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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Japanese Children

  
 
Seth
20:36 / 16.12.02
Hoookay. I admit that I'm not the biggest expert on foreign cinema...

- Akira: Children abused in school by teachers, bullied by pupils, out of control, not a parent in sight. Pree-teens held captive and fed drugs by the military.

- Ring: One child hated and neglected for being different (admittedly, dangerously so) before being pushed down a well to die. Another kid being neglected by both parents, unable to relate. Teenagers being infected by a horrible curse when left unsupervised.

- Battle of the Planets: A team of teenage orphans saving the world.

- Battle Royale: The State in fear of children, forcing them at gunpoint to wipe each other out.

- Neon Genesis Evangelion: A hero neglected by his father and forced to pilot a machine that makes him manifest his repressed rage. Other child-pilots getting seriously wounded in battle. More kids missing one or more of their parents. Admittedly, I've only seen the first four episodes so far, but child abuse seems to be a major theme.

Audition: A young girl abused by her dance instructor.

Perfect Blue: A teen pop idol feels forced by her agent into acting a rape scene in a drama series, then gets involved in porno against her will, before nearly getting raped by a stalker.

... but what is going on here? That's not even an exhaustive list - I'm positive there's tons I've missed out. What is the root of the Japanese obsession with child abuse, the loss of innocence, pedophilia or childhood trauma? Where does it come from in their culture? From the nation that gave us vending machines containing used school girl's knickers and a host of children's cartoons featuring young girls with their white panties on display... are their any cine-literate psycho-analyst culture junkies going to dissect this phenomenon?
 
 
The Strobe
21:08 / 16.12.02
Also, Serial Experiments: Lain, which features a sequence involving a computer system called KIDS made of children all hooked up as some big neural network. It did, of course, send them all mad and kill them.

Not to mention the whole tormented not-quite-real-or-there central character, and the girl who kills herself in the opening episode and then sends emails to people after the fact.

I'd be interested to consider this, certainly, having seen quite a bit of what's mentioned here. Just another time. (exp: please PM me. I owe you NGE like a bastard and now have time and burners to copy whatever you don't have. And you need to see Lain a lot. 3 Discs. I have.)
 
 
Foust is SO authentic
01:37 / 17.12.02
All I know is, there's a lot of seriously disturbing things in Japanese culture. The prevailing image of Japan is that it's full of self-controlled, serene people who are obsessed with work; yet their fiction and pop culture exports hint at something beneath that. Something I'm pretty sure I don't want to experience.
 
 
Seth
22:47 / 18.12.02
Agreed, Foust. I just really want to know why that is. What exactly has caused their culture and cinema to be like this? I mean, they've endured some fucked up stuff, but none of it seems to hint at why they portray their kids the way they do.
 
 
_pin
22:59 / 18.12.02
Is there something in the idea of the repression and control of their culture that everyone knows them for breeding this sort of stuff? It seems logical, but then in Western culture, Things That Shock And Arrouse have become more extreme simply because of desensitization to what has shocked and arroused before. Surely it is not the same in Japan (?).

Or is this not a new phenomenon?

All thinking-out-loud, there, because I don't really know what I'm talking about. Obviously.
 
 
rizla mission
09:31 / 19.12.02
Also thinking-out-loud because I don't really know what I'm talking about.. (so prepare for a bit of a headdump):

I've been pondering similar things about Japanese culture of recent, particularly the somewhat bizarre attitude to women that comes across from it.. I mean, this one's not exactly rocket science, but check Ring, Audition, the killer girl with the scythe in Battle Royale, the rather strange dichotomy of female characters which you often find in Manga, not so much Virgin/Whore as Virgin/Killer.. (bit film noir that actually, in a crazy sort of way)..

Japanese culture often seems to have an element of extremity, even when it's not sexual or violent extremity .. they don't seem to do things in half measures.. everything's big and epic and over the top.. I can't think of much recent Japanese culture in which subtlety is a highly regarded value..

Also - and this is one of things I like best about the new Japanese movies - there's very little in the way of direct moral messages. Whereas Western films frequently like to spell out for us who's in the right and who's in the wrong, Ring and Audition and Battle Royale are extremely ambiguous in regards to this .. their attitude is one of "Some fucked up shit has happened. Who was the hero and who was the villian? who was responsible for the bad stuff and who saved the day? What were we trying to say about society? I dunno, you figure it out..".

