East and West comparisons: Is anime really just post-watershed terrestrial softcore fap-o-vision?
July 18, 2006
| Is guro really that hot? The Japanese think so!
I was reading the paper on the way to work today, and it came to my attention that the paedo-politicians in the Netherlands that Lolitron blogged about a few months ago have not been overruled by the courts, and they have been allowed to run as a political party. Luckily for the Dutch children, they only have three members and one is unlikely to gain support, as he is a convicted child molester. However, it got me thinking about something that had been bugging me for a while now about the content of anime (both in the non-adult and adult industries) as opposed to say, the American adult film industry.
For instance, in the Toppest 10 hentai anime review in Oniichan no ecchi a while back, the top few contain at least violent rape and bondage, with some scattered tentacles, enemas, scat and guro thrown in for good measure (c.f. Bible Black O_o)
| Is loli twincest really that hot? THE INTARWEB THINKS SO!
Also, even in mainstream anime, even though I blog about it in a rather blase fashion, lolicon and yuri are rife without anyone really so much as batting an eyelid (Well, except Mimei Sakamoto, anyway O_o). But on mainstream Japanese TV, full though it is with dubious JDramas and rivetting quiz shows, these themes are completely and mysteriously absent.
In British TV, for example, any shows with lesbian or gay relationships are to be celebrated as a great step forward in television history (unless they really are very bad, c.f. Queer as Folk), with the currently running Sugar Rush (Channel 4), and the BBC Production of “Tipping the velvet” as prime examples. But in no way is this mainstream.
In the Western adult industry, although lesbian themes are relatively mainstream, any fetishes to do with bodily fluids such as scat are considered very niche, and violent rape and guro are more or less underground.
I guess the main point of this short editorial is a question: Are the Japanese really that perverted that they need these things so close to the public eye? I sure as hell don’t want to see scat in any porn I watch, and guro? Who watches that kind of thing? *shudders*
| Is crab bestiality really th….oh you get the idea -_-
My theory is that in contrast to their inoffensive, vanilla-flavoured pre watershed TV, everything post-watershed and on DVD is shifted up in acceptability terms by a notch. What I mean by this is that general nudity (fanservice) and lesbian (yuri) themes become commonplace, whereas violence and extreme sexual practises become borderline acceptable.
Of course, the fact that it ISN’T REAL helps a lot ^_^
Basically, I can see that a lot of anime (especially the shows that I like) seems to be comparable to what gets shown on Channel 5 post watershed (Digikerot might know what I mean by that). And beneath the polite honourable shell of Japanese men and women is a sexual deviant clamouring to get out.
And I haven’t even started talking about the incest O_o
Yuri to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito 
July 18, 2006 at 5:59 pm
It made me feel a lot better when I found out that people got totally freaked out by the guro scenes in Muv-Luv Alternative. Until I found out about that, I had always assumed that every anime/eroge fan was totally desensitized to every kind of Bad Things(tm).
July 18, 2006 at 6:07 pm
I don’t lower myself to watching Channel 5.
Honest! ^^;
July 18, 2006 at 9:16 pm
I think there’s a lot differences that people don’t consider. They think Japan and they think buttoned down and conformist and all, that, but it’s rapidly changing away from that. Artistic expression is one of those ways that they are doing so, so a lot of the “questionable” content you see is trying to stay true to a story.
Another of the things I’ve noticed is that many of these observations about lewdness and so on come from priamrily Christian countries, which is not toe say the complainer is Christian, but in those countries people are raised with different ideals. Questions like “Are the Japanese really that perverted that they need these things so close to the public eye?” seem to imply that there’s something wrong with sex, or liking sex, or wanting to be aroused, which I don’t think is as big an issue in Japan, at least for older people. Children are taught frank things about sex and relationships from their parents (skinships and sleeping in their parent’s bed is a large part of this. It also causes a bit of a break in the family divide that we see in our own country, making that would mama/sis-con thing a little more obvious and easily explained, not that they should be doing that stuff anyway) The views on sex, and eroticism and etc. are largely different over there. While Buddhism does have a bit of a stigma against rampant promiscuity, it’s not as strict by far as Christianity and other Judaic religions, and the same holds true for Buddhism in and of itself. There’s not guarantee of hell for sinners and all that. It’s more a of self-study program. Byeond that, many Japanese claim to be Buddhists but don’t really care about it that much, further removing the influence surrounding any rules against getting it up.
