Malaise of the sexual archipelago
Jun. 8th, 2007 01:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusSome of the heavenly aspects of Japan can easily turn -- well, I won't say "hellish", but perhaps "destabilising". The innocuous delights of this archipelago can tip and turn into dangerous fevers against which there's no effective innoculation.
Japan is -- at least for me, and this kind of statement can't be anything but subjective -- the world's sexiest country. Whereas in Germany I can go days, weeks, months without seeing a "yes", a "do" -- and therefore live a happy, stable life in a couple-relationship without any trouble, here my head twists daily, hourly, and by the minute. My eye swivels to a leg, a midriff, a bottom on a bicycle, a face on a poster. On some streets, every single woman is a "do". I am super-saturated, super-stimulated, confused, aroused, destabilised, and quickly become restless.
Left to my own devices for a couple of hours yesterday in Osaka (Hisae had to do bank and depato stuff), I found myself in a shopping centre above Shinsaibashi station in which all the products seemed to be lingerie and all the customers big golden-skinned, curly-haired amazons wearing tiny tight micro-hotpants, loping stilettos, tummy chains, fluttery eyelashes, keitai straps dripping with sparkly jewelry... A trashy look, for sure, almost tranny, and not my type at all (I like understated art school girls with a touch of the ethnic about them, a soupcon of ancient court culture), and yet it was unignorably sexual, so predatory that it brought out the reciprocal predator in me. The lower cortex took over. I felt like beating a hunting drum, shaking a spear and running around in circles whooping.
I recognised the beginnings of the sexual malaise which coloured, and darkened, my days when I actually lived here -- the terrible moment when Momus becomes Balbus the Homunculus, and paradise becomes hell.
Who would want to live on ice cream every day, even if it's their favourite food? Who would want everything they touched to turn to gold? Who would want every woman they passed on the street to be, literally, irresistible? It's the kind of situation that
a) can seriously disrupt a stable relationship with your significant other, as you struggle with the inner devil telling you to follow your instincts
b) can injure your own pride when you do make clumsy, ill-advised passes and they're politely declined
c) can disrupt relations with other gaijin males in the area, who have also abandoned their moral scruples and followed their dilated pupils (see, I'm writing a song right here!) and
d) can make you start to wish Japan would become an Islamic republic so that its women would hide their more-naked-than-naked summer outfits under burkhas.
"Nick is a Cherry Boy," my ex-partner Shizu told the table at a Shibuya restaurant the other day, when we'd all had a bit too much to drink and were getting raucous, libidinous and direct. "He's like a virgin; it takes very, very little for him to get excited." Hisae and Shizu then compared notes -- for rather too long, and in Japanese -- on my vices, my proclivity for adventuring, and the tragic weakness of my built-in temptation barriers.
The fact is, I can be mature and responsible in Berlin, but I can't in Japan. In Japan the super-sexy ambience -- the spectacle presented by the average city shopping street, for instance -- gets me frisky, and then frustrated. My first trips here were full of sexual possibility -- though not so much action, because I was in the first stages of getting married to Shazna -- but I think Japan has changed somewhat. I think one's sexual power as a gaijin is now considerably less than it was even 15 years ago. This is something Donald Richie remarks on in his recent memoirs (with him, of course, it's a gay sexual compulsion, and the historical timeline he can plot it on stretches back six decades), and those who say it's just because Donald is older and less attractive as an eighty-something of course have a point, but only a minor one.
Japan is emerging from the imperial shadow of its post-war domination by the West, and with that emergence comes a decline in the sexual power of foreigners. Yes, David Beckham's image is all over the place, and so is Johnny Depp's, but do Japanese women dream of actual relationships with Beckham and Depp? Yes, there's still a sizeable subgroup of women who are attracted primarily to Western males (and some who go exclusively for Africans or African-Americans), but my impression is that that group is declining, and that the "new mood of national narcissism" is one which privileges Japanese sex symbols over Western ones.
That -- combined, no doubt, with the fact that in my late 40s I'm not as cute as I used to be -- makes for a kind of massive net trade imbalance in the glances on the street. On the Japanese street, I'm exporting a lot more desire than I'm importing.
Sure, there are still breathless girls waiting to talk to me after my show, and happy to send slightly-too-long emails which tell me slightly-too-much about their personal lives. And for that I'm grateful. But amongst, for instance, the Amazons in the lingerie mall I'm simply a henna gaijin, and possibly a hentai one to boot, an odd character in an eyepatch. More like elderly Donald Richie or one-eyed Lafcadio Hearn than fit David Beckham and funky Johnny Depp. I'm casting the sighing sort of Gorgon glance that turns women to stone, and there's a curious expression organised around my too-tall nose which manages to suggest, simultaneously, utter bliss and quiet despair. There goes a man who is in heaven -- and hell.