Maybe now I'm taking this a step too far, but I think a similar thing can be seen in a lot of Manga.. rather than presenting a direct conflict between good and evil, Manga stories often seem to be about a basic conflict between two rival powers, and the one that wins does so through strength rather than through moral righteousness, with the ideologies the different sides represent left in the background or not raised at all (eg, LAW versus CRIMINALS or REBELS vs EMPIRE - the side we're supposed to root for is generally the side the story chooses to focus on.. in a Western story there'd be lots of examples of how the 'good' side stood for good and the 'bad' side stood for evil, but there rarely seem to be in Manga).
 
 
The Strobe
09:41 / 19.12.02
Also:

exp, there's even more about children, and especially mothers, to come in Evangelion. On a quite earth-shatteringly large level, for which the word "Spoilers" will not do justice.
 
 
The Natural Way
11:22 / 19.12.02
Yeah, I mean, there's plently of teens being violated on the big screens in the West, but we're just a bit more...conservative and uptight about it. In a war our stuff's nastier and more surreptitious.
 
 
The Natural Way
11:22 / 19.12.02
I meant "way" not "war".

For fuck's sake...rgh!
 
 
illmatic
12:23 / 19.12.02
There's something in this idea - probably the best thing to do would be to ask someone Japanese. Or someone whose worked there - any JET scheme or TEFL teachers here? On this note, is anyone aware if Japan has the death penalty of not?

I ask because I wonder to what degree the privleging of the indvidual that seems to go in Western-Liberal democracies occurs in Japan? Could this be linked with the depictions of cruelty you're talking about? I've no idea and don't know nearly enough about contemporary Japan to even take a wild guess.

Also, how do we know that these just aren't the extreme parts of their culture that manage to get over here? Maybe the Japanese equivalent of the Daily Mail has already denounced them. I'm certain there are strong areas of conservatism in Japanese culture though how this manifests I'm not sure ie. sex and violence might not be such a huge issue.

Obviously, I too, have no idea what I'm talking about.
 
 
illmatic
09:51 / 25.03.03
Right, I'm bringing Japanese Children back from the dead...

(oh no, what Have I said??!)

I think this has got a lot of to do with the way in which we construct catergories of childhood and victimisation here in the West. Something I've heard a lot is that our current conception of childhood is a newish invention, something only a few hundred years ago. Might even be shorter than this - does anyone know? That's children as holders of an innocence we get all sentimental about, rather than simply "tiny adults". If this conception is tempoarily limited, might it also not be culturally relative? The Japanese obviously have quite a different conception. I don't know what this ,is, but perhaps the horror for us comes from seeing someone else violate one of our cultural taboos.

You can see this our dialogues changing quite clearly, for instance with the level of discussion we've got on padeophilia. I can remember when there was never any discussion of this, when it's simply wasn't an issue. A turning point I recall is the establishment of "Childline" - this was the first time I remember seeing "child abuse" in the news with any regularity. So with gone from silence to the complete hysteria we've got now, in what? 15 years?

I'm assuming that the Japanese have never picked up on the idealised image of childhood that we have - I'm assuming that they have another set of assumptions about children, no more or less true than ours - and don't see "abuse" in the same way we do. Can we argue that the whole category of abuse and victimhood is part of the privelging of the individual/ Western liberal-democracy thing that I mention above?

Also to take the Rza's point

Manga stories often seem to be about a basic conflict between two rival powers, and the one that wins does so through strength rather than through moral righteousness, with the ideologies the different sides represent left in the background or not raised at all

Reminds me of something I read in a book about India recently ("Shamans, Mystics and Doctors" by Sudhir Kakar) - he stated that the Indian psyche is more strongly divided along the axis of pollution/ cleanliness than the Western good/sinful. I assume something similar operates in Japan. I don't know what this is though, but I've can't imagine someone Japanese going on about "sin" - getting a bit of clarity on Japanese views on good/evil this might explain the production of these extreme images.

Any thoughts?
 
 
lord nuneaton savage
11:33 / 25.03.03
I had a mate go over to Tokyo for a few years, he told me that feeling girls up on tube trains is actually seen as something of a hobby over there, apparently it happens to every girl you meet and is almost accepted practice. Also theres a few western artist's who live over there who's art is kind of an interesting reflection on japanese approaches to women (from a western perspective obviously)check out Trevor Brown and Romain Slocombe. (I dont know if they have websites).
 
 
Spatula Clarke
00:30 / 26.03.03
Yeah, and there's machines on every street corner that you can buy teenage girls' soiled underwear from.

Jesus...
 
 
Rev. Orr
02:40 / 26.03.03
I can't think of much recent Japanese culture in which subtlety is a highly regarded value..

