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I'm not Japanese or anything but watching the locals react I got the impression that homosexuality is okay in fiction and that's it. Or maybe for older people, it only actually exists in fiction. But then we get into the Western conception and images of it versus local interpretations of non-binary genders and gender preferences (okama, yuri and such) and things get all murky, same as in other non-Western countries as far as I know.
Samurai Sanders fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Nov 7, 2013 |
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Nov 7, 2013 04:52
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Kenishi posted:As to the seeming contradiction in anime/manga. (Disclaimer: I am not Japanese, Female, nor do I like Boys Love (BL)) Based on discussions I've heard with some of my girlfriend's friends (granted they're Chinese and not Japanese) it sounds like BL stuff comes from the same root as the slash fiction here, namely that it's a "safe" environment where women can find love being expressed without being victimized by it.
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Nov 7, 2013 04:54
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Kenishi posted:I think you've missed the real point with the homosexual material. In watching how fujoshi (BL lovers) react to BL, I think the selling point isn't the fact that its two guys boning each other. That's not the "grab." I think the [subconscious] thought line goes: "Oh these two beautiful boys are in love with each other. Oooh, this is so forbidden, no one would ever do this in real life. ITS S000 HOT!." Timg'd for being slightly NSFW:  The thread title is now accurate! Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Nov 7, 2013 |
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Nov 7, 2013 06:02
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Silver2195 posted:Timg'd for being slightly NSFW: The same could be said about the male obsession with "fantasy lesbians", I'd guess. In Japan the whole idea that gay men are all indiscriminate nymphomaniacs is pretty prevalent. It really makes for some cringe-worthy stuff on TV over here. There was one game show where "good-looking" male celebrities had to run away from a horde of "okama" who, when they caught a victim, would.... KISS THEM 
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Nov 7, 2013 06:17
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It's pretty ironic considering the huge amount of unacknowledged homoeroticism going on in pretty much any exclusively male social group in Japan. I've always gotten the sense that homosexual activity in of itself is not frowned upon so long as it's discrete, but identifying exclusively as homosexual and rejecting traditional gender roles is viewed as self indulgent and shirking one's societal responsibility. The tension between familial and societal duty and romantic love is a hugely important theme throughout the history of Japanese literature, but with the class system being replaced with egalitarian democracy, forbidden love between a man and woman comes off really contrived in a modern setting without breaking one of the major taboos like having one of them be non-Japanese or burakumin.
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Nov 7, 2013 06:36
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Silver2195 posted:Timg'd for being slightly NSFW: Is that from Short Cuts?
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Nov 7, 2013 07:12
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Cliff Racer posted:Is that from Short Cuts? Not sure what the original source is. I've seen it posted here (in PYF rather than D&D or ADTRW, I think) in the past.
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Nov 7, 2013 07:17
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Silver2195 posted:Timg'd for being slightly NSFW: Japan, it's probably time to join the modern world and see that those things kind of go together.
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Nov 7, 2013 07:21
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Silver2195 posted:Timg'd for being slightly NSFW: Now I've got Symphony no. 9 stuck in my head.