So far as scat and guro are concerned, I have seen very little of both of those in the larger percentage of hentai. Rape you see a lot as men like the idea of being powerful and that’s what they conveys, like it or not. Of course, there are even female fetishists who like that sort of thing themselves, so there you go. Tentacles came around as a way to bypass censorship laws, and sort of blossomed from there. And anyway, after a while, you will dissociate that negative feeling you get when you see this or that fetish in action and your brain will pick up on the erotism inherit in the action itself. That’s how sexuality works, for men at least, and I think the Japanese have been consuming erotism for a lot longer than we have in America, especially in animated form, which takes off the moral and physical constraints of the real world.
I guess that’s about all I have to say about it. I probably forgot something. Haha.
July 19, 2006 at 7:23 am
I agree with the dissociation thing, since I have become so blase about a number of these things it shows that I am pretty much resistant to anything Japan can throw at me.
Also I didn’t say that scat and guro are commonplace, rather that they are a lot more popular and less niche ideas. But I see what you mean.
Of course the opinion that I seem to have failed to include in this is that I approve of this entirely ^_^. Go Japan; lead the push to a better industry!
July 19, 2006 at 1:06 pm
Yep, the above commenter is right. There is the general fact that the anime you see here isn’t all that is shown over there. Fanservice is prominent in TV anime as well and has been for many years – you even saw panties in Dragonball(at least in the episodes on our local TV that I dared to watch(before swearing never doing so again) I saw these). It’s not just DVD, and yes, there is also Yuri in TV series(in fact there always was, several children series features characters that were gay, take Sailormoon or Utena, just for two animes that are well known in the west).
Homosexuality is getting more and more accepted in Japan, and thus it slowly gets more mentionings, in “normal” TV as well. For example, several actors and singers have been outed during the last decade, and none of them had any trouble, whereas thirty years ago, it ruined careers. Nowadays, there is even an openly lesbian politican acting in Osaka. Just like over here, such themes simply crawl back. Remember, one of the biggest reasons that stuff vanished was the westernisation of Japan, where it was outlawed(since the oh-so-advanced west did as well). The amount of shunga(basically drawn porn, for example stuff by Katsushika Hokusai done around 1810…the same guy did tentacle porn, by the way) showing homosexual sex isn’t small. Some of the most famous “novels” (actually more like a series of novels) in Edo Japan featured a guy who had 3000 lovers – including 800 men(yes, I am not kidding, he had that many lovers, and around a quarter were men, which he had graphic sex with – and that was a popular story, says a lot, no?).
That’s the reason why homosexuality is on the rise. Stuff gets accepted more, thus displayed more, nevermind that Japan is in a process of individualisation, the ideal of being normal, married, working is crumbling rapidly(Source: There are official polls that show a RAPID decline in that as an ideal – so much for the “homogenous” japanese)
One of these changes is simply that homosexuality as a concept is more and more seen as acceptable. And thus you get to see more. First in Anime, and in regular TV/society a little later. But it is a process that is happening right now.
Loli, Guro, Scat, on the other hand, are all completely different things. They are so prominent in the west because the people who are interested in hentai like that stuff and bring it over. I doubt the west gets most japanese porn.
But then, I can’t really talk much about porn, since I really don’t have much of an interest in that.
July 19, 2006 at 1:10 pm
By the way, any chance to offlink these pictures instead of showing them directly? Especially the first and the third are supremely disgusting, and I don’t really know if you should keep them up like this when a simple offlink with a warning would suffice :(
I really didn’t expect to see -that- in a blog like this. ^^;
July 19, 2006 at 5:51 pm
Was the third picture really that disgusting?
I apologise. I will refrain from posting any pictures of nude crabs ever again. When I get the new site up, hopefully I will be able to get the escerpt thing working and marking things with “NOT SAFE FOR WORK” will work better.
But then again, you probably should have known better, coming to a blog mainly about girl/girl fanservice in anime ^_^
July 20, 2006 at 3:56 pm
The third picture was kawaii, long as you don’t look at it a nasty way.
July 21, 2006 at 5:14 am
I think the first picture is made of sex and win. Haha. SHE COULD RUB HER CLIT ON THE SPORTING BLOOD VESSELS! IT’S HOT!! COME ON!!!
August 21, 2007 at 4:34 am
I wish I could still flinch to that kind of gore, but it’s somewhat thanks to the US’s granted “culture of violence”, oy. I got that from Bowling For Columbine. It was a good doc just like Moore’s other stuff and on TV and in RATM Music Videos(I heard that he actually directed or produced it, oy). For the 3rd picture, though. I couldn’t help but have dirty thoughts, oy.
October 29, 2007 at 7:10 am
All about ford cars and parts smooth criminalsmooth criminal
December 20, 2007 at 6:03 am
I would like to see a continuation of the topic