...except their traditional pictoral art, music, caligraphy, flower arranging, modern architechture, their culture of technological minimalism and miniturisationand the entire concept of Shinto. Aren't we in danger of putting Tarrant on TV out of business here? One might as well ask what the tradition of slasher movies says about Western attitudes towards teen sexuality and vulnerability. Answer a lot, but it's hardly valid to extrapolate into a smear on the entire culture. Is this really more than a small sub-subset of a national culture?
 
 
Seth
08:27 / 26.03.03
Is this really more than a small sub-subset of a national culture?

I don't know. That's what we're trying to find out. If it simply happens to be the aspect of the culture that we make visible and accessable to our markets, we then have to ask exactly what that implies about that market and those that supply for it.
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
09:24 / 26.03.03
Wasn't paedophilia (that is TOTAL paedophilia, foetus and above) only outlawed in Japan in the mid nineties? Can anyone get an exact date on this? There are, however, European countries where this was also the case in a more limited form, i.e increasing the age of consent from twelve to sixteen.
Oddly, seeing as this was the case and that you can still fell up girls on the subway, buy used panties and menstural fluid, it's never mentioned in Manga/Cinema, even in the grittier social commentary stuff like Audition/Perfect Blue
On the good/evil issue, I assume that a lot of the morality comes from Buddhism/Shinto, Eastern philosophies where good/evil are much less defined. It comes out in their cinema a little: Akira's just formless energy weilded by a fucked-up kid damaged by a crumbling society, Shinji from NGE's dad is just trying to save the world.
(By and by, were the Neon-Genesis episodes shown on the UK's Sci-Fi channel up and till recently the whole of the series, barring the 'Revelation' full-length feature? Did anyone else fell a little dissapointed when it went from William-Burroughs-doing-Godzilla to Philip K. Dick's 'difficult' later work without an explanation.)
 
 
rizla mission
09:29 / 26.03.03
I take Orr's point.

I was actually thinking along similar lines when I re-read my earlier post yesterday.
 
 
rizla mission
09:34 / 26.03.03
buy used panties and menstural fluid,

Is this true?

I mean, the pants vending machines are of course infamous, but they're brand new pants intended to be worn by purchaser, right?

The automatic connection to weird sexual stuff sounds a little .. exaggerated?
 
 
Sax
13:32 / 26.03.03
Well, the one I saw in Japan advertised panties as worn by genuine schoolgirls, honest. Whether this is in fact the case I don't know, because I didn't part with my yen. I suppose, as with many of these things, it's up to your grubby little imagination. Clean pants, pants that have been pulled on and worn for 30 seconds by bored homeworkers or genuine detention-fresh panties worn by giggling Japanese schoolgirls, you decide.
 
 
CameronStewart
16:15 / 26.03.03
I spent a few weeks in Tokyo two months ago and I can tell you that

a) I never once saw a schoolgirl-panties vending machine, not even in the red-light district of Kabukicho (and I was looking, believe me).

b) Molestation on the train is NOT "an accepted practice." It happens, of course, but there are signs plastered all over the place instructing women to raise an alarm if it does. My friend Ayako, who was showing me around the city, said that women are not nearly as tolerant of it as they once were (probably 10-20 years past).

However, child pornography - at least cartoon depictions of it, in manga and anime - is very common. I was wandering around the manga shops and a great many of the covers featured VERY young-looking children in sexually explicit poses - and this isn't tucked away in some dark corner at the back of the shop, this is right out in the open. What's even more startling is seeing women browsing through it with no apparent discomfort.
 
 
Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo
19:53 / 02.04.03
I have read on snopes.com that the "soiled panties" machines were an urban legend, myself.

But as Faux News says, if it is on the internet, it's a lie, only believe what they tell you!
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
11:19 / 03.04.03
The soiled panties 'vending machine' myth IS a myth, as far as I know, but there is an underground market for it. On 'Tom Green's Tokyo Monkey Subway Hour', apart from dressing like Godzilla/playing with feral monkeys/acting as an ambassador for the humble Fork in a chopsticks-only zone etc. Tom was also taken by his local guide to the apartment of a man who sold soiled panties from his apartment (he kept them in a fridge). They came with polaroids of the former owner and from the look of his apartment the dealer made a good deal of money from it.
 
 
EE
18:48 / 03.04.03
I never once saw a schoolgirl-panties vending machine, not even in the red-light district of Kabukicho (and I was looking, believe me).

That's weird. I could have sworn I saw some there. I could be wrong, I couldn't read the writing on the machine, and I was pretty drunk at the time.

Off topic: You know, a map/brochure of Tokyo described Kabukicho's nightlife as "vibrant". I was expecting nightclubs and bars and cafes. Imagine my surprise.
 
  
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