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Nov 7, 2013 07:57
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Protocol 5 posted:It's pretty ironic considering the huge amount of unacknowledged homoeroticism going on in pretty much any exclusively male social group in Japan. I've always gotten the sense that homosexual activity in of itself is not frowned upon so long as it's discrete, but identifying exclusively as homosexual and rejecting traditional gender roles is viewed as self indulgent and shirking one's societal responsibility. The tension between familial and societal duty and romantic love is a hugely important theme throughout the history of Japanese literature, but with the class system being replaced with egalitarian democracy, forbidden love between a man and woman comes off really contrived in a modern setting without breaking one of the major taboos like having one of them be non-Japanese or burakumin. The homoeroticism extends both ways, but you probably don't notice it as much since homoerotic behavior among women is perceived to be more normative in many cultures. I'm not sure where you're from, but I would assume you come from a western culture based on your characterization of it. Most of what you posted is, I think, the most accurate way to think about it. Being gay is seen as a kind of self-indulgence on par with other things that are seen as indulgent in society. I mean with the way straight Japanese people are made to put up with bullshit from society in general, it seems like acting like a straight person is tossed on the pile of gimu the same way unpaid overtime and changing your mother-in-law's diapers are. I admit that it's not directly comparable, but the chains of society in Japan are definitely tighter and far more numerous. It also starts from like middle school age when they start going to cram schools heavily in order to get into a good high school. I think that's probably how Japanese people see it, though. Being gay is just another selfish vice to be given up just like other selfish vices like "not working yourself to death." There's also a heavy dose of pretending that gay people don't actually exist because it would culturally be very traumatizing to reevaluate all the behaviors in Japanese society that might come off as homoerotic if they weren't thought of as innocent traditions. ErIog fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Nov 7, 2013 |
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Nov 7, 2013 14:37
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Mezzanine posted:In Japan the whole idea that gay men are all indiscriminate nymphomaniacs is pretty prevalent. Protocol 5 posted:It's pretty ironic considering the huge amount of unacknowledged homoeroticism going on in pretty much any exclusively male social group in Japan. I've always gotten the sense that homosexual activity in of itself is not frowned upon so long as it's discrete, but identifying exclusively as homosexual and rejecting traditional gender roles is viewed as self indulgent and shirking one's societal responsibility.
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Nov 7, 2013 15:10
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Well at least Osaka's Yodogawa ward is openly and officially accepting LGBT folks now. http://www.city.osaka.lg.jp/yodogawa/page/0000232949.html I read that most of the benefits are related to bureaucracy, like training ward officials to understand what a gay household is, and there's pretty much no controversy at all. It just doesn't seem like a big deal culturally like people have said.
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Nov 7, 2013 15:21
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There's actually one smaller thing I want to add on about the child porn thing. Japan may have an abundance of stuff dealing in child porn, be it real stuff or drawn stuff, but the thing I find most amusing is the fact that responses to things like preying on children tends to result in extreme knee jerk responses. Child predators used the Nintendo 3DS Swapnote service in Japan quote:Last week, without warning, Nintendo terminated the Swapnote service for the Nintendo 3DS, which allows 3DS owners to exchanges hand-written messages and photographs with their registered friends over the Internet. A recent report by two Japanese publications might provide further insight as to why this happened. This kind of response has become very common in Japan. Mixi for instance, became practically useless when the Mixi company basically took a hardline stance against people actually trying to set up meetings outside Mixi. For instance, giving someone your email through a PM on Mixi would result in a warning and finally a complete ban on your account (in addition to the message never reaching the person). The reason was because it was discovered kids were exchanging emails with adults and sex was the result. (Worth noting that Mixi's use has declined and almost everyone is on Facebook it seems)
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Nov 8, 2013 05:06
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Kenishi posted:Mixi for instance, became practically useless when the Mixi company basically took a hardline stance against people actually trying to set up meetings outside Mixi. quote:For instance, giving someone your email through a PM on Mixi would result in a warning and finally a complete ban on your account (in addition to the message never reaching the person). The reason was because it was discovered kids were exchanging emails with adults and sex was the result. What Mixi WERE doing was killing off any community where someone under 18 posted any message in a dating thread (and there were a LOT of dating threads) In my experience, what caused everyone to stop using Mixi was The Social Network coming out in Japan (as in "all my in-laws and co-workers popped up on Facebook after the film came out"). The rise in popularity of twitter, a little later, was the last straw.
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Nov 8, 2013 11:14
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ookiimarukochan posted:Mixi started taking "hard stances" when it floated - nothing to do with child sex, everything to do with cleaning up their image. quote:In my experience, what caused everyone to stop using Mixi was The Social Network coming out in Japan (as in "all my in-laws and co-workers popped up on Facebook after the film came out"). The rise in popularity of twitter, a little later, was the last straw.
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Nov 8, 2013 11:34
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Kenishi posted:I actually never though about The Social Network. Did a lot of people really watch that though? I know Twitter was always popular really, but it filled its own nitch, and has consumed it all I guess. (The Top 5 accounts on twitter are in Japan for instance) I think enough people watched it and thought to try Facebook that you finally reached that critical mass where Japanese people started migrating to Facebook. Mixi pretty much always sucked, but everyone's friends used it, so that's what they stuck to, until the recognition the movie brought to Facebook tipped the scales.
