[…]Furthermore, the capitalistically conditioned modern porn viewers seem totally complicit to such a system. And sex sells, in Japan as much as it does anywhere else. Quoting anthropologist Anne Allison, who specializes in Japanese society, Udo Helms writes:

The packaging of bodily exposure that decenters or obscures genitalia is big business. It sells products and is productive itself of a construction of leisure that is sold to Japanese consumers as escapist recreation. The state has in fact endorsed and encouraged a sexual economy of a particular order, one that evades the state surveillance of pubic realism and therefore constructs the stimulation and simulation of sexuality as a fantasy. Such mass sexual tropes as voyeurism, infantilization, and sadomasochism are something other than ‘obscene’ and other than ‘real”. (140)

Pornography is incredibly common and normalized in Japan, and its kinkier, more violent subgenres are nearly as common. It isn’t unthinkable to see a man on the subway flipping through a manga comic where twelve year old girls perform sado-masochistic acts on one another. Apparently, “a Japanese civil servant has been demoted for visiting porn sites more than 780,000 times over nine months while at work… upon discovery, the man, whose name is not being released to the public, was not fired. However his pay was docked by $190 a month” (Maclean’s). Pornography is so normalized and deeply integrated into Japanese society that this sort of misbehavior at work is frowned upon, but won’t result in termination.

A woman’s body part in a basic, non-sexual state, is unacceptable. Meanwhile, women are objectified and humiliated and abused and raped and filmed for pornographic entertainment – and the Japanese government writes this off as fit for the public and good for the economy just so long as there’s a black bar over any exposed genitalia.

[…]Commentators with a wider historical perspective than the latest fan favourites are aware that moe goes back much further than the millenium. Rooted in fetish, some of its imagery derives from porn anime like the Cream Lemon series, which appeared as a result of the emergence of home video in 1984. (Interestingly, Cream Lemon‘s longest-running single strand was the saga of an older brother’s incestuous fixation on his sister.) Anime blog Colony Droppicks up on 1986 porn parody anime Cosmos Pink Shock. Tezuka had already been there, and had already filtered out the sex and replaced it with romantic and protective longing.

“[…]The conflation of child-like innocence and adult desire has been employed for decades in Japanese pornography surrounding schoolgirls. In most cases, uniforms, the fetishized signifier of innocent status and character, remains in spite of, and even during, sexualization to provide a target for desire.”

[…] females are perceived as cute only if they revert back to their childish identities — both physically and mentally.

Kawaii-ism may be cute and cuddly on the outside, but it’s laced with an age-old idea that women should be kawaii, demure and submissive. Is it a pure coincidence that Wonder Woman had to be remarketed for it to appeal to the masses here?!

The period of advanced economic development and material affluence from the 1960s to the 1970s was also the time when anime, manga, game and character merchandisers in Japan promoted extreme consumption among youth. Ootsuka Eiji, for example, explains the conditioning of young girls into ‘pure consumers’ (junsui na shouhisha) (Ootsuka 1984). To expand the consumer base, marketers disseminated an image of cute (kawaii) in fashion magazines and shoujo (for girls) manga, and encouraged young women to buy cute merchandise and accessories to fill up their rooms and construct identity. Such a space is disconnected from social and political concerns, and exists for the preservation of the individual. Broadly, the same argument can be made for otaku subculture,which Ootsuka states was surrounded by media and unconcerned with the social and political in the 1980s, and Azuma argues consumed as a way to build personal and group identity. Indeed, Ootsuka has suggested that today many Japanese, including boys, are becoming ’shoujo’ (little girl) consumers in that they are surrounded by comforting media and merchandise and consume endlessly to support their spaces and notions of self.

https://cl34nslate.tumblr.com/post/186019457631/pe-lila-article-here-amazing-that-this-is#notes

“After I graduated from high school, I was no longer a schoolgirl, and so I no longer wore a school uniform. As soon as that happened, the frequency with which I encountered chikan immediately dropped by a huge amount, and when I realized that, I was filled with despair. Chikan realize that wearing a school uniform means that the girl is a minor, and it’s insane how in this country a uniform becomes an icon that makes the wearer a target for this kind of behavior.” over 3,000 people replied to this tweet with similar experiences such as: “The same thing happened with me. I often encountered chikan when I was in high school, but that stopped almost entirely once I got into college. There are weid guys out there who are really into high school students and have Lolita complexes.” “They probably think that because they’re minors, they won’t realize what’s going on and will keep quiet, then go home and cry themselves to sleep.” “It’s because the characters in pornographic manga and adult videos are high school girls. They should ban those!” “I want police women to go undercover cosplaying as schoolgirls so they can round up all the chikan.”

