I've posted about this before but it continues to fascinate me. I'm also not talking about the more obviously fucked up topic of the sexualising of teenage girls in Japanese media, but what constitutes an "older" person over there.
I'm currently watching the Netflix adaptation of One Piece, and saw some Japanese discussion about the show's portrayal of Shanks and the actor playing him, who looks like this on the show:
There were comments saying that he "looks too much like a man past his prime" but also comments like "I like seeing attractive older men in media" and I'm just confused since he looks like a perfectly normal handsome actor man. They talked about him like Western social media talked about a 65-year-old Jeff Goldblum
I guess you turn into an ossan immediately after your 25th birthday
Being honest, I hadn't really thought about it until now. Seeing how Japanese work culture is and how in a lot of cases (specifically the "businessman" type office jobs) many young people might just see it as the beginning of no more "life". So if all the freedom and fun of basically everything college or lower ed levels is where the concept of "young" just ends, and old age means no longer being able to do anything other than boring work. And while not an excuse for adults lusting after actual kids (it isn't), it could be a weird reaction to the mass desire to be/feel "young" again when looking at it from an "old" POV. So maybe the hard shift in basically all of Japan's work culture vs free time to just do more free time things could help in shifting both the idea of what "old" is as well as turning fixation of lusting after or otherwise yearn to "feel" young again.
But I also can't say that the headspace of the US is much better in how our work/life systems are getting any better and might start shifting into a weird clone of what our own corpo overlords want to copy from Japan (or other SEA nations). We already see more and more articles about how corps and many small businesses either openly or imply that you should be finding ways to bring work into "free" moments in your non-work portions of the day. How not doing that shit is signs of "just not being motivated to succeed". And how even those moms out there are getting pressured into getting back to work sooner or be quietly replaced for not being as available due to now having kids.
One thing that jumped out at when watching Uzaki-Chan was how the main cast is constantly reminding themselves “College students are also adults!” Even while some of them are preparing to graduate.