Spirals and cream
Feb. 14th, 2004 01:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusFrom a Tech-TV article:
'Americans often believe Japan to be a rigid, sexually repressed, conformist society. All one needs to do to squash that fallacy is experience pop culture in the land of the rising sun.'
Would you like to peer with me into the Japanese imagination? If you're outside Japan and don't have access to mangas or TV shows, you can still read about the outlandish plots and concepts which drive the dreamlife of the safest nation on earth. You can reconstruct its strange dream-events in your mind. Here, for instance, are some dizzying plot summaries I found on a page about the comics of Junji Ito:
Gyo - the Eerie Wriggle Part 1
'Fish appear to be suddenly growing legs and crawling on to land in Okinawa. The walking fish stink of death and seem to follow a couple (Tadashi and Kaori) as they flee from Okinawa back to Tokyo. Kaori, Tadashi's girlfriend, is sickened by the smell of the walking fish, but one day finds herself underoing a strange transformation of her own.
Gyo - the Eerie Wriggle Part 2
Tadashi's search for the mechanized gas-producing animated corpse of his girlfriend takes him to a circus where an over-the-top ringmaster provides some useless exposition into the origins and nature of the gas being produced by the machines/organisms. An earthquake uncovers a bizarre face of rock in the mountains with human-shaped holes burrowed into the surface. People, having seen these holes on TV, hike into the mountains and recognize that the shapes in the cliff match their own silhouettes; one by one, succumbing to a feeling of existential helplessness, they strip off their clothes and voluntarily entomb themselves.
Uzumaki 1
First Kirie's boyfriend's father becomes obsessed with spirals, leading ultimately to his death. Then his mother becomes ill with the spiral mania, leading to her death. A student in Kirie's school develops a vortex-like wound. Kirie's father, a potter, becomes obsessed with spirals and uses them in his work. A couple falls ill with the mania and twist around each other in a spiral. One of Kirie's classmates develops supernatural perm powers.
Uzumaki 2
'Surprising people is my hobby'-boy gets surprised by a car - gruesome. People start turning into snails. The lighthouse becomes dark and claims a few teenagers. Kirie has a bizarre convalescence at the hospital with some affected women from the maternity ward. Typhoon #1 hits Japan and stays over the town.
Uzumaki 3
A person turns into a spiral-callous-monster. In the wrecked town, people can now trigger twisters with nothing more than a sudden movement or a strong exhalation of air. People learn to ride these new twisters and also discover that snail meat tastes good. Kirie and Shuichi think to escape the town by sea, but are met by a whirlpool. They try to escape by forest, but Kirie's younger brother is transforming and they end up where they started. The town is a spiral and Kirie and Shuichi, instead of running, seek its center and eventually give in to the spiral mania.'
And here are some of the giddy concepts being wheeled out for TV shows in Japan. Tech-TV again:
'Though it has toned down in the past 10 years, much Japanese television programming can be described as erotic. One of the more outrageous channels is Paradise TV, whose popular show at the moment is "No-Holds-Barred Sexual Harassment Heaven." In it, female contestants are sexually harassed to the delight of the audience.'
The Mainichi Daily News adds:
'Paradise TV, Japan's biggest adult-oriented satellite channel, is known for milking any idea it can get, but perhaps its latest idea is going a bit too far. Now the channel is putting the squeeze on lactating mothers by getting them to compete in producing mother's milk to go for a number of games to determine Japan's breast milk champion. It's all part of a quiet boom in demand recently for lactation videos sparked by the growing number of men who are turned on by the idea of suckling at a woman's breast.
'Paradise TV's Bonyu Mama-san Daishugo -- Bonyu Matsuri (Great Gathering of Breast Feeding Mothers -- Breast Feeding Festival) has gathered four young mothers who are expected to squeeze themselves dry. But the decisive battle could well be the cooking contest, where there will first be a taste test as the women will go espresso into a cup of espresso before they produce their favorite milk-based dish, such as breast milk cream stew. Taking the milking even further, the ultimate climax to the show will come with the lactating lasses expected to show the milk of human kindness to four young men, with the winner the first person able to induce the lad to produce some cream of his own.'