For people familiar with Japanese culture, you would know that the Japanese have an obsession with the youthfulness of young girls, as well as the uniforms they wear. The Japanese put pressure on their women to behave and look younger than they actually are to be desirable. Many mature women in Japanese society act in ways that are reminiscent of a pre-teen in order to attract more male attention. 

Citing a Dr. Takasu (author of The Magnetism of the Heart—Becoming a Cute Woman:  Mesmer Explains the 5 Rules for Becoming a Good Woman), McVeigh concludes that there are three major characteristics of cuteness:  1) having features of an infant; 2) arousing a protective instinct in others; and 3) having the desire to be liked (139).  McVeigh also provides lists of associations Japanese people have with cuteness, both conceptual (“powerlessness, controllable, controlled, weakness, femininity, cheerfulness and youthfulness”) and concrete (“females, bright colors [especially pink], infants, children, small size and toys”) (142).

[…] As McVeigh points out, in Japanese culture it is generally accepted that “[b]y being cute, women are able to occupy their ‘proper place’” (145).  This is thus, then, a trend that is easily incorporated into mainstream culture because of what it says about women.  As Joanne Finkelstein, in “Chic Theory,” writes, fashion has a disciplinary power and “coerces the body to shape and rearrange itself in accordance with ever-shifting social expectations.”  Young women who dress as children thus run the risk of being shaped into weak, childlike women.

On the other hand, this style may function as an indictment of just this problem, dramatizing through fashion the negative effects of this treatment of women in Japanese culture.  As several commentators have pointed out, Japanese attitudes toward dress have traditionally been much more functional and utilitarian than American attitudes.  If clothes can answer the question “who am I?”, Donald Richie states, “[t]he Japanese response to this is: ‘I am what I appear to be; I am the function that I am dressed for’” (49). Young women’s cuteness may then be read as a statement about the functions that they are allowed to engage in.

[…]Yaoi novelist Kaoru Kurimoto expressed a similar opinion. Writing under an alias, Kurimoto said that women “are constantly classified based on how they look, how they fulfill female-gendered functions, how they perform as home maintenance machines, how much ’added value’ they’re perceived to have, or how ’fresh’ they are,” and speculated that these women imagine yaoi to be “a place where the gaze of men and society doesn’t exist, and where they themselves—always the objects of that gaze—don’t exist either” (Nakajima 1991, 100, 191).

[…]Also, Japan’s still largely patriarchal society may have come to expect women to be kawaii. In the male-dominated field of academia, for example, women are expected to defer to their male colleagues by acting submissively – and being submissive, of course, is part and parcel of being kawaii, and of being a burikko.

A survey of female seniors in 561 Japanese universities in 1992 found women expected and didn’t mind sexism at work. 91% said they don’t mind being treated as “office flowers” and 25% considered that to be a woman’s role (Thornton, 1992). This shows how strong the male-dominated view remained.

[…]Women in Japan tend to struggle economically following divorce. That’s because traditionally in Japan, men work, and women stay home to take care of the children. About 62 percent of women drop out of the workforce when they have their first child, according to Kingston. When couples divorce, women have often been out of the workforce for a long time. Many institutions incentivize this arrangement: Japanese corporations often give husbands whose wives stay home a bonus, and the Japanese tax system punishes couples with two incomes.

