Well, let's see...

-they don't have modern birth control over there. No, really, they don't. The only female pill they have is the 50 year old high dose variety and nobody takes it. Japanese have a distrust of anything "not invented here" which extends to pharmaceuticals. There's a reason that sex is correlated with having babies.
-having a child is the end of your career for Japanese women, and their employers know it - and expect it.
-Japan has the strongest consumer culture in the world, highest cost of consumer goods, and shiattiest corresponding wages. They simply don't have the money to start families on two income households, much less one.
-the life of a modern mother in Japan (stay at home, look pretty, do housework, get ignored by hubby when he comes home from his 12 hour workday and 2 hours of culturally mandated time at the bar with his boss & coworkers.
-The culture's so compressed with so many tensions going on that people, en-mass, are simply surrendering and bowing out of society and its expectations on them. Herbivore men, shut-ins, there's countless varieties of these.
-The massive imbalance in their sexual dynamic and culture. Men are expected to be perverts, and there is somewhat of a prevailing "boys will be boys" attitude about it. Women who express extroverted sexual interest don't exist. Even their whores and pornstars are introverts sexually.
-Simply being interested in sex is considered a perversion there, even down to the language used. Fooling around is "being h-like" which is a euphemism for "liking weird things". Innocence is favoured to an unhealthy degree - the greatest compliment you can give a Japanese woman is calling her "cute" even into her 30's.
-Not only is their culture farked up in terms of pressurization and sexuality and commercialism and conformity, but it's a monoculture - your choices as an individual are to comply or to exit society. There's no alternatives - basically zero immigration rate and they don't allow dual citizenship, so there's no mashup of different norms and ideas - individualism there simply doesn't exist in a way more meaningful than consumption.

Just a few thoughts, distilled after some time there and a few conversations with friends currently working there or having spent a few years overseas in the past.

doglover: ChubbyTiger: No sarcasm? What else is there?

A lot of Japanese humor is absurdist. They're really big on a format called manzai where two people, one straight man and one comedian, do sketches. They also like slapstick.

Right you are, Ken.

spman: I'm not too adept to Japanese culture, but I have friends that are, and it seems to be a collaboration of a number of different bad societal problems all coming together. The Under 30 crowd in Japan today has been programmed to have completely unrealistic expectations about women and relationships due to the way they're portrayed in popular media over there. Combine this with the fact that A. Asians tend to be naturally shy and B. Prostitution is rampant and inexpensive and copious amounts of aberrant pornography make it much easier for men to spend all day playing video games and occasionally dropping a couple thousand yen on a hooker or buying some tentacle rape porn or soiled underwear from the vending machine, much easier than actually going out and meeting people, establishing a relationship, and growing up into an adult.

This is actually one of the few reasons I don't advocate the legalization of prostitution in this country. If you don't actually have to work to get the vagina and can just buy it, then what's the motivation to actually work on becoming less of a socially awkward moron who spends all day playing WoW and sewing Cosplay costumes? We've already got an entire generation of basement dwellers, why eliminate the last motivation they might have to leave mom's house and actually become functioning members of society?

It's the same, to a lesser degree perhaps, in most first world countries. Women want the 'alpha male' biologically. Being that guy is a terrible pain the ass. And there can only be, by definition, a few of them. Twisting yourself into some mockery of a real person with fake chest puffing and phoney confidence is really sad (business twits wearing shoes too big for their feet because big feet mean big dicks, etc..). It's natural for a smart guy to say 'to hell with it'.

Women are not meant to be the 'choosers'. They seem to have no tools for figuring out which men are worthwhile and which are worthless, obnoxious posers. But as a society civilizes it's natural to want to let people make their own decisions.

bighasbeen: "Building a relationship seems like too much effort. To get her to like me and for me to like her... I'd have to give up everything I do at the weekend for her. I don't want to do that."

It sounds like an entire country is tired of her shiat.

THIS>

The movie, "Gung Ho" with Michael Keaton does a pretty good job with Japanese culture.

Nidiot: hitlersbrain: Until we finally make lifelike androids and program them to love sex, men will just keep having to make do with porn.

I just wished I'd figured out that women don't care for sex sooner and not wasted so much time and money.


