2010 Thinking, Part 1

Well, I made a couple of few-and-far-between posts about things unrelated to Japan, and then quit posting at all for the longest time due to realizing that…

For one thing, while Japan is less modern than my own country on women’s social/economic status, it may actually be more modern regarding respect shown to women behind closed doors, especially in matters of sex.

(…May be. I have to admit I have been feeling that more since I moved to a city near and influenced by Tokyo; attitudes here are certainly more modern than in the more provincial area I lived before. Also, now I am around mostly college-educated people. Before I was around all kinds of people, more of a cross-section than now, but spent a lot of time with some male friends absorbed in boys-club subcultures, and these folks’ attitudes skewed my view of attitudes held by Japanese men toward women, as they were certainly worse than average. As I was praying and hoping at the time, the very sexist feelings of “Friend #1″ mentioned in my post titled Blog Rethinking [May 14th, 2009] are not representative at all. But I spent too much time back then being stressed out by his attitude.)

–Btw: when I say women are shown more respect behind closed doors, I am NOT trying to offer an explanation of the variety “but at home, the mother is the boss of the family, and all those powerful men, when they go home they are scared of their wives.” I HATE it when people do this; in my experience it’s always a way of excusing male dominance in society.

I don’t have a lot of time to ramble today about what I DO mean, but Thinking Part 2 will come soon. In the meantime, here is a paper I had read that had me paranoid for a while about the situation of rape in Japan:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/rsw/undergrad/cetl/ejournal/issues/volume1issue1/gray/

I was depressed at what I read here, but really, the negative attitudes reflected in this paper aren’t what I mostly see around me (especially the mention of a correlation between pornography and rape, which doesn’t ring true to me. At home in the U.S. I feel a lot more that men’s behavior is influenced by pornography. I don’t feel that way here, may discuss that more later).

 I wasn’t surprised to find another paper with a different point of view:

http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/1961to1999/1999-pornography-rape-sex-crimes-japan.html

This paper traces the drop in rape cases since the 70s, and brings up the interesting possibility that rape may INVERSELY correlate with availability of pornography. Pornography was highly regulated during the American occupation and became much more available again afterward. The American occupation brought in a lot of harmful, negative-morality attitudes that have kind of messed up Japanese culture. Inevitable, since Japan was wrong in the war and needed to lose; the occupation was actually lighter than Japan expected it to be at the time. But still American control brought in with it some of the most poisonous influences in American culture, and Japan is still working on recovering from the sudden injection of alien taboos into their culture. More on this later…

But one more thing from this paper…wait, I can’t find the words now. I want to talk about this paper in a bit more detail in a future post so I’ll let it go, but it said that while number of (reported) cases of rape is low, rates of arrest and conviction are very high, I think it might have said highest in the world. In other words, Japan deals with rape better than you’d be led to believe by the scary language in the first paper, which of course doesn’t compare the situation in Japan with the even worse reality of rape trials in the U.S. and probably many other places.

Hearing this gels with my own experience of people’s attitudes here actually. It doesn’t surprise me that the first paper is written by one person, not a Japanese person, and that the second one is written by one Japanese and one non-Japanese author. (A great way to go! It’s not good of course for biased Westerners to go charging into countries that are not theirs and telling people what their problems are, but it’s also problematic to have biased native explainers invested in excusing away their culture’s human rights problems to the world, and having carte blanche to do so because of political correctness.)

Oh man, I actually don’t have time to get to the second reason I’ve stopped writing here, which is that some things that have always vaguely tugged at the back of my mind about the American approach to feminism have lately crystallized a bit more. I think there are some big mistakes in the American approach and I actually wouldn’t want to do my little part to spread it over here. Details later, on this and all the other things I said I’d discuss more later! Looking forward to getting back to collecting my thoughts on women in Japan.

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