Samurai women–part of the aristocratic class representing perhaps 8 percent of the population–were considered little more than “borrowed wombs.” Not only did they possess less status than aristocratic women of earlier ages in Japanese history (many of whom inherited property), they were probably more oppressed by custom than women of other social classes who were their Tokugawa contemporaries. Samurai women were obliged in this patrilinieal, patrilocal aristocracy to produce a suitable male heir or to accept male heirs produced by concubines resident in same household (or both). Since the economic status of many samurai households did not match their social status by 1860, women’s work in the home was economically important, but its value was not reflected in a share of domestic power. Unlike their Western counterparts, upper-class women in mid-nineteenth-century Japan claimed no “sphere” of their own and enjoyed little authority in their households. A samurai woman, for example, might or might not be the principal nurturer of her young child, but she was never a factor in decisions made about the child’s education or general welfare, and she could never become–in any sense–the guardian of her children. All decisions involving children were assumed by family hierarchy in which power was determined by sex and age. Samurai women, like women in other social classes, could be sent home or divorced for any reason, real or imagined, the husbands and his family might claim. Samurai women were nonpersons under Tokugawa law who could be put to death for adultery, or–in practice–any suspicion of adultery.— Sharon L. Sievers, Flowers In Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan

Stegeman argues that “[what makes] Japanese society Japanese is the characteristic way of organizing activity – a pattern of behavior that repeats itself over and over throughout Japanese society.[…]

In fact, one’s membership in a group often insures one’s sense of social responsibility toward society at large. No one in the group wants other members of his group to be the cause of social disturbance, because that disturbance can be observed and reported, and eventually reflect on one’s group. Whereupon the entire group suffers from the embarrassment caused by only a few individuals. Indeed, it is those individuals who drift away from the group, who become suspect in Japanese society – not those with group membership

Stegeman also notes that there is great emphasis on self discipline in Japanese culture because that aids in the cooperation that is needed. Another pertinent insight of his explains how “the direction that they place before themselves is confounded with the role they must play in their group[…]”

【Sexism in Japan】 In Japan, girls are destroying boys in HS entrance exams. So much that schools are implementing “affirmative action” to allow boys to pass with lower scores. In a test with a maximum score of 1000, guys can pass while scoring 243 points lower.

[…]My mom’s nickname for me was “little bird” in Korean, so when I was about to embark upon my year abroad, she said, “My little bird is flying away.” Sometimes she sounded just like a weepy character in a sentimental movie.

I was simply eager to go. I was particularly keen on meeting my dad’s favorite cousin, a distant uncle I’d never met before. From my dad’s descriptions, I anticipated a jovial rascal.

We agreed to meet at a restaurant in Seoul, and my parents had already spread word about my “brag-worthy” accomplishments in the U.S.: first-runner up in California’s Junior Miss competition in high school, a graduate of an Ivy League college, Fulbright fellow, yada yada. Upon meeting me for the first time, my uncle (whom I’ll call Joon) heartily congratulated me for making my parents proud. He was funny and gregarious, as I’d expected.

As the evening drew to a close and I was about to hop in a taxi, he announced loudly, “Congrats again. But you know, it’s really too bad you were born a girl.”

[…]Cuteness is a way to serve male fantasies in societies in which gender-roles are extremely differentiated. Men have a certain conception of what a woman should be, and they hope to find in women the characteristics they are looking for.

In traditional Asian societies the role of men and women has always been clearly separated, and until today many of the old conceptions of gender-roles and expectations still exist. For instance, Asian men traditionally do not like women who are better educated than them, who express strong views (for example regarding politics) or who earn more than them. Many parents still teach their daughters that they will not be able to find a husband if they have too high education or focus too much on their careers. The traditional notion of the social inferiority of women is thus perpetuated.

Examples of parents telling their daughters that the choice of their husbands should have priority over their education and that a husband who earns less than them is not a good match, are not uncommon (two such examples can be found in: Tokuhiro 2012, and Burger 2012).

In the Confucian tradition, the family was based on hierarchy, and hierarchy depended on generation, age, and gender. Parents were superior to children, men to women, husbands to wives etc. (Lang 1946, p. 24). According to this hierarchy, children were taught from an early age that different social and family roles implied different obligations and expectations.  Although the old-style Confucian culture has changed in the past decades, the hierarchical structure of East Asian societies persists, albeit in a much softer form compared with the pre-WWII period.

‘Pretty, Innocent Asian Girls’: The Cult of Cuteness in East Asian Societies, Aris Teon