I'm not sure that women don't care for sex as much as they don't care for sex with you. Alternatively - you're doing it wrong.

Ah yes, automated response # 27. Don't worry, girls really like you, just like your mom told you.

cheap_thoughts: This chick I worked with had a thing for asian dudes. I wondered why she liked tiny dicks, but I never called her out on it.

/cause asian guys have dicks that are small, get it?
//she's getting married to an asian dude in three weeks

This just in: Girls come in different sizes too....

miss diminutive: I have a friend teaching English in Japan right now who pretty much told me the same thing. He blames it overbearing mothers and distant, emotionally detached fathers who are raising kids who have little sense of how to deal with the opposite sex. That's his opinion, but it could hold some weight.

He also told me that sarcasm isn't really a commonly accepted form of humour and he's gotten into some very awkward situations because of that fact. That alone is enough to keep me away; I'd probably end up in jail.

Do you happen to know him from the site ruminations.com or is his name Eric?

doglover: RodneyToady: Email in profile if you're willing to send the title/author/journal (or with your friend's consent, the whole dissertation). I'm kinda bouncing around the idea of doing a post-doc in Japan or Italy on a topic along the same lines (within Social Psychology).

Technically he did his doctorate on Otaku culture. But if you want to talk about people who aren't gettin' laid...

Oh no...The Otaku are getting laid...Just within their own farked up little circles.

I have no issue with people watching anime. But if you're 30- still going to these 'cons- which run rampant with young girls and children; you need your head examined.

spman: This is actually one of the few reasons I don't advocate the legalization of prostitution in this country. If you don't actually have to work to get the vagina and can just buy it, then what's the motivation to actually work on becoming less of a socially awkward moron who spends all day playing WoW and sewing Cosplay costumes? We've already got an entire generation of basement dwellers, why eliminate the last motivation they might have to leave mom's house and actually become functioning members of society?

What? Germany has legalized prostitution and I don't see an entire generation of young females unaccompanied by their male counterparts because they're all off in some Brothel or playing WoW all day.

There are much larger cultural issues about how women are treated in Japan that have little or nothing to do with whether or not prostitution is legal.

doglover: Blueintheballs: I can't help but feel there's got to be more at play here than just social factors.

I think that's ALL that's at play.

The Japanese spend their entire youth trying to pass tests correctly and learning how to be homogenous. You get one kid giving an answer in a classroom and you can put away the tarot cards and pendulums because the next 10 kids are gonna follow suit.

You give a bunch of school kids a survey and they're gonna tell you exactly what they think you wanna hear. Who wants to hear that their daughter's a slut and their son spends more time looking up porn online than youtube links (well equivalent time) ? No one, that's who. So the answers you get are gonna be to please the supposed audience.

Then toss in Japan's economic situation, where everyone on the top with money pretends it's still the bubble economy and everyone on the bottom with no money is trying to get onto the top where the party's still goin' and you have very few people who can manage to afford kids. Hence shrinking birth rates and alleged no interest in sex.

But actually, come Friday night, the hooks are upped. And the weird thing is condom use isn't as prevalent here and the pill's almost unheard of yet the birth rate's STILL low. :-/ I dunno why.

But definitely don't trust a news article to give you the whole story. There's a lot more vectors at play here than in Despicable Me.

Cool, thanks for an insider's insight. I've never been to Japan but badly want to go.

I can understand the artificial answers in these surveys. I got to understand the whole 'saving face' thing when i was backpacking in Thailand and i guess that's turbo-charged for the Japanese.

The more i read about them, the more enigmatic they become.

dopeydwarf: The Incredible Sexual Egg: What the hell is wrong with that country

You haven't been paying attention.

HINT:

[www.tonyrogers.com image 550x438]

Look at their porn prints from 200 years before the bomb and get back to me. I swear the bombing made Japan a little less weird.

"They are young, earn little and spend little, and take a keen interest in fashion and personal appearance -- meet the "herbivore men" of Japan."


So the Japanese are blaming their hipster population for everything.

I wonder what the numbers for a similar survey in the Bible Belt would be?

This actually explains much. A friend stayed in Japan to help her sister for a few months, and started dating a Japanese guy. She told him out front that this was gonna be either a short relationship, or a long one with lots of time far away as she had to return to Mexico at some point. He told him he wanted the long term, but once it was two weeks after she returned from Japan, the guy ditched her.

