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
this is the country that produces extremely serious cartoons wherein the mitigation of a global catastrophe is assigned to a group of 12-16 year olds
The 30yo superheroes are all stuck in the office working until 12am taking the last train back home.
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.
Well imagine that. The country with a bigger cult of youthfulness problem than America has skewered perceptions of reality when it comes to the perception of the human lifespan
They have a whole word for it
In Japan, women had traditionally been expected to marry at a young age,[19] and those who were unmarried after the age of 25 were metaphorically referred to as (unsold) Christmas cakes (クリスマスケーキ) in reference to items which are still unsold after the 25th.[20] The term first became popular during the 1980s[21] but has since become less common[22] because Japanese women today can remain unmarried with somewhat less stigmatization.[23] An equivalent term does, however, still exist that hearkens to the "unsold" nature of unmarried women, urenokori (売れ残り, "unsold goods").
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_cake
Japan is full of single, lonely MILFs because society doesn’t want to have sex with them. Incredibly sad
Japan is full of single, lonely MILFs because society doesn’t want to have sex with them. Incredibly sad
So that's where those internet ads were poiting to!
I am shocked how strong the urge is to say regrettable things about a group of hyperexploited colonized people.
Japan really has been forced to embody the worst of anglo idology.
Does Japan count as a colonised country when they were an (insanely fucked up) empire for most of its existence?
They were an empire that failed and became a client state. They’re not colonized at all unless you’re counting the indigenous people
We paid the yakuza to shoot leftists, they are still a one party state using only institutions we created, and every one of your favorite hentia tags was created because of a law we put in place. Are you telling me the plaza accords would have happened if we didn't have them under control.
Japan was never colonized, the opposite is true, they were the colonizers
Japan absolutely was colonized by the US, though it was not half as vicious as the Japanese colonial occupation of China and Korea
Lol you really think their ideology and work culture would be any different if they had won the war? Colonized my ass
Yeah, the seccond most popular ideology in Japan is comunism. Third is ecofashism. So yes, if we didn't install neoliberalism it would look very different
But all the women that DiCaprio broke up with didn't have children but possibly were wanting to start a family.
Wouldn't that make them wannabes milfs?
In Japan when you're in your mid-twenties you're close to death, I'm an ancient lich.
I think it's because traditionally (or at least in modern capitalist Japan) you are only thought to have a brief period of relative freedom that ends after university, after which you're supposed to slave away at a corporation while supporting a family until you croak or retire if you're a man or be a housewife if you're a woman.
It's a large part of why protagonists tend to be so young in Japanese media- you could conceivably only be gallivanting around the world having adventures when you're a kid or a teen and all the grizzled experienced older guys are like 24 years old, otherwise it'd be weird and pathetic if they weren't settled down
I mean, essentially there's no difference to how Western society has been set up since at least after the end of World War II but I guess the social expectations are strong enough over there that it also affects how fictional characters in fantastical settings are viewed
For what it's worth, Japanese labour law is substantially weaker than the US's, so your life is even more consumed by corporate life. Also Japanese culture is consolidated under fewer corporations.
Stuff to think about. My mum (Japanese) is still working and she's nearly at avg lifespan for a Japanese woman. All remote work though
i much preferred the older style of 14 year old shonen characters looking and acting like 20 yearolds to the last decade or so of "18" year old characters who look and act 12.
you are only thought to have a brief period of relative freedom that ends after university, after which you're supposed to slave away at a corporation while supporting a family until you croak or retire if you're a man or be a housewife if you're a woman
Really well put, the modern novel "A Personal Matter" encapsulates this attitude in its soy themes.
twink is a state of mind, no such thing as twink death
Also being more serious here, can we talk about how fucked up the concept of twink death is? Consider how many gay men were dying at the age of twink death not too long ago due to AIDS. It's a body dysmorphia creating phenomenon and just another way to make people feel like shit about themselves.
I know it's so maddening, hearing someone who's like 19 whine about twink death wtf...
Yeah, it has a creepy element for sure. I was called a twink quite a lot in my 20s and now in my 30s I'm seeing people basically just telling on themselves for liking teenagers. I can vouch for having some serious body image issues and I'd rather not open that whole can of worms here.
