Not gonna lie

勇気 (Yuuki) September 11, 2015 1:49 pm

I've read a ton of screwed up stuff in BL, and Harada normally never got to me that much. But this last update was absolutely disgustingly jarring to me, and I don't know why. Besides the rather predictable twist ending that she likes to do, I thought the idea of being stalked, molested, and raped in a train car is a terrifyingly REAL issue that women and occasional men experience all the time in Japan - and their reaction is exactly the same: they don't want to shout or say anything because they are ashamed. They don't even bother to look at their attacker. This read really says a lot about the cons of a collectivist society such as Japan, where it's better to sacrifice your basic sense of safety than to cause a ruckus.

Responses
    勇気 (Yuuki) September 12, 2015 12:21 am

    I'm actually genuinely surprised that this is getting votes down. Does anyone actually want to discuss the nature of rape culture in Japan? Or are we simply going to continue leaving anonymous dislikes.

    Anonymous September 12, 2015 1:42 pm

    Your last sentence seems to be implying that molestation victims in Japan don't call for help because they prioritize keeping peace over their safety. Pretty sure that their reason for not calling for help is more due to their own shame and embarrassment at getting molested and then having other people know that such a thing happened to them, rather than them keeping quiet because they are a "collectivist society".

    勇気 (Yuuki) September 12, 2015 4:28 pm

    I just confirmed with my Japanese friend that that last sentence's implications are indeed founded. I am a Japanese studies major, and a lot of what I observe is this sense of peace-keeping, as you have derived from my statement above. My Japanese friend and I are truthfully observing this great sense of "forsaking the events of a single moment," that their rippling outcry may never make eventual waves in the passage of overall time - it is a very inherently imposed societal standard, which is very hard to grasp for people who live in majority individualist nations. Of course physiological post traumatic stress is a very large component in a victim's inability to voice their experiences, but with Japanese people specifically, the lack of dialog in their country about the severity of molestation issues is exacerbated by their collectivist mentality. This is something rightly observed by myself and many others who have lived in and studied Japan.

    On an individual level, societal standards and personal damage compound to create a hyper lack of "safe-place" in which there might be a space where people feel like they can talk about their victimization. This is a true issue, unique to Japan and many East Asian countries. Your feeling of the implications were completely correct. But there is nothing inherently wrong about bringing in the structure of a society, when discussing how it deals with sexual assault on a widespread, ethical scale. (And in Japan, the case is generally that they don't "deal"at all. The age of consent is still 13, the young are still virtually blameless for crimes, if even they are serial murders, etc.)