Then again, could've been anything else, but hey...

doglover: Madbassist1: doglover: Suffice it to say it would have been better to throw in the towel than drop the bombs if we had known what would actually happen.

That's probably the stupidest thing I've read on FARK in a while...

Hey, fark you.

Seriously fark YOU.

I look at what happened to the kids and stuff and I know in my heart I couldn't do it. Not for all the brides of Solomon to be mine for the rest of my days could I unleash that kind of hell.

Nuclear hellfire is the BEST part of a nuclear weapon. You're lucky to be vaporized at 6000 degrees. You're slightly less lucky to die in the first few hours of unimaginably painful radiation poisoning or melted flesh. It's when the black rain starts that your luck REALLY begins to fade. And, if after the first week or so you're not already dead, don't worry because all kinds of weird ass cancers are comin' for ya sooner or later. And if those don't get you the government mandated restrictions on your life certainly will wipe out your bloodline, if you weren't sterilized already by the irradiation or the subsequent tumors.

And let's not forget you can't punch a woman. That's like horrible. I can't even punch a woman with a blackbelt even though she can break my arm. I'd be worse than you know who. But it's totally cool if you kill thousands of them who are doing nothing more sinister than having been born in Kyshuu along with their kids? I repeat once again fark YOU.

As I recall, it was patently obvious that they were losing the war at the time. We had taken Okinawa with massive casualties. We were fire-bombing their cities. The cost of invading Japan, in terms of humans lives, was predicted to be on an almost unimaginable scale (both civilian and military). The Potsdam Declaration had been delivered and Japan, in the face of losing home islands, still believed that the Allies wouldn't win.

We dropped on bomb and they still refused to surrender. We dropped a second and they finally surrendered.

Yes, it was costly - but it would've been significantly more costly on both sides had we not done so.

That's why your comments are considered stupid.

Tat'dGreaser: I hear country music is huge there. Actually punk and other underground music styles are too.

So is power metal.

Lexx: Well, let's see...

-they don't have modern birth control over there. No, really, they don't. The only female pill they have is the 50 year old high dose variety and nobody takes it. Japanese have a distrust of anything "not invented here" which extends to pharmaceuticals. There's a reason that sex is correlated with having babies.
-having a child is the end of your career for Japanese women, and their employers know it - and expect it.
-Japan has the strongest consumer culture in the world, highest cost of consumer goods, and shiattiest corresponding wages. They simply don't have the money to start families on two income households, much less one.
-the life of a modern mother in Japan (stay at home, look pretty, do housework, get ignored by hubby when he comes home from his 12 hour workday and 2 hours of culturally mandated time at the bar with his boss & coworkers.
-The culture's so compressed with so many tensions going on that people, en-mass, are simply surrendering and bowing out of society and its expectations on them. Herbivore men, shut-ins, there's countless varieties of these.
-The massive imbalance in their sexual dynamic and culture. Men are expected to be perverts, and there is somewhat of a prevailing "boys will be boys" attitude about it. Women who express extroverted sexual interest don't exist. Even their whores and pornstars are introverts sexually.
-Simply being interested in sex is considered a perversion there, even down to the language used. Fooling around is "being h-like" which is a euphemism for "liking weird things". Innocence is favoured to an unhealthy degree - the greatest compliment you can give a Japanese woman is calling her "cute" even into her 30's.
-Not only is their culture farked up in terms of pressurization and sexuality and commercialism and conformity, but it's a monoculture - your choices as an individual are to comply or to exit society. There's no alternatives - basically zero immigration rate and they don't allow dual ci ...

That's a pretty accurate summary.

doglover: Blueintheballs: I can't help but feel there's got to be more at play here than just social factors.

I think that's ALL that's at play.

The Japanese spend their entire youth trying to pass tests correctly and learning how to be homogenous. You get one kid giving an answer in a classroom and you can put away the tarot cards and pendulums because the next 10 kids are gonna follow suit.

You give a bunch of school kids a survey and they're gonna tell you exactly what they think you wanna hear. Who wants to hear that their daughter's a slut and their son spends more time looking up porn online than youtube links (well equivalent time) ? No one, that's who. So the answers you get are gonna be to please the supposed audience.

