Of “Wacky” Japan and the Myth of the Other
by Racialicious Special Correspondent Latoya Peterson
Oh, the things these eyes have seen surfing the gaming blogs. I never know what is going to pop up on Kotaku, so when I saw a write up of Duel Love, I had to laugh. The Nintendo DS game puts you in the role of a transfer student, who becomes the personal trainer for a secret male fight club. Apparently, your job is to wipe down the boys post battle and give them massages. After reading the helpful description of gameplay provided by one brave blogger, I smiled a bit and surfed on.
But it appears that the game about boy scrubbing was not done with me yet.
A few days later, I checked my Feministe feed and saw that Holly had done a complete write up of the game. In her entry “Boy Scrubbing for Fun and Profit”
The first thing I noticed in the trailer is the fact that all the bodies featured are uniformly hyper-thin and pale. The game features the usual cliched lineup of cute boys to fall in love with: the moody cool loner, the rascally troublemaker, the older intellectual, the long-haired beauty, and the disturbingly young cute kid, but they all have the same disturbingly unrealistic body. (These kids are supposed to be fist-fighters?) A coworker of mine who’s into this genre says the artist who’s responsible for the character design has really gone downhill.
Now, I happen to agree with Zuzu’s points in that post I just linked: this kind of portrayal of boys is relatively insignificant in terms of role-modeling compared to what girls grow up dealing with, either here or in Japan. Although I did notice a very conformist “hot boy” look the last time I was in Tokyo, it certainly wasn’t an anorexic look. I still always wonder what’s going on with the fairly predictable kind of objectification you find in so many hundreds of shōjo and shōnen ai (those are the gay ones) comic books, visual novels, and games. These are products made mostly by straight women, for straight women. So what’s with the hyper-elongated torsos with the bizzarely placed pectorals? Is this really sexy? I remember seeing a Death Note bootleg game not that long ago that even featured a hyper-skinny guy with an absurd 12-pack of abdominal muscles. It’s not just that these artists don’t study realistic anatomy — just like the equally anatomy-and-physics-deficient artists who draw female characters with gravity-defying, spine-shattering boobs, there’s a particular kind of focused fetishization.
Holly then opens the floor for discussion (with a few different issues at play) but quickly comes back to the floor to address some stereotypical statements about Japan and Japanese society that were proliferating in the comments.
Holly says:
March 7th, 2008 at 10:38 am – Edit
I’ve noticed there are quite a few interesting ideas about Japan floating around in this discussion so far. I suppose I ought to have expected that, since it’s a Japanese game and this genre of comics / novels / games / animation originated in Japan. But really, it’s grown to be a global phenomenon. There’s something about it that appeals to a lot of people, not just in Japan. That’s what I’m curious about.
Japan has this place in the Western imagination as deeply strange and different on some level, a funhouse mirror and a convenient Other. That’s what has fueled what some people call the “Japan is Weird” trend in blogs and other websites. (Which, if you read the comments on that thread, I find deeply irritating.) I just want to make it clear, that wasn’t the intention of this post. It’s fine if you guys want to speculate about Japanese society or talk about how Japan is this way or that way based on pop culture you’ve consumed or a trip you made there. Even though I’m Japanese and spent big chunks of my childhood growing up there, I certainly don’t claim to be an expert on the subject. I want to do a little bit of myth-busting though… or at least, myth-questioning.
Holly thoroughly challenges many of the myths surrounding Japanese culture, like this one, heard quite often by my ears:
Characters in Japanese comics and animation look like white people!
This topic has been thoroughly written about. The best essay on the subject, in my opinion, is once again by my former classmate Matt Thorn:
http://www.matt-thorn.com/mangagaku/faceoftheother.html
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