General Japanese Culture Thread

Or at least get comfortable Murdering The Hypotenuse in their character x reader fanfiction.

Yep, the characters. There are also some fans who celebrate a characters' birthday, complete with cake.

edited 10th Nov '15 9:01:23 AM by speedyboris

This shows a lack of emotional maturity and connection with reality to an extreme level...Or trolling.

To be fair, that's a really good excuse to eat a whole cake.

Yeah, celebrating a character's birthday isn't so bad unless they take it really seriously. Like, as seriously as a real person's birthday, if not even more... well, unless they don't care about real people's birthdays in the first place.

edited 10th Nov '15 9:22:22 AM by MarqFJA

Much like with hikikomoris, very often they're people who looked at reality and said "nope".

Real people aren't that interesting anyway. In the Internet you glimpse the interesting parts, but miss the mundane.

There was an article years ago which talked about japanese women who have developed self-esteem issues due to game characters. Many thought they can't compete, as game characters are perfect by design.

Ah, the waifu phenomenon. Thankfully(or hopefully) most people use the term ironically, but often enough a toxic shitbag will show up and claim it's ok to project his entitlement on a fictional character and if you don't comply with it, you're eeeeeevil.

If they want to lock themselves up and fantasize about a fictional character, that's personal business of theirs and maybe their therapists. I've heard worse. But then these pricks show up and shout "How dare you draw porn of MY waifu!" and another desk faces the wrath of my head smash.

Brb getting a Two-Face coin to decide whether to turn that into a 4chan joke or a Tumblr joke.

edited 10th Nov '15 9:42:27 AM by Luminosity

That reminds me of one show where the main character does in fact shun people, including an idol, for the hardcore dating sim world since the girls there are structured, perfect, understandable, and all that in comparison to real people and their "issues".

Nitpick, but the character with the boyfriend that set the crazed fan off could not have been from K-On. None of the characters have boyfriends and they never ever interact with boys. They don't even have boys at their high school or college.

Like I said, my memory's fuzzy. I forget which show they were talking about.

Sakamoto Ryouma's swordsmanship scroll declared authentic

How very interesting, the legend lives on.

There's some self awareness now and then about how toxic and pathetic the whole waifu thing is. Oyasumi punpun had a number of blatant jabs at the behavior of otaku, like one character going on about the impurity of 3D women over their 2d counterparts. Welcome to the NHK, Perfect Blue and Ressentiment also dealt with this subject very directly with all the horror it entails.

While obviously this entitlement and emotional immaturity is awful it speaks of a much broader societal problem that so any Japanese men think of themselves so lowly that they just completely turn their back on their real world and drown their sorrows in immature, masturbatory fantasies.

edited 10th Nov '15 1:40:48 PM by wehrmacht

@Ogodei: Claymore is Shonen. It's just published in Jump Square instead, which is technically the monthly version of Shonen Jump.

I found the article I was talking about. The character was from Kannagi. Link. NSFW, obviously.

edited 10th Nov '15 4:09:10 PM by speedyboris

you got another source on that? like it sounds plausible but sankakucomplex is generally not that good of a source, they tend to be kind of sensasionalist.

edited 10th Nov '15 6:17:34 PM by wehrmacht

I put "kannagi outrage" in google, and got quite a few. Seemed to have originally started from 2chan, to absolutely nobody's surprise.

For anyone wanting one otaku's take (that) on purity fetishism, look up Masara's "glasses" webcomic on danbooru. (Requires some knowledge of Kantai Collection.)

There has been something of a reaction against this. There's a section of anime otaku who conspicuously celebrate the marriage of voice actresses, and have their own term ("voice-pigs"?) for the obsessives. I know about this only for seiyuu, where this purity obsession was always at its weirdest; it may be a different matter for idols who are actually intended to be fantasy material.

This whole phenomenon is full of contradictions. These girls, real or fictional, must remain pure and innocent, but many fans are fine with them sexed up in fetishistic ways. They must be masters at what they do but remain helpless and without confidence. In pornographic visual novels it has to the heroine's first time but she also has to be consummate and experimenting.

It's down to a mix of old norms about women, long outdated in practice, and a lack of contact with real women that might dispel them. And behind that, is a class of people of both sexes who cannot fit into this strongly conformist society and do not have the social skills to find their own place. So they turn their work ethic to safe, accessible fandoms. The Lost Decade made this worse by removing the assurance of a job, creating the hikikomori demographic. Seems to be improving recently (a mix of conventions breaking down, the internet and ever more of the country identifying as otaku) but it's a lasting problem.

Japan to issue first-ever recruiting call for female fighter pilots

Also, the Mitsubishi MRJ has had its Maiden Flight.

That sounds awesome.

I will admit that my primary exposure to Japanese culture is through bits of history but mostly manga and anime.

And among many things that bother me, one is this idea of purity for women.

God, here's hoping that it's an exaggeration and real life Japanese culture is more sensible.

Like said already, the worst of it comes from people divorced from reality. And the usual conservatives.

Purity as a concept goes way back in Japanese history and can get complex. Remarrying is a touchy subject for example.

EDIT: Japanese Death Poems for your pleasure.

EDIT 2 ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: Revision of Japan’s archaic sex crime laws falling short: critics

edited 16th Nov '15 9:05:04 AM by TerminusEst

Behind Japanese parochialism aka Why many Japanese don't speak English

edited 18th Nov '15 7:33:04 AM by TerminusEst

Interesting article. tldr, Japan has basically no foreign ties. Unlike most of the world, it has no history of global imperialism — it successfully repelled (for the most part) attempts to subjugate it, and its own attempts to colonize other parts of the world (ie, WWII) were both relatively late in the game and fundamentally unsuccessful. What that means is that 1) Japanese culture hasn't spread outside Japan, and 2) other cultures haven't spread inside Japan. Politically, its only real ally is the US, and that alliance basically boils down to "the US gets to keep bases in Japan, and in return Japan gets to call on the US for help if they're ever attacked".

So Japan remains fundamentally isolated despite the increasingly globalized world.

And in a way, it doesn't want the world to come visit it. It's been interesting under Abe's right-wing government, with a push for more proactive stance on defence and counter-terrorism matters, or foreign policyy in general. They're trying to make Japan relevant, yet at the same time, they don't want to bear the cost of the global issues.

The Tokyo Olympics will be a very fascinating thing to follow.

I thought Japan taught English as part of its curriculum?

Do you remember any Spanish you learned in school?