Then toss in Japan's economic situation, where everyone on the top with money pretends it's still the bubble economy and everyone on the bottom with no money is trying to get onto the top where the party's still goin' and you have very few people who can manage to afford kids. Hence shrinking birth rates and alleged no interest in sex.

But actually, come Friday night, the hooks are upped. And the weird thing is condom use isn't as prevalent here and the pill's almost unheard of yet the birth rate's STILL low. :-/ I dunno why.

My understanding is menstrual extraction is fairly common over there, hence a low pregnancy rate despite a low condom use rate.

/don't tell the fundies

xria: I wonder what the numbers for a similar survey in the Bible Belt would be?

They reproduce like rabbits. You always see Cletus and Jolene with 5 or 6 kids running around the trailer park.

Have you seen japanese porn?

OF course Japanese women are less interested in sex.

Krymson Tyde: i262.photobucket.com

ugly

i104.photobucket.com

ugly


i56.photobucket.com


aaaaand...ugly

miss diminutive: jimmythrust: Two word cure: Maria Ozawa

Something tells me I should avoid doing a GIS for her with safesearch off....

Indeed, if you are at work. That's a problem I don't have!

RodneyToady: doglover: There's no one factor to any of this, either. I'm simplifying grossly. You could easily write a PhD worthy thesis on this subject and I should know because my friend did just that.

Email in profile if you're willing to send the title/author/journal (or with your friend's consent, the whole dissertation). I'm kinda bouncing around the idea of doing a post-doc in Japan or Italy on a topic along the same lines (within Social Psychology).

For those wondering "Why Italy?" it has a similar (though not exactly the same) kind of profile as Japan. Sub-1.5 fertility rate, men live at home until their 30s and expect their future wife to be their new mommy, and women are not thrilled at the prospect. Plus, nearby Germany and Spain have a similar situation.

If that's true, is there a connection between past fascist governments and this phenomena?

urban.derelict: Krymson Tyde: i262.photobucket.com

ugly

i104.photobucket.com

ugly


i56.photobucket.com


aaaaand...ugly

The reason they were so successful in WW2 before sheer force of arms and 2 nukes got them to stop is because it was not even in their minds to question what the Emperor and his generals were doing. It wasn't even an option. Either defeat the Western powers or everybody dies trying.

liam76: Have you seen japanese porn?

OF course Japanese women are less interested in sex.

See, I'd love to see japanese porn, but three things make it a huge turn off for me:

1.- The intense machismo and rape theme makes me iffy.
2.- The screeching noises.
3.- The censorship of the dirty bits in the pants area (which is more of a laugh factor for me, to be honest).

Tat'dGreaser: CygnusDarius: So is power metal.

The subculture there is huge, but still very underground. If you think you get sh*t here for being different, you get it a lot worse over there.

I will admit though, that they do have some awesome bike builders over there. The spirit of cool chops, not the OCC bullsh*t, is huge there.

I don't really know about the biker thing, but I do know of the hip hop culture of Japan (for reasons I'm unwilling to reveal). It seems at odds because hip hop was born out of poverty, and the kids there aren't really starving, but it's more of an identity thing I guess (especially for the Ainu, Japan's version of the Native Americans) against a society that seeks to mold you into something you might not actually be good at, or something that you hate.

The Incredible Sexual Egg: What the hell is wrong with that country

Might have something to do with the commercial subby aired of himself in his underwear during the superbowl yesterday.

bikkurikun: Lexx: Well, let's see...

