I forget who first said it, but “If you want to know about a country, look at its pornography” is as facile and meritless a quote as it is oft-repeated. And recently I confused a country—Japan—with its porn.
Maybe they replaced my solid salmon-sexing job with a machine, but the Japanese don’t deliberately make their teenage girls tiny-skirted temptresses in order to overthrow our way of life, Asa Akira suggests.
Akira, who grew up in Japan, is seen being serviced by Makeup Wizard Glenn on the set of “Sailor Moon XXX.” It was the perfect opportunity for me to ask her a question that has germinated since the first time I saw a Japanese teen soak her underpants in shame while being raped by an octopus.
“What the hell is going on?” I said. “What is it with the dirty schoolgirls?”
Akira explained there was a difference between Japanese popular culture and Japanese porn.
“Most Japanese girls don’t know they’re porny,” she said, all porny and Japanese. “When I was growing up, I never thought of it as ‘Oooooh, schoolgirls.’ I just saw them as boy-crazy.”
“Because it seems like the Japanese porn I come across is all about tricking or forcing a vulnerable woman into having sex,” I said. “Which she’s then powerless to keep from enjoying.”
“One doesn’t cross over into the other,” she said.
Akira is playing Sailor Mars, her personal hero from the “Sailor Moon” hall of justice.
“Sailor Mars was always my favorite,” she said. “I wanted to be her. She was super-mature. In the Japanese version of the cartoon, she goes to a private school and comes from a prestigious family that owns a shrine or something.”
Each of the Sailors represents a planet and embodies her planet’s mystical properties (or something).
“I watched ‘Sailor Moon’ when I was little,” she said, “and it was all about cool teenage girls doing fun things.”
“And you didn’t associate it with sex?” I said.
“Not consciously,” she said.
Because that is pretty much all I see when I look at any Japanese representation of femininity (well, except Yubaba from “Spirited Away”).
“Maybe that’s you,” she said.
“Sailor Moon XXX,” directed by Lee Roy Myers, also stars Lexi Belle in the title role.
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Japanese debut money shot technology; Japanese cartoons teach us to fuck the shame away; Asa Akira—top drop by any other name
According to the Internet, I should not have used “Japanimation” but “anime.” There are those people who, upon being corrected about something they still don’t understand and therefore don’t see the value of, would lash out and say something like “Get a life!” when what they should have done was to have spoken correctly in the first place. So I’m sorry to have offended you, Internet. But I still don’t see the difference.
Yours,
Gram
For what it’s worth, “Japanimation” went out of style in the early 90s, once “animé” became more widespread. It’s almost akin, although immensely different, to calling R&B “race music.”
/geek
Surely there must be an article somewhere with you chatting with MakeUp Wizard Glenn, I dunno, he looks like he might have an interesting tale to tell..
Seconded.
It’s so true…I didn’t see Japanese school girl uniforms as sexy when I had to wear one. But I did know that there were people who did, because they kept trying to molest me on the trains!
Maybe that was just YOU, Rikochan.