I heard that in Japan it is a common practice for mothers to have sex with their sons to keep them focused on their schoolwork. This is just a sick joke, right?
Stupid me just attempted a google for - mother, sex, incest, japan. Stupid me. But I would basically say stop watching so much Japanese porn.
My bullshit-sense is tingling…
I grew up in asia, though not japan (Hong Kong, if you’re interested), and the views on education are similar: VERY tough disciplining from the parents which results in disturbingly high suicide rates amongts school going children.
Now, if one mother did this, I don’t know… but I don’t think you’ll find any correlation amongst the greater population.
It is an urban legend, possibly originating with prank calls made to volunteer organizations. Despite the mythological indiscretions of gods and goddesses, the Japanese have the same incest taboos as most of the western world.
Or it might be a variation of the story from this old thread:
Do Japanese Mothers Masturbate Their Sons To Put Them To Sleep?.
There too this notion was put to sleep, but in a different way.
One of the functions of folklore is to serve as a sort of social steam valve. Americans have certain beliefs about the Japanese: that they work harder and longer hours than we do, that they are better and math, science, and business than we are. There’s some truth as well as some falsehood in these beliefs, but the main point is that we feel some minor social anxiety that the Japanese are out-performing us. One of the ways we relieve this anxiety is to circulate beliefs and narratives about the horrible price the Japanese pay: they live in overcrowded conditions, their family life suffers because of their work hours, their educational system is cruel, they engage in bizarre sexual practices. Again, some truth and some falsehood. So a story like this, though untrue as given in the OP, still has a function.
Can’t find a cite right now, but several years ago I was told that (at least in tokyo) it was common to call a landlady in a boarding house “mother” and the other tenants “brother” or “sister” (depending on sex obviously).
Perhaps your story is a misunderstood translation of a tenant getting lucky that grew in the telling?
I’d do a lot better in school if some Japanese mothers had sex with me every now and then. As long as they weren’t too old.
Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope and Nope.
Urban legends, as well as the OP. But please feel free to find that cite.
It’s an urban legend, derived from perceived extremes of the kyoiku mama (education mother) stereotype. Dr. Drake’s idea is interesting, but I’m afraid that this UL exists among the Japanese as well.
The way I heard it was that Japanese is the only culture in which mother/son incest is more common than father/daughter - not common, just more common. Somewhat less rare. But no I have no cite and have no intention of searching for one here on my work PC.
Again, I’d like to see the cite, so we can wait until after work.
There is a high occurance of men who cannot cut the apron strings, even into their 30s. This is well-discussed amoung the Japanese as well, and is a common complaint from women who have dated such men, but this does not (typically) extend to incest.
Two of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of Japan are sexuality and work/study. I’ve heard more misconceptions about these two areas than most others.
There are generic titles for people older than you, like there are in Korean. I would never call a girl older than me by her name - I would call her “unnee” (or oneesan, I think it is, in Japanese), but that is the same whether she’s my older sister or just a girl that is older than me whom I’m on familiar terms with. Likewise, I would call a much older woman than me “ahjoomma,” be she a relative or a person I met on the street. There are no English translations for these words, so they just tend to get translated as “aunt” “older sister” “older brother” etc.
Well I was primarily posting to suggest a somewhat more likely version of the factoid in the OP. But I had missed the “to help in their schoolwork” thing, which is clearly totally silly.
I’ve read this too. Unfortunetly, it was in the subtitles of a pornographic Japanese cartoon. Probably not an authoritative cite.
I’ve heard the story described in the OP from this article. I have no idea how reliable it is, however.
Work safe link, by the way. Japanese version of MSN.
I think that article must have been published on “bring your reclusive sister who writes porny fanfic to work day”. :dubious:
With or without help for homework – is this a more likely scenerio? I’d like to see a cite for the reference that Japan is the only culture with this bias in incest.
:smack: Rereading Rabbit’s post, it’s not what I first thought, which was that boarding house landladies were giving out sex. They could be called “mother” but most are old enough to be “grandmother.”
The original source for the Japanese article from which this is translated is the Asahi Geino, which is at least as reliable as the National Enquirer. If you have time, check out the archives. They’re a hoot.
You know, Anne Allison’s Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) has a whole chapter [1] devoted to these rumors of overzealous kyoiku mamas (“education mamas”), those (allegedly) willing to do anything to help their sons pass entrance exams into prestigious high schools. Hers is a complex and very detailed analysis, worth reading in its entirety, but difficult to summarize here (and I think I’d get in trouble for posting too many relevant excerpts).
In essence, though, she argues that while incest exists in Japan, it’s no more prevalent in that country than it is in its industrialized counterparts. Moreover, while it’s obviously possible that a few such creepy incidents may have taken place in the family home, there’s no evidence that this particular scenario between overworked and overstressed schoolboys and their over-devoted mothers is at all pervasive in Japanese society or accepted by it.
Allison observes that these mother-son incest tales seem to have emerged in the mid-1970s; they likely reflect a long-submerged societal reaction to the constant pressure of having to rebuild a society devastated by war, one whose definition by traditional social structures was supplanted by the (imposed) adoption of American ways of life, where (men’s) professional performance (and sons’ school performance) had been the means of getting to the top of the heap.
Gender roles, she tells us, in Japan had been up until the ‘60s and ‘70s fairly strictly defined, with the home and family the expected focuses of most women. It was as women began to enter the male-dominated business world that these deviant “education mama” stories started to appear; Allison points out that, as of 2000 at least, these tales were being told with less frequency.
This narrative, like any good urban legend, holds a twist. The shock is that it’s the Japanese mother (and wife) who somehow manages to gain the upper hand over the males in her life: she either acquiesces to her son’s “needs” (or demands) or “enslaves” him (not only to insure the family’s goal that he do well, but also – in some versions – to gain the sexual satisfaction she never is able to achieve with his ever-absent working father), and at the same time she manages to have an illicit “affair” within her husband’s house, a form of payback for his own straying outside the marriage. Interestingly, the mothers depicted are not always portrayed as martyrs or villains; sometimes these tales show women achieving liberation (in terms of sexuality and power) by means of these twisted relationships. Males with traditional views about gender roles are perhaps alternately threatened, fascinated, repulsed, and titillated by such stories.
– Tammi Terrell
[1] Chapter 6, “Transgressions of the Everyday: Stories of Mother-Son Incest in Japanese Popular Culture” (pp. 123-145).
I must say, Tammi, your presence is welcome - but it took you 7 years to make 40 posts?
Nice post, BTW. Welcome back.