretty sure that they would also see 82-year-old grandpa carousing with three 20-something girlfriends as somewhat awkward to bring up at the family reunion (OK, unless granddad is Hugh Hefner… heck, and even then,sometimes…).
But what do you want them to do, march to demand a ban on the schoolgirl fetish? Would solve nothing.
The OP misses a couple of things:
(1) Having a trope be popular in porn is NOT indicative that the general society favors or tolerates that as part of everyday sexual behavior. Let’s look at Western pop tropes. How often are pizza delivery guys and plumbers paid in sex? How often do Secretaries take “dick-tation”? How likely is the state trooper who stops a female motorist to accept her enticements instead of writing a ticket? When was the last time the stewardess leaned across 12C to fellate the passenger in 12B? How common is it for a rape to progress from “No! Don’t! Stop!” to “No, don’t stop!” ? The most likely outcome of all those fantasy scenarios being attempted IRL, would be someone getting arrested. There would be great stigma attached to trying to make those fantasies your everyday reality.
(2) “A pedo is a pedo is a pedo”? If in the frame of reference in which the discourse occurs, the subject is NOT*** a “child”***, the guy hitting on her is NOT a “pedo”. Not any more than anyone who was checking out Britney’s pert little tuchus in the above-referenced video. Which you and I know the video WAS made for that effect. Many people refuse to stick with the strict definition of pedophile, someone attracted to children, and tag as such anyone hitting on anyone excessively younger, a common cradle-robbin’ Dirty Old Man.
Neoteny is hardly unique to Japanese pr0n, as evidenced by all the American porn sites which advertise “Hot Young Teens”, “Barely Legal”, “Just Turned 18”, etc.
Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Japan have a long-standing taboo against showing pubic hair?
Based on what little I’ve seen (I own a bookstore and we sell graphic novels), these girls are definitely not pre-pubescent, which means the men lusting after them are, by definition, not pedophiles.
There are other weird things about the Japanese also:
Why are they obsessed with the “Bishonen” (beautiful boy) that is so prevalent in manga and anime? The Bishonen aesthetically is completely NON-Japanese; in fact, Nicholas Hilliard was doing the whole “beautiful young man” thing 350 years before manga existed; his portraiture depicted idealized, feminine-looking men with delicate facial features and large eyes. The Japanese seem obsessed with this European looking character, inevitably with blond or red hair and a pointy little nose that I have never seen on any Asian person.
No, the Japanese “beautiful feminine boy” esthetic is on the order of 1000 years old (look in Leupp’s Male Colors on Google Books for discussion of wakashu). It’s just the definition of “beautiful” has been updated, from long face and tiny features (NSFW c.1680 print; both of the clothed figures are boy prostitutes; sections of a c.1750 scroll by Miyagawa Isshô showing men with their bishōnen lovers), to the modern “soft masculinity” prettyboy style. (Also, the target audience has changed from male to female, but that’s a different story.) And as a matter of fact, “manga style” characters ARE NOT intended to look Western. Believe Matt Thorn, he’s the world’s biggest (English-speaking) expert on shoujo manga.
If they’re not intended to look Western why do they always have blond hair, blue eyes, and straight, pointed noses? You will never, ever, ever see a Japanese person who looks lie this, but the character depicted (as well as nearly every other image-search result for “bishonen”) looks like he could have been directly lifted from a Hilliard miniature. I don’t really buy Matt Thorn’s argument; maybe the characters are not actually supposed to BE European but they most certainly look it.
The character in that picture has bright red hair and green eyes – colours that tend to be used in anime and manga for symbolic, rather than realistic, effect. If he had black hair and brown eyes, he’d look more Japanese.
I’ve seen some Japanese men that could pass for that pic. I did a quick google search for Japanese Men and found this. Of course the eye and hair color aren’t right, but anime has plenty of eye and hair colors that don’t exist in the real world.
Hair and eye color in manga and anime are largely notional, to differentiate characters, not necessarily a reflection of how the character is supposed to actually look as a person. (Red, pink and purple hair anybody? Here is Greenwood is a fairly “reality-based” series, and no-one ever thinks these guys look in the least unusual.) I’ve read several manga where a character’s eyes went from green to blue to purple and the hair from blonde to brown to grey in the color pages of different chapters, based on however the artist felt like drawing them at the time. It’s also common for a pair of characters who have “black” and “blond” hair in the B&W interior art to be shown with “brown” and “slightly-lighter-brown” hair in color art. People who are actually supposed to be Western have big noses (not dainty pointy noses) and square jaws, and frequently freckles. Nowadays there’s a tendency to justify this by having characters explicitly say that they bleach or dye their hair, but it’s still mostly notional.
More importantly is that nearly all anime and manga centers on high schoolers. But given that this is the core market for these products, that’s really not all that big a mystery.
Definitely, they’re all pædophiles. It’s not even possible that the attraction has anything to do with regression to a safer, more innocent time in their sexual development, say, when the males in question were barely pubescent and just beginning to notice girls in school girl uniforms. That’s inconceivable.
