Now I get it…
Posted by ampontan on Tuesday, July 7, 2009
EFFICIENT USE of the Internet has often been a problem for me right around the witching hour in Japan. Accessing web pages, or even different parts of the same web page, slows to a crawl. It’s taken me as long as an hour to put up a post on this site around midnight, when it would have taken only a few minutes had I performed the same tasks during normal working hours.
At times it’s been so frustrating, I’ve felt like taking an axe to the computer.
Now I know why. This Bloomberg article explains the reason. The title? “Porn Downloads Strain Japan Phone Network”.
“We can’t see customers’ data but can surmise the biggest portion of it is probably movies,” said KDDI spokesman Keiichi Sakurai. “We can’t deny the possibility those movies include adult content.”
Customers have complained about stoppages or slow Web access, mainly around midnight when traffic from “heavy users” spikes, Sakurai said. Japanese carriers spent $74 billion building their networks since 2000, based on data provided by Wireless Intelligence, a London-based researcher.
One reason for the problem is that Japan was among the first to use advanced technology:
“When you have unlimited data, you’re going to have an issue with capacity — it’s an issue that’s been waiting to happen,” said Windsor Holden, principal analyst at Juniper Research Ltd. “It wouldn’t surprise me that it happens in Japan first because they’ve had 3G for so much longer.”
It’s forcing DoCoMo and others to take steps to limit access:
While profiting from the traffic, Tokyo-based mobile carriers DoCoMo and KDDI Corp. say they’ve been forced to impose limits on the heaviest users as the $74 billion network feels the strain.
And:
“Pornography will eventually open a debate about how carriers should modify their business model as data traffic swells,” said Yusuke Tsunoda, a telecommunications analyst at Tokai Tokyo Securities Co. “It may prompt even tighter access restrictions.”
Thanks for nothing, dudes. Here’s an idea: Why don’t you do the rest of us a favor–and yourselves most of all–and find yourself a real woman? You know, get some flesh-and-blood action instead of the self-defeating vicarious jollies you’re trying to pretend is “pleasure”. Or is that too much to ask?
There’s a very simple rule with women: if you make them happy, they’ll make you happy. You don’t have to be a doormat, and you don’t have to pretend to be a stud; just put a smile on their face and a song in their heart. It’s not that hard as long as you are. Heck, if you use your natural-born imagination, you don’t always have to be that, either.
Some of them might even be so happy they’ll volunteer to cook you a meal. Now wouldn’t that taste a lot better than the crappy convenience store plastic-flavored bento you’ve been dribbling down the front of your dirty tee-shirt while you watch the semi-pros go through the motions?
Hokuto’s Web site offers 2-minute video clips for phone users for as little as 100 yen and sells full-length movies for DoCoMo subscribers.
“Whenever there is a new distribution method for adult content, adult content will go that medium,” said Holden at Juniper Research. “It’s gone that way since cavemen drew adult pictures in the cave.”
But at least the cavemen were using live models and drew those pictures based on experience.
Here’s a timeless tip: There’s no finer medium for enjoying your adult content than to use the old-fashioned distribution method.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7, 2009 at 11:01 am and is filed under I couldn't make this up if I tried, Popular culture, Science and technology, Sex, Social trends. Tagged: Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
NB said
Actually, I think they’re jumping to conclusions with the porn. They don’t have any proof of that. And reasonable proof of that could easily be obtained by looking at the URLs the downloaded files are coming from.
I recently taught a lesson about computers and the internet in English to my “college prep” 特進 junior highers.
I was surprised when most students said they used the internet to download movies. When I asked what kinds of movies, they said dramas and anime.
You could imply that these kids were downloading porn, but I doubt it. They don’t appear to be that kind of kids. And they’re young enough that I’m not sure the thought of regularly downloading porn has crossed their minds yet.
I think this is yet another media stereotype of erotic Japan used to juice up an otherwise boring article about internet speed being congested by illegal movie downloads.
ampontan said
NB: I’m not so sure. While the by-line seems to put it in the standard “Japanese person did the research, non-Japanese-speaking foreigner did the English” category, there’s enough content in there to make it believable. You did see the UK source talking about the global pornography market? I’ve occasionally seen stats for porno sites in the US, and they’re through the roof.
I did a post a few years ago for Japundit about the e-rogs (erotic blogs) and there were a ton of them out there. Some were barely disguised professional efforts. There was a semi-portal site called 日刊EROG; it might still be around.
And those downloads are illegal?
BTW, I still plan on using that Foreign Ministry tip you sent. Give me a few more days.
NB said
No, sorry I didn’t read the article before, but I just did now.
It does sound believable in the article.