'Americans often believe Japan to be a rigid, sexually repressed, conformist society. All one needs to do to squash that fallacy is experience pop culture in the land of the rising sun.'
Would you like to peer with me into the Japanese imagination? If you're outside Japan and don't have access to mangas or TV shows, you can still read about the outlandish plots and concepts which drive the dreamlife of the safest nation on earth. You can reconstruct its strange dream-events in your mind. Here, for instance, are some dizzying plot summaries I found on a page about the comics of Junji Ito:
Gyo - the Eerie Wriggle Part 1
'Fish appear to be suddenly growing legs and crawling on to land in Okinawa. The walking fish stink of death and seem to follow a couple (Tadashi and Kaori) as they flee from Okinawa back to Tokyo. Kaori, Tadashi's girlfriend, is sickened by the smell of the walking fish, but one day finds herself underoing a strange transformation of her own.
Gyo - the Eerie Wriggle Part 2
Tadashi's search for the mechanized gas-producing animated corpse of his girlfriend takes him to a circus where an over-the-top ringmaster provides some useless exposition into the origins and nature of the gas being produced by the machines/organisms. An earthquake uncovers a bizarre face of rock in the mountains with human-shaped holes burrowed into the surface. People, having seen these holes on TV, hike into the mountains and recognize that the shapes in the cliff match their own silhouettes; one by one, succumbing to a feeling of existential helplessness, they strip off their clothes and voluntarily entomb themselves.
Uzumaki 1
First Kirie's boyfriend's father becomes obsessed with spirals, leading ultimately to his death. Then his mother becomes ill with the spiral mania, leading to her death. A student in Kirie's school develops a vortex-like wound. Kirie's father, a potter, becomes obsessed with spirals and uses them in his work. A couple falls ill with the mania and twist around each other in a spiral. One of Kirie's classmates develops supernatural perm powers.
Uzumaki 2
'Surprising people is my hobby'-boy gets surprised by a car - gruesome. People start turning into snails. The lighthouse becomes dark and claims a few teenagers. Kirie has a bizarre convalescence at the hospital with some affected women from the maternity ward. Typhoon #1 hits Japan and stays over the town.
Uzumaki 3
A person turns into a spiral-callous-monster. In the wrecked town, people can now trigger twisters with nothing more than a sudden movement or a strong exhalation of air. People learn to ride these new twisters and also discover that snail meat tastes good. Kirie and Shuichi think to escape the town by sea, but are met by a whirlpool. They try to escape by forest, but Kirie's younger brother is transforming and they end up where they started. The town is a spiral and Kirie and Shuichi, instead of running, seek its center and eventually give in to the spiral mania.'
And here are some of the giddy concepts being wheeled out for TV shows in Japan. Tech-TV again:
'Though it has toned down in the past 10 years, much Japanese television programming can be described as erotic. One of the more outrageous channels is Paradise TV, whose popular show at the moment is "No-Holds-Barred Sexual Harassment Heaven." In it, female contestants are sexually harassed to the delight of the audience.'
The Mainichi Daily News adds:
'Paradise TV, Japan's biggest adult-oriented satellite channel, is known for milking any idea it can get, but perhaps its latest idea is going a bit too far. Now the channel is putting the squeeze on lactating mothers by getting them to compete in producing mother's milk to go for a number of games to determine Japan's breast milk champion. It's all part of a quiet boom in demand recently for lactation videos sparked by the growing number of men who are turned on by the idea of suckling at a woman's breast.
'Paradise TV's Bonyu Mama-san Daishugo -- Bonyu Matsuri (Great Gathering of Breast Feeding Mothers -- Breast Feeding Festival) has gathered four young mothers who are expected to squeeze themselves dry. But the decisive battle could well be the cooking contest, where there will first be a taste test as the women will go espresso into a cup of espresso before they produce their favorite milk-based dish, such as breast milk cream stew. Taking the milking even further, the ultimate climax to the show will come with the lactating lasses expected to show the milk of human kindness to four young men, with the winner the first person able to induce the lad to produce some cream of his own.'