-they don't have modern birth control over there. No, really, they don't. The only female pill they have is the 50 year old high dose variety and nobody takes it. Japanese have a distrust of anything "not invented here" which extends to pharmaceuticals. There's a reason that sex is correlated with having babies.
-having a child is the end of your career for Japanese women, and their employers know it - and expect it.
-Japan has the strongest consumer culture in the world, highest cost of consumer goods, and shiattiest corresponding wages. They simply don't have the money to start families on two income households, much less one.
-the life of a modern mother in Japan (stay at home, look pretty, do housework, get ignored by hubby when he comes home from his 12 hour workday and 2 hours of culturally mandated time at the bar with his boss & coworkers.
-The culture's so compressed with so many tensions going on that people, en-mass, are simply surrendering and bowing out of society and its expectations on them. Herbivore men, shut-ins, there's countless varieties of these.
-The massive imbalance in their sexual dynamic and culture. Men are expected to be perverts, and there is somewhat of a prevailing "boys will be boys" attitude about it. Women who express extroverted sexual interest don't exist. Even their whores and pornstars are introverts sexually.
-Simply being interested in sex is considered a perversion there, even down to the language used. Fooling around is "being h-like" which is a euphemism for "liking weird things". Innocence is favoured to an unhealthy degree - the greatest compliment you can give a Japanese woman is calling her "cute" even into her 30's.
-Not only is their culture farked up in terms of pressurization and sexuality and commercialism and conformity, but it's a monoculture - your choices as an individual are to comply or to exit society. There's no alternatives - basically zero immigration rate and they don't allow dual ci ...

That's a pretty accurate summary.

I have a friend who is a Japanese woman in her 30s. She said she will never go back because as a single older woman in that culture her personal and professional lives would be difficult compared to the U.S.

Is this the same culture that makes the over the top school lunches? I am not going to make a grown man a panda sculpture made of rice and seaweed every night.

spman: I'm not too adept to Japanese culture, but I have friends that are, and it seems to be a collaboration of a number of different bad societal problems all coming together. The Under 30 crowd in Japan today has been programmed to have completely unrealistic expectations about women and relationships due to the way they're portrayed in popular media over there. Combine this with the fact that A. Asians tend to be naturally shy and B. Prostitution is rampant and inexpensive and copious amounts of aberrant pornography make it much easier for men to spend all day playing video games and occasionally dropping a couple thousand yen on a hooker or buying some tentacle rape porn or soiled underwear from the vending machine, much easier than actually going out and meeting people, establishing a relationship, and growing up into an adult.

This is actually one of the few reasons I don't advocate the legalization of prostitution in this country. If you don't actually have to work to get the vagina and can just buy it, then what's the motivation to actually work on becoming less of a socially awkward moron who spends all day playing WoW and sewing Cosplay costumes? We've already got an entire generation of basement dwellers, why eliminate the last motivation they might have to leave mom's house and actually become functioning members of society?

"A great man is always willing to be little. Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill." - Emerson

In my experience this applies well to learning to deal with women.

/more the "pushed, tormented, and defeated" part than the "real skill" part

Men have their roles and women do too. Its so oppressive for both. If any of us here (as guys) where expected to work 60 or 80 hours, and then hang around with co-workers drinking after for hours on end, even when we'd rather go home finally to our woman, that is pretty miserable for both...if they want a relationship based on love rather then what everybody else puts up with. Life is not easy in asia. Its self destructive and wrong no matter which way you turn

My wife watches Korean students though... and they say the same thing about the fem-boys. They want a guy who acts like a guy... but then they want him to bring tons of money so they can stay home and just spend it around the clock. If your are a guy only bringing love or sex...its just not enough....MONEY, MONEY, and MORE MONEY. You are not a father or husband you are a pay check. Some may not want to be burned by that fire or weight on their shoulders. I imagine its not so different in Japan.

doglover: ronaprhys: We dropped on bomb and they still refused to surrender. We dropped a second and they finally surrendered.

I'm gonna stop you there.

Correlation does not equal causation. The Japanese were at war in mainland Asia for a long time before World War Two even started. The Russians were their old foes. But during the whole German Invasion, Stalin was busy in the west. With Germany pacified he was able to organize a war on the Eastern Front. The Chinese were takin' it back as Japan's imperial army faced every increasing shortages of men and supplies. There were countless internal and external forces at play along with the fact that we were already firebombing entire cities to ruin and that wasn't stopping them.

Basically the bombs ending the war is American propaganda. The consensus among the scholars I've talked to is that they were just twisting the knife that was already in the heart of the empire. Also, in Truman's defense, we really had no idea they'd be quite as bad as they really were.

Learn yourself something. (new window)

What you are dishing out us nonsense propaganda. The bombs did in fact prevent a U.S. invasion.

This new revisionist bullshiat is just more stupidity to advance a few idiots careers.

The guys are too metrosexual and gay. There is no testorine in them.