On the other hand, I had co-workers tell me flat out “it’s ok to be a perv in Japan” when I first moved here. I’m aware that that subculture exists here, I just wonder how wide spread it really is.
NB said
The downloads my students talk about are “free” Hollywood movie “downloads”. But many things on the Japanese net can be called a “download”.
ampontan said
Your students might be talking about bitorrent (I think it’s called) where people are downloading all sorts of movies and music for free. I just found out about it a few months ago. It’s now possible to download more movies to your computer than you’ll ever be able to watch in a lifetime, and I know one person who has.
I recently recommended a Miles Davis disc to that person, and he found it at bitorrent. Along with everything else Miles Davis ever recorded over something like 40 years.
But that’s an international phenomenon.
RMilner said
Congestion on the internet is the same as congestion on the roads. Users will avoid the busy time if it gets too slow for them.
As for Japan having a perv culture, my Japanese wife, told me that pornography is regarded merely as another form of entertainment for adults, not something specially sinful like it is in the Judaeo-Christian cultural tradition
Aki said
The reporters of the Bloomberg article are perhaps clueless about Nico Nico Douga (ニコニコ動画), but, according to university students around me, many of undergraduates and graduates are connecting to that video site in the midnight. According to this article (in Japanese), traffic to Nico Nico Douga had been occupying one twelfth of the whole internet traffic in Japan in 2007, when Nico Nico Douga had only four million users. The number of its users is increasing, and it has more than 11 million members now (it was reported that it had 11,090,000 members at the end of January, 2009). Perhaps Nico Nico Douga is the culprit of the congestion on the internet, and it is hardly a porn site.
Get A Job, Son! said
I have to say that while there could be a percentage of the midnight internet traffic allocated to porn downloads, there might also be a sizable amount on torrents and the like (incl nico nico douga).
I am amazed by the amount of morning/evening train commuters looking into their PSPs and mobile phones (and the like) watching Hollywood movies or TV dramas. I guess these are easy-enough accessed by torrents etc.
It seems to easy (and cliche) to simply attribute the traffic purely to porn… and maybe working a stereotype out of its box again (those porn obsessed perverted Japanese!!) is just ’slack journalism’.]
bender said
As for Japan having a perv culture, my Japanese wife, told me that pornography is regarded merely as another form of entertainment for adults, not something specially sinful like it is in the Judaeo-Christian cultural tradition
Gosh, watching how many times characters in American popular TV dramas have sex, I gotta say your so-called Jew-X’tian tradition probably revolves around horny-ism.
ampontan said
My Japanese wife also thinks American TV dramas are screwy that way. Once she asked me how come they always have to throw in a love/sex angle in a story when it’s incompatible with the plot line.
BTW, I don’t have a problem with anyone expressing their ideas, but that phrase you put in front of the word “tradition” is a really poor choice. Try “Judeo-Christian” the next time.
mac said
> Gosh, watching how many times characters in American popular TV dramas have sex,
> I gotta say your so-called Jew-X’tian tradition probably revolves around horny-ism.
I have often wondered what effect on society watching so many other people act out sex has.
Back in the real world, before they invented TV, how times in one’s life might one watch someone else having sex? Somewhere between none and a couple of times by accident probably? Nowadays, every series producer feels that they have to introduce a visual sex scene at least once – in order to be racy, provocative or simply bolster the ratings – which means that in one night one might witness half a dozen mixed acts, gay, straight or group. Unless, of course, ‘Sex in the City’ is on, in which case it will easily double or triple that.
Unfortunately, most people reading this will see Japan through the filter of English language medias, so what do Japanese people think of Westerner’s apparent sexual appetites, and the time, effort and neuroses they insert into it.
The American pornographic industry and its intellectually challenged consumers’ fixation, muddle and diminution of Japanese eroticism and sexuality into the lumpy, look-a-like porridge of “Asian chicks” – born out of the US military R&R prostitution camps – disgusts and sickens me. It is as implicitly racist and sexist as it is a sad representation of the degradation of Western society.
As written above, again there is always the usual compressing of Japanese society into the Western media’s narrowed stereotypes; right-wing fascists, whacky geeks and … now … porn-obsessed.
But, fair is fair, rather than attempting to mix together Jewish and Christian body fluids as one, who is going to tackle the disproportionate influence of certainly elements of the (American) Jewry into building up both the pornographic industry and its sex-filled “soft” sisters Hollywood and the printed media? Are we not seeing the domination of one or two different sexualities?
