Ah, Japan.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Are you suggesting that beastiality involving cephalopods isn't fucked up?

The lass in your avatar seems to enjoy it.

[Azathoth]

They are more fun when they have a bit of fight left in them.

[Trolldor]

Weird doesn't mean there is anything "bad" about it.

BAA's suggesting it's completely fucked up though.

And it is.

A mainstream, popular selling item is a magazine of teenage girls - thirteen, fourteen - for middle aged and older men. We're talking swim suits and under wear shots. If you're a woman, getting felt up on the train is an every day occurence. They have entire bars where you pay to have dates with hosts/hostesses - and that's it. A very basic dinner and drinks and conversation, and the bills they rack up can be in the hundreds of thousands of Yen for a single night. A lot of the women are below a healthy weight level and that's considered attractive, and it's an obsession on a level that far outpaces any of the issues people think we have here.


Fuck, you can take one look at Sumo wrestling and that sums it up. Kids fattened and trained up for this, to die of weight-related problems in adulthood. And this is considered honorable.

[Pappa]

Are you suggesting that beastiality involving cephalopods isn't fucked up?

Well, if the cephalopod is up for it and of consenting age, who am I to argue.

More seriously though, I was refering to the tentacle fetish rather than the actual bestiality.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I lived there three years. It's weird. There's a BMW dealer on the road from Yokosuka to Tokyo that has a three story atrium as the corner of their shop. One back wall has a Japanese Imperial battle flag. The other has a Nazi battle flag. Both are floor to ceiling, nearly 30 feet long each and wide in proportion. Down the street they have people who meet to dance in pompadours and poodle skirts.

[Ian]

Japan's going to attack the US again, sometime around the year 2050.

Don't believe that? Read this book:
http://books.google.com/books?id=r-g97K ... &q&f=false

Nah, I don't believe it either.

[Pappa]

Weird doesn't mean there is anything "bad" about it.

BAA's suggesting it's completely fucked up though.

And it is.

A mainstream, popular selling item is a magazine of teenage girls - thirteen, fourteen - for middle aged and older men. We're talking swim suits and under wear shots. If you're a woman, getting felt up on the train is an every day occurence. They have entire bars where you pay to have dates with hosts/hostesses - and that's it. A very basic dinner and drinks and conversation, and the bills they rack up can be in the hundreds of thousands of Yen for a single night. A lot of the women are below a healthy weight level and that's considered attractive, and it's an obsession on a level that far outpaces any of the issues people think we have here.


Fuck, you can take one look at Sumo wrestling and that sums it up. Kids fattened and trained up for this, to die of weight-related problems in adulthood. And this is considered honorable.

The Japanese probably say similar things about the rest of the world too. It's easy to see weirdness and/or fuckedupness in a culture if you look at it from the perspective of your own culture.

What would they think of a guy marrying a horse on Gerry Springer, or American parents force feeding their kids McDonalds until they're morbidly obese, or UK Teen magazines encouraging girls to be anorexic, or people breaking their legs and collarbones chasing cheese down a hill, or....

[colubridae]

Weird doesn't mean there is anything "bad" about it.

BAA's suggesting it's completely fucked up though.

And it is.

A mainstream, popular selling item is a magazine of teenage girls - thirteen, fourteen - for middle aged and older men. We're talking swim suits and under wear shots. If you're a woman, getting felt up on the train is an every day occurence. They have entire bars where you pay to have dates with hosts/hostesses - and that's it. A very basic dinner and drinks and conversation, and the bills they rack up can be in the hundreds of thousands of Yen for a single night. A lot of the women are below a healthy weight level and that's considered attractive, and it's an obsession on a level that far outpaces any of the issues people think we have here.


Fuck, you can take one look at Sumo wrestling and that sums it up. Kids fattened and trained up for this, to die of weight-related problems in adulthood. And this is considered honorable.

The Japanese probably say similar things about the rest of the world too. It's easy to see weirdness and/or fuckedupness in a culture if you look at it from the perspective of your own culture.

What would they think of a guy marrying a horse on Gerry Springer, or American parents force feeding their kids McDonalds until they're morbidly obese, or UK Teen magazines encouraging girls to be anorexic, or people breaking their legs and collarbones chasing cheese down a hill, or....

That's just common sense

[Trolldor]

Actually, the Japanese are telling their teenage girls to be anorexic.
They do forcefeed children if they're training them to be Sumos.
They do shit on a daily basis that's more retarded than chasing cheese down a hill - ever seen a Japanese game show?
And as for marrying horses - again, octopus.

[Svartalf]

Man, you ain't even close to the surface of just how fucked up that country is.

It's not fucked up, it's just very different. They've had an entirely different cultural path to everywhere else in the world, it's no wonder some of it seems a bit odd to the rest of us.

It's also fucked up... I mean, that culture is centred around death and self destruction (or at best self negation), and when the self expresses itself, endorses some of the most twisted stuff I've seen anywhere... even Russian mysticism doesn't come close to the subcultures of Japanese paraphilias.

[Svartalf]

Are you suggesting that beastiality involving cephalopods isn't fucked up?

Actually, probably less than bestiality involving stallions... less dangerous... bbut that's one of the least of kinks in the Japanese psyche.

[Trolldor]

More so, actually, because as far as I can tell it's limited to Japan.

[FBM]

I've never heard Koreans saying that Japan is weird, just different. Seems to me that Japan's weirdness is the result of many centuries of cultural inbreeding. Apart from being geographically isolated, they're convinced that their culture/race is superior in the first place, so whatever cultural icons they import from outside are just assimilated into the pre-existing cultural framework (as more weirdness). Japan's popular culture is weird, but not fucked up, if by 'fucked up' you mean degenerate. And it doesn't seem weird if you grew up there, I imagine. Weirdness (and probably fucked-upness) has an inverse relationship to proximity, seems. There are people here in TN who still wear cowboy hats and boots as their 'normal' attire. Srsly. They're not out rustlin' cattle. They're just 'normal' people. I've learned to stop assigning degrees of weirdness or fucked-upness and just enjoy/marvel at/celebrate the diversity.

[Trolldor]

I tend to stop at celebrating it when the culture commercially produces sex toys aimed at replicating under age girls.

[Pappa]

I've never heard Koreans saying that Japan is weird, just different. Seems to me that Japan's weirdness is the result of many centuries of cultural inbreeding. Apart from being geographically isolated, they're convinced that their culture/race is superior in the first place, so whatever cultural icons they import from outside are just assimilated into the pre-existing cultural framework (as more weirdness). Japan's popular culture is weird, but not fucked up, if by 'fucked up' you mean degenerate. And it doesn't seem weird if you grew up there, I imagine. Weirdness (and probably fucked-upness) has an inverse relationship to proximity, seems. There are people here in TN who still wear cowboy hats and boots as their 'normal' attire. Srsly. They're not out rustlin' cattle. They're just 'normal' people. I've learned to stop assigning degrees of weirdness or fucked-upness and just enjoy/marvel at/celebrate the diversity.

+1

I've never been many places in this weird world, but I've read a lot of anthropology books on peoples that have pretty unique cultures. Once upon a time the whole world was a patchwork of small unique cultures. Now Western culture has spread far and wide and in the West, we assume it is normal and everything else weird. It's not normal. It's just widespread due to historical happenstance.