I remember tart cards from when I lived in Japan. Don’t remember anime or manga tart cards, though. Just actual photos. But then I lived there a while ago, so things might have changed, and I wasn’t really paying attention to that sort of thing, either.
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Never been there.
Don’t care to go.
Yes, the word means “abnormal” but you have to realize that despite the stereotype of sex-crazed deviants. Japan is a really prudish country. In Japanese sex scenes (even in movies that are designed to be pornographic), the genitals tend to be blurred out (rather defeating the point). Plenty of comics are called “hentai” that don’t involve tentacle porn or anything like that – just anything with sex scenes in them.
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To expand on this (pun intended I guess), hentai features tentacles pretty much because of the prudishness.
I don’t know exactly when, but Japanese censorship laws were passed that were written in such a way to forbid “sensitive” materials, and the cutoff for what counted as “sensitive” eventually settled on PIV penetration. So artists developed the workaround of using tentacles to penetrate instead of penises.
You see these kinds of workarounds everywhere. And while people feel like tentacles are especially degenerate, it’s more or less meant to be like in western softcore where people masturbate clothes on.
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at one point i created an image that overlaid the continental u.s with a map of australia.
it turned out that most of our acquaintances had this mental picture of australia being around the same size as texas.
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Antohony Bourdain Parts Unknown’s Tokyo episode actually has an interview with the guy who created Legend of the Overfiend, and he says just this – it was a work-around to not being able to show penises and such.
So yeah, see what happens when you cram sexuality into the bottom of a bottle… Urotsukidoji!
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True, but it is kind of like the fact that Canada is the second largest country in the world (and Russia the first). Yes, in theory but most of the country is unusable. Of course with Russia and Canada global warming may actually make some of the currently unusable places prime real estate in 50 years. I don’t think the Outback will be improved.
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It works the other way as well. Most Australians think of Tasmania as a tiny place, when it’s about the same size as Ireland.
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seems to me (born 4th gen texan) the Aussies I’ve met were just texans with a great accent.
with greatest regards, @Wanderfound @Immutable_Mike @Michael_R_Smith @redheadedleague, I mean no offense!
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and yet people live in the remotenesses of both canada and australia.
as an 8th generation texan, much of white australia is like much of white texas–as long as you’re white they’re some of the friendliest people on earth.
given my deep reading of the history of the u.s. civil war, this comes as no surprise to me.
in so many unpleasant ways it reminded me of my first three years teaching in a smallish town in deep east texas where, if you were white, and if there were no people of color in the room people felt no shame in using terms like n^^^^r, c^^n, w^tb^^k, b^^^^r, etc. and , just like in east texas, when i told white people directly to lay off the freaking racist language it earned me some hard stares and hurt feelings.
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There are things I am in favor of that people would find “problematic”. There are things you are in favor of that people would find “problematic.” I don’t think either of those should be illegal, especially if it’s a cover for racism.
Thanks, I have a lot of experience.
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Statistically, if you go anywhere in Australia you’re actually unlikely to bump into a racist. But that’s probably more due to most of the country being uninhabitable.
I have a state election tomorrow, and I’m kinda surprised that I only have one outright quiet-parts-loud racist to choose from.
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Sexuality and sex work in Japan seems to happen under a totally different cultural framework and power structure/context from White Western cultures in my understanding.
The unionization and protection of sex workers in Japan in the early 1900’s has a celebratory festival, Kanamara Matsuri. (I’d post the Wikipedia entry but it is flawed in many ways). Went to the festival and it was joyous except for many sniggering American tourists imposing themselves into the event.
Another example would be the film by Nagisa Oshima (a regular judge on Iron Chef!) ‘In the Real of The Senses’. This art film was marketed in the West as pornography as all the sexual content was real. The film is based on a factual narrative around the sado-masochistic relationship between a prostitute and her lover. She was the dom in practice and eventually killed her lover and severed his penis. Was found wandering around Tokyo dick in hand.
This happened around 1934. The woman became a folk hero in Japan
Just thinking that sexuality, culture, otherness, gender identity and ‘pornography’ becomes problematic when we don’t challenge the lens with which we view it.
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The word hentai literally means pervert (as in “a person with unusual sexual tastes”) and is not understood within Japan to refer to pornography (whether animated or not). I think that a big issue with what they refer to as “ero manga” or “ero anime” is that, all too often, the characters are very clearly presented as being in high school or younger, which they explain away with a disclaimer saying, “All fictional persons appearing in this work are 18 years old,” even though they’re only 4 feet tall and wearing schoolgirl uniforms and referring to others at the same school as “senpai” (which means they can’t possibly be in their final year of high school).
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Not entirely surprising that this is happening. Australia is also the country that until 2013 didn’t allow the R18+ classification to be applied to Video Games and instead would classify such works as Refused which bans them from sale. Even after the laws were revised to allow for games to be classified as R18+ many games that might have qualified for that rating were still simply being banned. It looks like they’ve come around in recent years and started actually applying the rating though.
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oops double post