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Nov 8, 2013 11:50
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It really says something about how loving terrible Japan is at the internet that they found out about Facebook from a movie.
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Nov 8, 2013 12:44
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Stringent posted:It really says something about how loving terrible Japan is at the internet that they found out about Facebook from a movie. Well, the main benefits of a social network is that you can have everyone you know on it. My girlfriend for example is chinese so all of her friends are on QQ or whatever sister sites Tencent set up so even though she has a Facebook that's how we chat when we do IM stuff.
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Nov 8, 2013 14:24
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Did Japan actually like The Social Network? I was sitting in a class at college right after the movie came out and, when one of my professors asked asked a room with a hundred people in it if they had seen it not a single one raised their hand. This despite being in an IST course.
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Nov 8, 2013 17:22
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Cliff Racer posted:Did Japan actually like The Social Network? I was sitting in a class at college right after the movie came out and, when one of my professors asked asked a room with a hundred people in it if they had seen it not a single one raised their hand. This despite being in an IST course. edit: I don't know any Japanese who are really into movies in general. TV yeah, but not movies.
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Nov 8, 2013 17:34
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Stringent posted:It really says something about how loving terrible Japan is at the internet that they found out about Facebook from a movie. I was talking to some English teachers a few months ago and not a single one of them, including the two who had lived in America before, had ever heard of eBay. Yahoo!'s last bastion of hope is the Japanese market, really. That whole Galapagos effect is applicable to everything from cell phones to auction sites to online shopping to social media.
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Nov 8, 2013 18:31
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I showed Amazon and one-click ordering to some of my Korean coworkers and they basically thought I was a witch for a week. You don't have to download ActiveX plugins? You don't have to enter 30 different verifications, any one of which failing in any minor way resets everything so you have to begin the process again from scratch? You don't have to use IE 6?
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Nov 8, 2013 18:37
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Cliff Racer posted:Did Japan actually like The Social Network? I was sitting in a class at college right after the movie came out and, when one of my professors asked asked a room with a hundred people in it if they had seen it not a single one raised their hand. This despite being in an IST course. Samurai Sanders posted:It doesn't seem like the kind of movie that would be a hit there, no. Looks like it didn't do particularly well: http://www.eiren.org/toukei/img/eiren_kosyu/data_2011.pdf But then people don't actually need to go out and see the movie to learn about Facebook through it. If they even saw the preview it might pique someone's interest, at which point they could go on, realize it's worlds above any Japanese SNS in functionality, then tell their friends, etc.
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Nov 8, 2013 18:37
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Sheep posted:I was talking to some English teachers a few months ago and not a single one of them, including the two who had lived in America before, had ever heard of eBay. Yahoo!'s last bastion of hope is the Japanese market, really. That whole Galapagos effect is applicable to everything from cell phones to auction sites to online shopping to social media. Weirdly, Yahoo is the most popular search engine and Internet portal in Hong Kong too. Probably just copying Japan.
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Nov 8, 2013 18:50
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Google has a verb form in Japanese though (ググる) but Yahoo doesn't, as far as I know.
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Nov 8, 2013 18:51
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Samurai Sanders posted:Google has a verb form in Japanese though (ググる) but Yahoo doesn't, as far as I know.
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Nov 8, 2013 20:21
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Grand Fromage posted:I showed Amazon and one-click ordering to some of my Korean coworkers and they basically thought I was a witch for a week. You don't have to download ActiveX plugins? You don't have to enter 30 different verifications, any one of which failing in any minor way resets everything so you have to begin the process again from scratch? You don't have to use IE 6? The Korean government really needs to get its head out of its rear end; client-side certificates are a good idea but at this point it would be far safer to just throw it out rather than to force people to use Windows XP. mystes fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 20:45
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Cliff Racer posted:Did Japan actually like The Social Network? I was sitting in a class at college right after the movie came out and, when one of my professors asked asked a room with a hundred people in it if they had seen it not a single one raised their hand. This despite being in an IST course. Conversely, my middle school and elementary kids knew all about it. I was teaching the 6th graders the names of class subjects and one kid kept mixing up "social studies" with "social network" and the others would all laugh at him. My JHS 3rd years made reference to Zuckerberg once or twice, too.