Cue: Prof. Nathan Abrams quoting Al Goldstein of Screw magazine saying, “The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don’t believe in authoritarianism …” Pornography thus becomes a way of defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream … an attitude which has now ejaculated all over Asian society, defiling it with a near total contempt for the many unique indigenous religious and cultures, now entirely dominating – in my opinion – popular attitudes and shaping young Japanese, especially young female Japanese’s, own attitudes towards themselves and their bodies?
This is contentious I know, and painted in very broad simplistic terms, but what do we have … Jews as producers … Christians as consumers … and Asians as products?
ampontan said
But back before the days of radio, people used to see animals doing it all the time, particularly on the farm. It’s not hard to put two and two (or one and one) together.
NB said
I think this is oversimplifying things a bit.
Every culture in the world has their subculture of pervs. And it is sad that in the Western world this subculture has pushed into the forefront of entertainment so much that people feel they need to have a sex scene just to get ratings.
To say that:
is only supporting stereotypes.
In reality I’m sure there are producers, consumers and products within all Middle Eastern, Western, Asian, et al cultures.
NB said
Well, I think it’s pretty obvious. People no longer see sex as a special moment between two people trying to make a family.
Society sees sex as the act that commonly happens on the end of a date – cause that’s what all the people on TV do.
They also see sex as the apex of any relationship instead of any commitment to or appreciation of the actual person.
This can be seen in the dating culture, prenuptial agreements, divorce rates, teen pregnancy.
Not that these things didn’t exist before, but they used to be rare and bad things which are now simply common.
Not that this is everyone, but somehow people have accepted that this is what our current “society” and “culture” are.
(That’s also one of the reasons why younger generations have trouble getting along with elders who can remember before there was TV.)
mac said
You are right, it is at least once in every soap and every movie and the average viewer sees 4 or 6 a night.
What of the big problem with all this dramatized sex and relationships, is that they are in no way real and, of course, ‘monkey-see-monkey-do’ humans want to copy them.
This cannot be more true than the influence of ritualized sex in pornography. What has taken 30 or 40 years to ferment in the West, a gradual breaking down of mores, is now being trust in the faces and down the throats of much more vulnerable societies – and its mainly young female individuals – for the sake of nothing else but … money.
Gradual, contextual change is being torn apart and all the “viruses” (memes) of one dominant culture are being forced into all others without any regard to their effects. Whatever extreme is pumped out of San Diego today hits the faces of some young teenager in Sapporo tomorrow, in an either a “voluntary” or involuntary” fashion.
And its backfires the other way too. Imagine being a single, blonde female walking into a town where the only other single, blonde female the denizens have ever seen is some siliconed porn “actress” debasing herself for money.
We are close enough to the history, and it has been well studied enough, to be able to make very clear and correct judgments.
I was very careful to choose my source. Abrams, in the Jewish Quarterly, extended the subversive thesis to suggest that porn was a frontline battle in the spiritual battle between Christianity and at least, we presume, the secular Jews. He went on to say that Jews were also at the vanguard of the sexual revolution of the 1960s; Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman replacing Marx, Trotsky and Lenin as required “revolutionary reading”.
One could even look back early to the late 19th C and early 20 th of both the Viennese Jews (Freud) and the early “smutpeddlers” (German Jews in America) to see how the difference cultures have interacted. And given that, at some point Islam is bound to react (and already is in places from Saudi to Indonesia), it is nothing short of another war born of the 3 major Middle Eastern mono-theistic cultures that is swallowing and polluting the entire world.
Of course Japan has its own erotic culture and relationship to sex. Yobai is one that sounds both charming, practical and was practiced in particularly Japanese manner to me. Some of the extreme animation is unhealthy another. Sex has its own place within Japanese cultures that is free from many of dynamics of the Judeo-Christian cultures. What hope has it of surviving the tanked up onslaught of Dream America pneumatic sex™ on film, TV and in the cheap fleshpots of Asia? Its a little bit more graphic that seeing two cats getting it on in a ricefield.
Walk down any street in Japan and tell me those are not porn-ified fashions from the “hooker heels” and stockings, down to the “Fuck 69″ tee-shirts being sold in child sizes from local supermarkets? (I am not joking … I have the picture).
If there is one thing that I would add to the rant above, it is that there are a whole load of clothing manufacturers in China that are cracking up at themselves knowingly debasing the Japanese market with cheap clothing printed with outrageous sexual seditions.
Bender said
The choice was a nasty one indeed, and was intentional. Sorry for that. But I wanted to somehow emphasize how artificial the so-called tradition is, and also the way it’s recently used (especially in America) to lump up “western” culture as opposed to Islam or other “eastern”/”non-western” “civilizations”. I think Mac picked this up somewhat.
BTW, from a Far-Eastern perspective, anywhere west onward from the Tarim Basin is “west”.
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