What a maroon!
Posted by ampontan on Saturday, March 27, 2010
What a maroon!
- Bugs Bunny
HERE’S A STORY that speaks for itself.
Nick Levasseur, a delegate in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, posted this on his Facebook account:
Anime is a prime example of why two nukes just wasn’t enough.
It made the news on local television.
This from a citizen of the country that gave the world chewing gum, Dr. Pepper, and the movies of Oliver Stone and Michael Moore.
But really, everything on that clip is pathetic. The two newscasters said that the comment:
“could be deemed as insensitive towards the Japanese heritage”
Is it too much to ask of you people to pull the carrots out of your backsides and speak real English? “Could be deemed”? “Is” is shorter, sweeter, and unambiguous. “The Japanese heritage”? How about any erect vertebrate with a functioning nervous system? “Insensitive”? “Pig-ignorant” has the advantages of being more to the point without any wussiness.
Just call a spade a spade. Surely you can think of a euphemism for “dickhead ” that your producers will find acceptable to use on a broadcast.
Speaking of dickheads, this one apologized:
It has no place in private or public discourse.
That’s not the bleedin’ point, is it? The place where it lodges is between your ears, but short of using a pair of foreceps and an electric drill, no one will be able to remove it, will they?
Here’s the worst part: I can’t say for sure, because I haven’t visited his Facebook account to see the comment–you have to register for Facebook to do that–but he probably thought he was being funny.
As far as I know, he hasn’t offered to resign. That’s not surprising. He’s a Democrat.
The idea of resigning to take responsibility for one’s crimes, malfeasance, or stupidity is a concept that seldom occurs to anyone on the left, as the Japanese will have observed from the behavior of the DPJ. Standards of conduct are for other people.
Jonny H said
The Bugs Bunny quote is one of my favorites and I use it often. It definitely applies to this politician.
Paul said
I don’t think you’ve seen much anime. It’s amazing to see people with such talent drawing things so disturbing and perverted… I’ve seriously never seen anything like it from an American.
Ecoutez said
Paul,
I doubt you’ve seen much anime if you think “disturbing and perverted” works as a general description of the form.
Anyway, regardless of what you think of anime, the politician’s comment is absolutely appalling.
no happy ending said
As someone that grew up on underground comics of the 60s and early 70s … Paul, you have not lived.
Robert Crumbs, “The Family That Lays Together Stays Together” comes to mind immediately … and that is lame in comparison to the other stuff. But, yes, I agree with you … the pedophiliac porn and cartoon porn for kids is shocking … as I am always reminded when I go down the local cento and pick up any comic book there.
Ecoutez, what is the proportional balance? What percent is deeply perverted?
M-Bone said
“what is the proportional balance? What percent is deeply perverted?”
If, by deeply perverted, you mean lots of sex of any type, I would say quite a bit under 5% of commercial releases. I frequent a 300,000 volume manga shop in Japan and the “porn” section for men is less than 1000 manga while the section for women is about 2000 (it is general knowledge in the fan culture that there are many more porno manga being done by women for women than for male readers). Mix in “mainstream” sex titles (no children, no mess) like “Futari Ecchi” and you have several thousand more. It is also instructive to look at an average Bookoff which would have 15-20 cases of seinen manga, 15-20 of shonen, maybe 10 or so of shojo, 5-10 of various bunko, fewer than 5 of konbini sale volumes and fewer than 5 of manga porn. I haven’t actually counted, tend to stay the hell away from that stuff. But I’ve been to a lot of used bookstores….
Look at the sales (Oricon or other) and you will see that the overwhelming volume of manga are the non-pornographic type. It is rare for a genuine pornographic manga to crack several thousand copies sold while big series like One Piece can go up to 3,000,000 or more (nearing an astounding 200,000,000 over the life of the series, I believe).
Sex in anime is also relatively rare. There are few examples on TV. Those that do pop up tend to be done artistically. From last season, the anime adaptation of Dazai Osamu’s Ningen Shikakku (No Longer Human) had a sex scene. They are so rare that they are quite notable when you do see them. They also tend to be late night broadcasts.
Now, there are scads of straight to video anime pornos, but the average sales that I’ve seen from them tend to top out, once again, in the several thousands of copies – much what you would expect for niche porn anywhere. Likewise, porno computer games are less than 1% of the market for video game software in Japan.
I think the problem in interpretation tends to be – when people see anime porn outside of Japan, it appears outside of the context of general anime consumption. If people don’t see the context, some nasty show can seem as “normal” as Miyazaki. They aren’t.
ampontan said
M-Bone, et al.: Don’t know if you were around at the time, but in the early 1990s (circa 1991), there was a big to-do in the English-language press, which filtered overseas, about the Rapeman comic. The idea was that the protagonist was a masked men who went around raping women who caused problems as a way to set them straight.
I knew an American in Japan at the time who got in extremely high dudgeon about this (and other aspects of Japan), and wanted to find a copy. He was very pro-feminist (and also had an anti-Semitic strain, but I digress).
He enlisted a couple of Japanese women to help him find one, as he was Japanese-incapable. It took them most of their spare time for the better part of a week before they could find one in a hole-in-the-wall place with little customer traffic.
He was rather pleased to score that copy, and of course took it back home to show off as a souvenir. I thought he should have realized that something was not quite the way the English-language press described it when it took him so long to actually find a real copy, but of course he didn’t.
He once tried to start a discussion by saying something like, “You know Bill, some people would say that by staying in Japan and working here without challenging them, you are contributing to the problem.”
I asked him casually why I should take seriously what some jerks say, which ended that one.
James A said
Ampontan,
Well, he seems happy that he accomplished a lot getting that manga. Not just for his own personal vendetta, but for his own enjoyment as well. Nudge nudge, wink wink, knowwhatimean?
Alex said
I don’t think most foreigners realize that “anime” merely means “animation”. There is anime for kids, for teenage girls, for salarymen (office workers), of any and every kind. From what I’ve seen (in both live action and animation), in Japan, erotic and non-erotic content are very strictly separated. Sure, you might find some crazy stuff in the Adult Video section in a store in Japan, but it’s far rarer to see a sex scene in a normal, mass-released Japanese film than in a Hollywood Production.
In the 80′s there WERE some naked women in normal anime, but in terms of detail, they were just dolls! No nipples OR any sort of body features (I think you know what I mean).
How about you start complaining about Sex in Hollywood films first, which reaches MILLIONS of people worldwide?