Naked Japan

If you didn`t already guess from my reference to eating unusual seafood, I`m posting from Japan.

I continue to be working on an old laptop and an old version of Internet Explorer, so posting with links is still too much trouble at the moment.

I see that in April 2006 I had a travelogue post up about my last trip to Japan. (It`s a nice little post with decent photos, if I do say so myself. Now that I think about it, I get so little postive feedback to this blog I should take to making comments on my old posts praising how good they still are in retrospect.) Anyhow, if you want to see that old post yourself, just use the blog search above for `ryokan`.

I just spent a couple of nights at another onsen hotel, which Japanese people do to enjoy the hot baths and food. I have been to Japan often enough now that the nudity aspect of it (they are sex segregated anyway) is very passe, but it is hard to lose the capacity for surprise when a middle aged staff woman turns up while I am standing nude beside the bath, as happened last night. It was quiet, and me and my son were the only ones at this particular pool, and she suddenly was there, checking the termperature or something. She said sorry while I discretely dangled the washclothe in front of my, well, dangly bits. It was the least I could do.

Part of the problem with this surprise visit was that I knew that this particular bath was, at a certain hour, going to change over and become a female bath for the rest of the night. I had to trust that I had been informed of the change over hour correctly, as I did not have the skill to double check by asking the unannounced staff women such a question. Being caught in the baths after the changeover would presumably be quite a faux pas. But then again, women walk behind men at the urinal in mixed sex toilets here all the time; I am sure Japanese women can take a nude, pink bodied, embarrassed Westerner in their stride.

Anyway, I soon found Japanese men in the other parts of the baths which I couldn`t see from where I was when the staff women turned up, so it was all OK.

One other feature of the Japanese attidude to nudity which Westerns may find surprising is that it is quite OK for girls up to the age of 8 or so to go into the men`s baths with their father. Also, on TV you will see much more young child nudity than you would in Australia. (A general interest show about a family will show the kids all having a bath together, with nothing hidden, for example.) By Hetty Johnson`s standards, Japan would count as a pedophile`s paradise, yet (as far as I can tell) there is little of that problem here at all, at least until the kids have reached puberty. When they do, then yes, I suppose Japan is a pedophiles gift, as young teenage girls are definitely the open target of lurid interest. It`s very easy to stumble across DVDs and magazines in Akihabara shops showing very young girls in provocactive poses, and these are not sleazy X rated porno shops of the Australian variety. It`s been a while since I have read about it, but every now and then the media will run stories about the problem of teenage school girls who make pocket money by having sex with mature age men. The market for such services is much stronger than in the West, it would seem.

I am told that there was some move to legislate about the exploitation of such youth、but it hasn`t happened yet.

By the way, I wonder if it is possible for the financial system of the West to collapse enough that I am stuck here forever?

UPDATE: just today,　I read in the Japan Times about a man prosecuted for posting naked kid photos on a paedophile network. So the problem is clearly here, but still it seems that generally there is no sense of panic about it when most people think of child nudity as unremarkable and innocent.

UPDATE 2: it appears that this was reported at Boing Boing before, but I had missed it til now. Since I was last here a couple of years ago, men in Tokyo's famous Akihabara district can also get an ear picking service (done by young women dressed in yukarta while the men lay their heads on their lap.) The general idea is shown in the photo in this article here. I am told by a man who has actually done this that it is on a strictly "no touch" basis, and can also include shoulder massage and a cup of tea. As well as conversation. At 2000 or so Yen an hour (about $20), it's pretty cheap.

It is, I suppose, a not unreasonable thing for a lonely man to pay for conversation with an attractive and relatively intelligent young woman (they are often university students, apparently.) The thing that just makes it weird to a Western mind is the ear cleaning. I am told that there is a maternal love aspect to this, as it is the way mothers may clean their kid's ears. But that just adds another layer of Freudian ickiness to the whole thing, doesn't it?