Monday, March 3, 2008

Chikan ha hanzai desu!



Greetings Again,

To get back on track with this blog, let me briefly discuss pornography and sexual advertisements.

Simply put, in Japan, porn is EVERYWHERE. You can find it in convenience stores (which in Japan are every 30 meters), and every Tsutaya (popular video rental store). Not to mention every city has a porn shop and various sex businesses (i.e.
電車でゴーゴー in Hirakatashi). The quantity can be overwhelming. And the shear variety borders on nauseating...correction, is nauseating. I won’t go into too many details, but there are definitely 6 floor porn shops throughout Tokyo and Osaka.

There are definitely some inconsistencies here though. Everywhere and anywhere, pornographic images are placed in front of you. However, the porn itself is required to be censored in Japan, and hardly anyone is comfortable with openly talking about sex. The enormous amount of sexual content accompanied with the Japanese ‘keep it to yourself’ attitude is a sexual incident waiting to happen. Things like groping on trains are all too common (many of my female friends have been groped on more than one occasion). There are even all women train cars to help prevent this kind of thing. The all too famous Densha de Go Go provides an opportunity to pay to grope women on a fake train (so I hear). Japan must be an extremely sexually frustrated country. I guess in a country full of perfect 10 super-models it’s to be expected.

But seriously, groping women on a crowded train should not be commonplace. What’s the deal?

No comments: