loliconomics

I may as well just change this blog’s name to “lolicontracker” or something like that, because approx. 90% of the material is going to be me ranting about the pervasiveness of the loliphenomenon in mainstream Japan. “You’re overreacting. We all know that loliculture is relegated to a few middle-aged otaku huddling in their parents’ houses jerking off to reverse import La Blue Girl DVDs, right?” I wish. Those guys, at least, have the decency to stay the fuck out of sight. The larger issue is that you literally cannot walk through a bookstore without being visually sodomized by loliriffic imagery. If you don’t believe me look at this.

Hmm…anime drawing of 9 year-old girl proffering glimpse of immaculate white panties? I must have wandered into the curtained-off manga section again. What? I’m in the econ/finance section?! I know it’s hard to market books on economic theory, especially when you’re specifically targeting the pedophile demographic, but did they really have to go there? Maybe I’m turning into a western-morality Nazi, but come on. A modicum of decorum, if you please.

Free market

Unbridled capitalism, it’s argued, will eventually lead to everything being commoditized and assigned a monetary value. Japan perhaps makes the strongest case for this theory. There is a niche retail market here for just about everything including spit, feces and teddy bears modeled on Korean soap opera heartthrobs. I just hope this store isn't selling what I think it is.

Worrying and Start

In Japan pretty much all books, be they Japanese or foreign, are fitted with a little paper wrap tucked around the dust jacket. These generally bear large, eye-catching marketing phrases, like “10 MILLION COPIES SOLD” or “CONTAINS GRAPHIC QUADRUPLE FISTING ACTION” (as in the case of the book partially visible on the far left). However, the positioning of these marketing wrappers can lead to comical results, as I found in our local Maruzen. The Japanese slogan printed on the wrap reads “OPENS PATHS”…

Abeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeebah!!!!

You see some odd advertisements in Japanese train stations. This one purports to be advertising a sort of night-school for computer illiterates who want to learn how to write in kusachu or whatever. However, I think it’s obvious from the picture that all three of the models are getting blowjobs. This probably also explains why it’s shot from the waist up. Needless to say, the guy on left is furiously shooting his wad even as the woman (?) in center nears the peak of her climax. The woman on right is clearly the most uptight of the group, and therefore just smiles politely and fiddles with her scarf thing while her partner earnestly, but somewhat clumsily, attends to her clitoris. The blue letters at the bottom of the ad are a direct translation of Robbie Williams’ immortal lyrics: “Get your rocks off Get your rocks off, honey Shake it now now Get’em off downtown.”

Splashguard not included

There’s a Japanese verb, gaman suru, which roughly means “to put up with all kinds of outrageous crap because to do so is considered a virtue by your culture”. I think this row of urinals perfectly exemplifies the Japanese spirit of gaman. At some point, a handicapped-accessible stall was installed directly in front of the last urinal, leaving approximately 10 inches of room for the user. Nothing says gaman like cramming yourself into a tiny crevice and urinating on yourself due to splash damage from a rediculously positioned commode. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to try to wedge myself in for a piss.

Ho ho ho!

I and Santa's enormous pale scrotum wish you all a very merry Christmas!
(Full body shot can be seen here)

Bypass

Eh. No sarcastic commentary today. Just a shot of this bypass that I thought was kind of cool. The Japanese love of nature may be greatly exaggerated in the West, but they do know how to make scenic highways.

Drought

Today's post has nothing to do with Japan. I just wanted to post this picture of the desolate, barren, lifeless surface of mars...



...to give y'all an idea of what my sex life is like (^o^)

Bad Santa, Bad!

Man, please tell me those aren't Santa's big, bouncy white balls dangling out there in the open air. I was with my daughter when we espied this inflated Santy in a shopping arcade. I didn't know whether to say "Ooooh, look! It's Santa-san!" or "COVER YOUR EYES! LOOK AWAY!"

Hair Dryer Poised to Make Housewives Wetter

Gentlemen, behold! The Matsushita “Nanoe Minus Ion” dryer! For those who have been living in the outer reaches of the Hindu Kush, minus (aka negative) ions are a snake oil cure-all for everything from stinky rooms to grumpiness here in Japan. Having not lived in the West for about 9 years, I’m not sure if this trend is big elsewhere or not, but here one can buy exorbitantly priced home negative-ion generators, negative-ion producing jewelry, and negative ion computer peripherals for the health-conscious geek. But what are these Nonoe Ions? According to the description of the Matsushita “Nanoe Minus Ion” hairdryer:

“Low acidity ‘Nanoe Ions’ are carried in the electric currents contained in water and are produced through cutting edge technology. Compared to regular ‘minus ions’ they contain 1000 times more moisture. This dryer produces ‘Nanoe Ions’ from its built-in 4cc water tank and injects them into the center of your damaged hair…”

Wow…so this dryer actually makes your hair wetter than it was before? I guess that justifies the JPY 14,000 (about US $120) price tag. What other items need Minus Nanoe Ion technology to inject more moisture into dry, neglected body parts? Post your ideas in the comments section (or not).

B-day Shoutout!!!

A HUGE b-day shoutout to our MAIN FUCKING MAN Mr. Kura! An even bigger Japan geek than yours truly, this guy knows more kanji than your average kokugo professor, but is so humble about it you'd never notice until you realized he was calmly sitting next to you on the subway reading something written in the 1750s without a dictionary!
Otanjobi Omedeto! Try not to hack anyone's head off this year (you will NOT get the Quickening that way, despite what you've seen on Highlander...I know, I've tried!)


PS. If you want a B-day greeting, tell me when your freakin' birthday is!!

Phat Photo Phiesta

Ok, I'm not trying to muscle in on turf so thoroughly tread by Engrish.com, but this week had me diving for my phone. Again, we are reminded that the true value of phone cameras is that they allow us to photograph other cultures for the purpose of ridiculing them.

First up, when was the last time your beverage promised to make you both a hero AND a leader? At only JPY 105 (a mere 2.03971 Brazilian Reais), this seemed like a steal. A strong 'nose' of glass-cleaner, a vaguely antifreeze-like 'attack', and an 'aftertaste' of oaky kidney trauma characterize this year's vintage of Osotspa M-150.

Ahh... now this little shop made me nostalgic for the days when you could ride into a sleepy rural Japanese village, pick up a few dozen strapping peasant girls, take them to Saitama, and pay them $2.75 a month to live in prison-like dormitories alternately wringing silk threads out of worm asses and tossing salad for the pervy managers.

Unerfahren Parken ist Verboten

I ducked into a mall to grab a bottle of iced coffee and came out to discover the bicycle Gestapo screwing with my ride. Apparently these guys get paid to hang around in front of the store, straightening the rows of parked bicycles, motorbikes, and scooters. I’d locked my aging Giant to a bike-rack in the designated area, assuming everything was kosher. Not so. They explained that my trusty steed (not pictured here) was facing the wrong direction, so they had no choice but to wrestle it around, chained as it was to the rack, lest the world implode. I unchained my bicycle for them, flipped it around to face the ‘right’ way, and they were happy. Only in Japan.

In all seriousness, there is a need for guys like this here. The average bicyclist/scooterist in this country has parking habits that can only be described as barbaric. You find bicycles and even motorcycles parked in the middle of sidewalks, in front of fire-exits, and on top of the elderly. Worse still, a lot of people seem fond of abandoning their unwanted velocipedes pretty much wherever suits their fancy. I wish the major train stations in this city would employ a couple of guys like this to keep the entrances a bit clearer. But those hats have got to go man.

The twofold nature of this biscuit…

Granted this is only amusing if you a) read katakana, b) know the cultural context, but it kind of ties in with the previous post, so I’ll attempt to explain it.

The name of this snack can be transliterated as either ‘white rollita’, in reference to the shape of the snack (which is a sort of a twisted, white-chocolate covered biscuit), or ‘white Lolita’, in reference to the literary classic by Vladimir Nabokov. This pun is fully appreciable in Japanese and is probably intentional. The expression ‘Lolita Complex’, or ‘Lolicon’ as it’s known in the lingua vulgaris was imported long ago, although the Japanese pronunciation is rendered as “roreetah konpurekusu” (or rohreekon, if you prefer).

Lolicon is the commonly used euphemism for adult males who display a bit too much enthusiasm for young girls. Rather than being frowned upon, as in the West, the ‘Lolicon’ is treated as a huge marketing opportunity, with prepubescent pop-stars like Morning Musume (whose members are periodically replaced to keep the average age of the group somewhere around 12 and whose concerts attract droves of middle-aged men) to glossy ‘gravure’ photo-albums that depict girls from ages 10 and up, posing in bikinis (books that would probably get you pulled aside and flogged if you tried to bring them through customs in most Western countries). I guess I could inject a little self-righteous Western moralizing here, but there’s far too much of that out there already. Suffice it to say I plan to get my daughter out of this country as soon as I finish grad school.

More Than Meets the Eye

There go all my sweet childhood memories shot to Hell. Until recently I pined for the days when my biggest problem was completing my Constructicon collection so I could form them into that big motherf**ker, but this was cured, instantly, upon viewing the above. According to the info card that came with this incredibly disturbing figurine (which my wife brought home for some unfathomable reason), the Lolita in the Autobot hat is named ‘Ai-chan’ and she’s a virtual hologram that administers Cybertron. So we have a naked, underage hologram bathing with, inexplicably, a Sharkticon between her thighs. What really hammers home the creepiness though is the peeking-tom Optimus Prime in the background.

Anyone who’s spent any time at all in Japan knows this country has serious pedophilia issues to work through, but damn! I’d hoped those issues would keep their slimy, schoolgirl-violating tentacles away from childhood nostalgia. I gotta shower. I feel soiled.

I SAID, HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO SUCK MY 8 LITTLE BALLS, MR. GARRISON?