Japan is -- at least for me, and this kind of statement can't be anything but subjective -- the world's sexiest country. Whereas in Germany I can go days, weeks, months without seeing a "yes", a "do" -- and therefore live a happy, stable life in a couple-relationship without any trouble, here my head twists daily, hourly, and by the minute. My eye swivels to a leg, a midriff, a bottom on a bicycle, a face on a poster. On some streets, every single woman is a "do". I am super-saturated, super-stimulated, confused, aroused, destabilised, and quickly become restless.Left to my own devices for a couple of hours yesterday in Osaka (Hisae had to do bank and depato stuff), I found myself in a shopping centre above Shinsaibashi station in which all the products seemed to be lingerie and all the customers big golden-skinned, curly-haired amazons wearing tiny tight micro-hotpants, loping stilettos, tummy chains, fluttery eyelashes, keitai straps dripping with sparkly jewelry... A trashy look, for sure, almost tranny, and not my type at all (I like understated art school girls with a touch of the ethnic about them, a soupcon of ancient court culture), and yet it was unignorably sexual, so predatory that it brought out the reciprocal predator in me. The lower cortex took over. I felt like beating a hunting drum, shaking a spear and running around in circles whooping.
I recognised the beginnings of the sexual malaise which coloured, and darkened, my days when I actually lived here -- the terrible moment when Momus becomes Balbus the Homunculus, and paradise becomes hell.
Who would want to live on ice cream every day, even if it's their favourite food? Who would want everything they touched to turn to gold? Who would want every woman they passed on the street to be, literally, irresistible? It's the kind of situation that
a) can seriously disrupt a stable relationship with your significant other, as you struggle with the inner devil telling you to follow your instincts
b) can injure your own pride when you do make clumsy, ill-advised passes and they're politely declined
c) can disrupt relations with other gaijin males in the area, who have also abandoned their moral scruples and followed their dilated pupils (see, I'm writing a song right here!) and
d) can make you start to wish Japan would become an Islamic republic so that its women would hide their more-naked-than-naked summer outfits under burkhas.
"Nick is a Cherry Boy," my ex-partner Shizu told the table at a Shibuya restaurant the other day, when we'd all had a bit too much to drink and were getting raucous, libidinous and direct. "He's like a virgin; it takes very, very little for him to get excited." Hisae and Shizu then compared notes -- for rather too long, and in Japanese -- on my vices, my proclivity for adventuring, and the tragic weakness of my built-in temptation barriers.The fact is, I can be mature and responsible in Berlin, but I can't in Japan. In Japan the super-sexy ambience -- the spectacle presented by the average city shopping street, for instance -- gets me frisky, and then frustrated. My first trips here were full of sexual possibility -- though not so much action, because I was in the first stages of getting married to Shazna -- but I think Japan has changed somewhat. I think one's sexual power as a gaijin is now considerably less than it was even 15 years ago. This is something Donald Richie remarks on in his recent memoirs (with him, of course, it's a gay sexual compulsion, and the historical timeline he can plot it on stretches back six decades), and those who say it's just because Donald is older and less attractive as an eighty-something of course have a point, but only a minor one.
Japan is emerging from the imperial shadow of its post-war domination by the West, and with that emergence comes a decline in the sexual power of foreigners. Yes, David Beckham's image is all over the place, and so is Johnny Depp's, but do Japanese women dream of actual relationships with Beckham and Depp? Yes, there's still a sizeable subgroup of women who are attracted primarily to Western males (and some who go exclusively for Africans or African-Americans), but my impression is that that group is declining, and that the "new mood of national narcissism" is one which privileges Japanese sex symbols over Western ones.
That -- combined, no doubt, with the fact that in my late 40s I'm not as cute as I used to be -- makes for a kind of massive net trade imbalance in the glances on the street. On the Japanese street, I'm exporting a lot more desire than I'm importing.
Sure, there are still breathless girls waiting to talk to me after my show, and happy to send slightly-too-long emails which tell me slightly-too-much about their personal lives. And for that I'm grateful. But amongst, for instance, the Amazons in the lingerie mall I'm simply a henna gaijin, and possibly a hentai one to boot, an odd character in an eyepatch. More like elderly Donald Richie or one-eyed Lafcadio Hearn than fit David Beckham and funky Johnny Depp. I'm casting the sighing sort of Gorgon glance that turns women to stone, and there's a curious expression organised around my too-tall nose which manages to suggest, simultaneously, utter bliss and quiet despair. There goes a man who is in heaven -- and hell.
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Re: Swing Momus Swing
Date: 2007-06-08 02:46 pm (UTC)