Japan's average demographic age is only getting older yet the cultural fixation on youth in fiction only intensifies.
Yeah it's like what St. Bhagavan Shree Matt Christman (PBUH) theorized about death, that as you die, you replay all your memories from your youth till present as a way of making amends with the past and facing yourself at the edge of oblivion. It's like they're doing that but on a societal scale as they face the same demographic fate as every "advanced" liberal soyciety with fascist elements. Just coping away with an idealized form of youth and it's "endless possibilities".
replay all your memories from your youth till present
It'd be nice if Japan went there and actually did that in popular culture, especially the anime/manga industry, where the characters started getting older in emphasis after an initial reflection, but the fixation on underaged characters seems stagnantly stuck in its ways, as is the fandom that keeps consuming that and demands more and more of it.
I think the thing with the young protagonists in Japanese pop culture is that they're supposed to be relatable to and reflect the age of the target audience. Most big Japanese franchises are aimed at 8 to 18-year-olds.
In that aspect it's not that much different with much of Western pop culture with superheroes, Star Wars and so on, but in the West kids have had no problem liking grown-ass adult characters like Superman or Indiana Jones or whatever and them being grown-ups is a big part of the appeal and power fantasy.
I think the thing with the young protagonists in Japanese pop culture is that they're supposed to be relatable to and reflect the age of the target audience. Most big Japanese franchises are aimed at 8 to 18-year-olds.
I don't think that fully applies to what I was talking about. I don't mean "young plucky hero takes on the world" as much as the much wider spectrum of near-total preoccupation with female children or childlike characters in isekai/harem hog feeding products. There isn't even really protagonist agency for those characters there: there's just trophies to "win" for the male ego-insert, young or otherwise.
I guess you turn into an ossan immediately after your 25th birthday
you do. unlimited genocide on the superstructure
Being old isn't about your physical age it's about your state of mind
Physically speaking I'm a young adult, mentally speaking I'm a grumpy old person
Old starts when you get back and joint pain. So as soon as you become a wage slave basically.
Are you sure you're not getting lost on the language barrier here? At least a link would be nice. Not that I don't disagree with the theme here but direct translations can be iffy. I like to be extra careful when taking second hand account view from someone that may not even speak that language as a 2nd or even 3rd language.
I also think the Netflix adaptation was mostly well received though this is from a quick glance I could be wrong I don't watch/care about Netflix shit.
Also this community has an extremely bad case of projecting western cultural standards onto everyone else. I absolutely love the juxtaposition of Japanese people acknowledging someone isn't young anymore meanwhile Hollywood is literally trying to turn 80yo
walking corpses"actors" into 30yo superstars and pretending everyone is just going to clap and nod along as if its fine and good lol.You could even say Japanese people are being more egalitarian- while Hollywood has a long tradition of more uhh... seasoned male actors being celebrated as sex symbols and silver foxes, the same treatment is very much not extended to female actors. (Also just look at the relative age between someone like Tom Cruise and the actors playing his love interests across his career)
I also wasn't trying to say WEST GOOD JAPAN BAD, despite how my post may have come across- it's just interesting to see different cultural standards in practice.
Like watching playthroughs of the Red Dead Redemption games and comparing how Japanese and Western commenters view the main characters.
Westerners think Arthur Morgan and John Marston are just BADASS COWBOYS or HOT DADDIES or whatever whereas Japanese people often qualify their statements more, saying they're pretty cool... for older guys
Pretty wild considering most of the spaghetti westerns are based on Japanese rōnins.
Surely that has more to do with
culture skewing young than Chinese?
They're just early adopters of the same attitude social media has about age.
It's not just Japan, this attitude is present across all of SEA and is responsible for pretty much every single person in media looking like an identical pretty boy clone. South Korea is the worst for it but it's present in China (which is why they're fighting it now) and also other sea countries to varying degrees.
It's an extremely shit social trend.
Apparently there's only two choices according to some in this thread: digging up old celebrities to reprise their nostalgia roles forever and ever, or teenage male protagonists and teenage female fanservice.
Yeah it's a problem.
Ironically someone like Jackie Chan probably wouldn't succeed in the industry if he started out today. He wouldn't look right and they'd reject him as a candidate. It was genuinely better 30 years ago.