I saw a young mum, kids in tow, wearing this t-shirt the other day. Disconcertingly, one of her toddlers had a matching shirt.

Yo! Bum rush the show!

Ah, Japan! Land of frank advertising. One of my favorite advertisements ever, this huge, illuminated sign, located in a major subway station, is the epitome of taste. The soothing green leaves serve as an elegant frame for the text, which reads:

KIKUTA PROCTOLOGICAL CLINIC

Now that's class, that is.

The Sausage of My Despondency

Japan has some screwed up convenience store food. The most starkly horrifying of these are the strange snack-breads, which despite containing corn, mayo, and/or meat products, require no refrigeration whatsoever. Suspiciously cheap, and apparently impervious to spoiling, these things scare the crap out of me. Let's look at two case studies.


1. The Pork Sausage Roll
A lengthy pork wiener slathered in mustard and ketchup on a white bread bun. It can kick around inside your backpack for several of July's hottest days, and still remain edible. Yoiks!



2. The Pork Dumpling Roll
Looks like an innocent sesame roll, but open it up and whoa! There's some kind of greasy, meaty patty in there. Like the Pork Sausage Roll, it requires no refrigeration.

Are these things irradiated, or simply loaded with more preservatives than Lenin’s corpse? Either way, they are a sin against God and all that’s holy and natural.

10/15/2005: I forgot the punchline, which should have read "...but I still can't seem to stop eating the fuckers."

Coffee with that?

Man, urban Japan is awash in SEX, and odd little semi-seedy, semi-respectable streets litter this fine nation. Adjacent to a building housing a fetish underwear shop on the first floor and strip clubs on the second, you find a definitely non-fetish shoe shop run by a saintly white haired granny. In the dead center of a residential area, crammed with immaculate vinyl-sided homes and stucco apartments, a hard-core porn shop might open, right between the neighborhood 7-11 and the barber where mom gets her hair permed.

It was in a neighborhood such as this that I found the Starbox Image Club. It appears to be some sort of cosplay strip-joint, though I was not willing to risk my marriage by going in and confirming this. I’m not sure which aspect of the logo I liked best -the brazen co-optation of one of America’s flagship brands of hegemony, the double meaning of the word ‘box’, or the likelihood that the proprietor was oblivious to this double meaning.

Smack my konnyaku up

Greetings, and welcome to the first installment of Yamatonokuni. This blog shall attempt to thrust a small, unwelcome flashlight into the inadequately lubricated orifices of a major Japanese population center for the enlightenment, amusement, and hopefully unmasked terror, of any audience it accrues. Today we turn our attentions to an area of Japanese culture sadly neglected by many Western scholars: food sex.

Konnyaku (above photo shows a typical example) is a rubbery Japanese staple made from the starch of an exceptionally unaesthetic potato called devil’s tongue or sometimes Konjac. This almost entirely flavorless food has a history of over 2000 years, contains zero carbs, few calories, and has the highest molecular weight of any fiber known to science. But what is the point of developing a highly refined starch-based food product if you can’t screw it?

Case study:
According to my informant, ‘Mr. A’, any block of konnyaku jelly of sufficient size can be swiftly adapted for nefarious purposes. Mr. A kindly divulged the preferred technique of konnyaku-based gratification.

WARNING: (as of yet) UNTESTED BY AUTHOR. AUTHOR TAKES NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR BURNS, DEATH, GENITAL INJURY OR RIDICULE RESULTING FROM THE USE OF THESE INSTRUCTIONS.

Ingredients:
1 block konnyaku*
1 small dried sardine**
hot water

Directions:
1. Use a paring knife or other suitable instrument to make a hole of appropriate size in center of konnyaku block. Do not to pierce konnyaku all the way through.
2. Drop konnyaku block into hot water.
3. Heat 1~2 minutes, until konnyaku is precisely human body temperature (98.6 F or 37.0 C –use a candy or meat thermometer to ascertain temperature).
DO NOT OVERHEAT KONNYAKU. RISK OF INJURY, INFERTILITY, HILARITY.
4. Use disposable chopstick, etc. to insert sardine into the bottom of hole made in step 1.
5. Lubricate to taste and utilize.***

*Prior measurement to assure block is of adequate size and thickness strongly recommended.

**Interestingly, according to Mr. A the dried sardine is for the purpose of adding a realistic “barrier”, and not for, ah... olfactory stimulation (as one might initially assume).

***Post-coital disposal is another matter altogether. We may note here that konnykau is a popular filler for many kinds of soups, stewed vegetable dishes and stir-fry in Japan.

09/28/05 Clarification: Man, I completely forgot to specify...this particular means of recreation is meant solely for MALE users. Sorry to all those confused lady readers who wrote in ("...OK, I've made a hole and stuffed the sardine down there. Now what? The thing seems too squarish to be of any use..." etc.) I do apologize and shall do more research into whatever the female equivalent of "Konnyakubation" may entail.