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Nov 8, 2013 21:01
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mystes posted:Japanese web design seems like it's a few years behind In my experience this is largely due to batshit insane requests from large companies (i.e. name is a 3 letter acronym, starts with an "N")
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Nov 9, 2013 00:54
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People love to have every little thing explained to them, and they'd hate to offend by omission so as much text as possible is placed on the sign, site or magazine cover.
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Nov 9, 2013 04:28
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mystes posted:Japanese web design seems like it's a few years behind I always thought this was because people never really had personal computers (still don't--a lot of people are shocked when I tell them that these days in the US not having a computer is akin to saying you don't own a refrigerator) and always browsed the internet on those old flip-phones. So the vast majority of Japanese websites were made for flip-phone browsers and end up looking like they were designed by whoever did Yvette's Bridal, and when smartphones came along and they actually had to use websites for once, that's finally when they started realizing 'oh hey our websites look like crap, what's HTML5 and CSS?'
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Nov 9, 2013 05:12
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ookiimarukochan posted:In my experience this is largely due to batshit insane requests from large companies (i.e. name is a 3 letter acronym, starts with an "N") What sort of requests? Arbite fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Nov 10, 2013 |
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Nov 10, 2013 02:25
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Arbite posted:What sort of requests? Well, if it's anything like my job, one thing might be insisting upon putting the full company name anywhere it appears, ala: Something Awful Goons Co., Ltd. Which is bad enough, except that they 'spell' it without the space between co., and ltd., ala: Something Awful Goons Co.,Ltd. no matter if it's incorrect and will give anyone reasonably proficient in English the idea that the company didn't do their homework, as if a native speaker is going to confuse co., ltd with the word 'rhinoceros' if that space is in there.
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Nov 10, 2013 03:40
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Reverend Cheddar posted:Something Awful Goons Co.,Ltd. mystes fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Nov 10, 2013 |
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Nov 10, 2013 05:47
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mystes posted:Not enough capitalization. Are you sure you work for a real Japanese company? My humblest apologies dear client-sama, you are undoubtedly correct, it indeed is SOMETHING AWFUL GOONS CO.,LTD. Would you like this in mono spaced font as well? (Every day.  )
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Nov 10, 2013 07:41
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I once left out a ・ in a company name (on a handwritten form). It took weeks to fix that one.
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Nov 10, 2013 07:57
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Are Japanese companies and bureaucracies less tolerant of spelling (or whatever you want to call it) differences than English language ones? It should be the opposite, since their language has so many more ways to write things.
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Nov 10, 2013 08:02
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Samurai Sanders posted:Are Japanese companies and bureaucracies less tolerant of spelling (or whatever you want to call it) differences than English language ones? It should be the opposite, since their language has so many more ways to write things. Where it really kills me is in medical terms. They insist upon using the long scientific term, even for consumer-oriented products, which we would never use and probably wouldn't even know unless we were doctors and sperging among ourselves. For instance 'myocardial infarction', which I then have to look up to figure out what the hell they mean and it's a heart attack.
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Nov 10, 2013 08:33
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Samurai Sanders posted:Google has a verb form in Japanese though (ググる) but Yahoo doesn't, as far as I know. Wait, it's an actual -る verb? Not する？ So you can say "ググった？"
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Nov 10, 2013 10:57
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I think the extent to its use as a verb is in the present tense/future. I'm pretty sure I've never heard it conjugated into a past tense. I know if I was going to say something "I searched google." I'd probably say ググルで調べた ｏｒ ググル[で]検索した But if I was going to say "I'm going to search google." in a convo, I'd probably just say ググる. (My Japanese is bad, so I might be very wrong.)
Kenishi fucked around with this message at 11:24 on Nov 10, 2013 |
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Nov 10, 2013 11:21
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