@Sarteck
Out of curiosity I have been watching where this thread has been going and I feel that I have to interject something about Japan and the topic of rape in that country. If there was
one western country I would believe that makes people avoid pressing charges on rape and the like, it would definitely be Japan. There can only be speculation and anything concrete about how much people don’t report this stuff is impossible, but I can imagine there being some truth to it.
Japan is a country with very high communal values and the obedient and maiden like wife is a common value for women to strive for. There have been cases where even when the woman has won a case on workplace sexual harassment, she has still had to hide her identity to avoid the death threats and harassment, because she had tarnished someone’s “honor” and “promising career” with her accusations,
even when she had a legal right to do so and had proven her case in court. If you accuse someone of something, it is a much bigger deal to everyone in Japan and the accuser’s family takes it more personally then in the rest of the western world. The use of honorifics is a clear indication that your place in society matters much more than in the other western countries, so if you are convicted of a crime or show clear disrespect to someone, it reflects very badly towards your family and friends as well. This puts pressure for people to not go through the process of reporting the crime for both themselves and the perpetrator’s sake and instead try to keep it their personal problem and not burden society with it. I don’t live in Japan and I can only verify this stuff by reading about it from various collaborating sources, so I can’t say any of this stuff with absolute certainty, of course.
The glorification of rape in Japan is an interesting thing in its pornography; I wouldn’t really call it “glorification” myself, but the amount of rape depicted in Japan’s porn is so common it’s almost embarrassing if you were to compare it to the amount of non-rape porn in the country. There can only be speculation about why this is the case, but I would argue the reasons aren’t as nefarious as some might say. Rape is a fantasy in Japan among women and men alike and in the fantasy the rape is depicted as “letting emotions take control”, “breaking societal taboos”, “power fantasy”, “ and basically the overriding of any the strict “courting rituals” of society. The thought process among men, I would imagine, is that since women don’t like sex, the only way to have it would be through rape and since rape is a crime, you can only enjoy sex through pornography and the tropes used in pornography come from this shared cultural understanding of sex in Japan. Some statistics on Japan say that among men, men don’t think marriage is all that important of a goal in life, which might be because most have given up on ever finding an ideal woman. Especially among the sexually frustrated is the wish that someone would take the initiative of approach and not ask many questions in doing so, which in practice, is not an ideal default position to presume of people, because, you know, rape. I don’t believe there is a causal link to pornography and rape, but I do believe there is a reason why rape is so common as a trope in porn. So, basically, rape porn like porn that fetishizes infidelity is a manifestation of larger cultural forces and should be treated as a symptom and not as the disease.
Tsundere characters in Japan, who very commonly are women, kinda play off this “I want to have sex, but I am just pretending not to”, which circumvents the shared idea that women don’t like sex but would want it if you just tried enough. I won’t say anything about the implications on this stuff too much, since I hate “studying” of a country through their media entertainment and making disjointed generalization of the entire culture the artist lives in. The artist of any work is an individual and should be treated as one – not as some parrot drone of their nation’s values and ideas.
