Bring Forth the Ban Stick

Slate addresses the question of whether a new Japanese creation, a rape simulator video game, should be banned in the United States. Being a bit fanatical about the First Amendment, I don't normally advocate banning entertainment, (even when I find it utterly distasteful, like rap), but this would be the exception that makes the rule. Anime is just retarded; this is malignant.

Coming from Japan, however, it does not surprise me. Japanese society is seriously inbred -- and I can support that statement, possessing a modicum of first-hand experience with their xenophobia and bizarre culture.

In January of 1992, I was deployed as a member of a training cadre from USMC Weapons Co. 2/5 to Bohiro in northern Hokkaido, (the northernmost island of Japan "proper"). The op was for cold weather cross-training with an infantry regiment of the Japanese SDF. They were very cagey around us at first. After about a week, there was some level of fraternization among the enlisted ranks and eventually we went out and engaged in some drunken karaoke on the local town -- in large part because they were ordered to do so, we discovered later. While a Jap would rather die than be outright rude in public, most of them were never really friendly, either. I'd term it more grudging acceptance.

Something not often understood by Westerners is the fact that the word gaijin and several other related words and phrases are serious insults. And it applies to everyone not of Japanese origin. Their native obsequiousness and hyper-politeness means they almost never directly address foreigners in a rude way in public; they'd much rather make you uncomfortable to the point you're ready to take your leave. Taken as a whole, the Japanese are beyond doubt the most dedicated and fanatical racists on the planet. Nice, polite, fawning racists -- but that's the most dangerous sort.

Bizarrely, this racism is applied within their own (seemingly homogeneous) culture. For example, one of the things we learned from the few who were willing to converse with us openly was that the people on Honshu consider the people on Hokkaido to be sub-human -- and they don't mean it in a joking way, either.

Amazingly, the Japanese worldview actually manages to become progressively more vicious than that as you go outward from Tokyo.

Over the course of three separate deployments to Okinawa, I found that the hatred among the native Ryukyans for the Japanese was buoyed by many centuries of atrocities at the hands of Japanese militarism. The Okinawans weren't exactly overjoyed with the continued American presence on their island, but there was a strong sub-current of "better the Yanks than the Japs." More than once I saw arrogant Japanese businessmen in bars treating Okinawan bar girls like pieces of human flotsam who existed solely for their amusement that night. They expected to be -- and often were -- treated like social and cultural superiors by the Okinawans.

So, does a rape simulator from the country responsible for the Rape of Nanking and the Bataan Death March surprise me? Not a bit, unfortunately. In some ways I find Japanese civilization uniquely fascinating, especially the shogun period. But in many other ways, I find it repulsive and often degenerate. There are dozens of levels of stratification and elitism running all through Japanese society, and frankly I don't understand most of it. I suspect very few people outside of Japan understand it -- least of all those self-described "Japanophiles" among modern Western youths.

The little nippers do build some damned fine automobiles, though. I guess every society has a good side. Well, almost every society...