Before we start seriously discussing the meaning of Japanese mainstream nudie magazines featuring voluptuous elementary schoolgirls in bikinis, let us dispense with a modern myth about Japan:
Myth: Japanese “pedophilia” is an a-historical phenomenon.
Unlike the Christian West, Japanese society does not have fundamental religious or philosophical dispositions hostile towards human sexuality. The Edo period was a wild time – men crawling around at night and secretly sleeping with their neighbors' wives, kabuki as a traveling theatre of prostitutes, the heyday of the Yoshiwara pleasure district. But somewhere between the Confucian-Prussian austerity of the Meiji period, the toil of the war, and the Occupying Puritanism of the Americans, Japan became a somewhat sexually-repressed society. Not so much a new moral stance, but a quiet rejection of open sexuality for the pursuit of larger priorities - war, Imperialism, high-paced economic growth.
Back in the 60s, little girls did appear on television, singing songs, prancing and dancing for the public’s entertainment, but instead of emphasizing infantile qualities, early teen singers like Hirota Mieko and Wada Akiko sang songs in low registers and play-acted adulthood in a clean-cut manner. Being alive in Japan in the 60s was hard work, and the culture represented the stern Protestant-esque work ethic driving economic progress.
The whole cloying kawaii culture did not start until the 70s. And the standard object of desire for the working man at that time was a college-coed in a tennis circle. Very classy, good manners. Even during the “Sex Boom” of the 80s, female university students still held a strong position in the collective libido, but now they were on late-night TV, bouncing around in bikinis and skimpy outfits. Following soon after that, the Onyanko Club lowered the bar by shifting desires to average-looking high school girls singing suggestive songs. A decade later in the mid-90s, the enjokousai (compensated dating) boom revealed to the public that old men would pay a lot of cash to have sex with middle school girls.
Sociologists and critics have proffered a lot of explanations over the years for the falling age of Japanese men’s sexual preferences, most notably that rising educational opportunities for women increased their intellectual maturity above the level desired by most Japanese men. In order to procure mental inferiors, men had to keep slinking down the food chain. Whatever the reasons, salarymen fantasizing about sleeping with middle school girls is arguably a contemporary spectacle. Maybe desires were hidden in the 60s and 70s, but I don’t think there is much evidence that this interest in junior high schoolgirls was always latent from time eternal. Even with past arranged marriages, the idea was to marry a young girl and have her pop out children for the farmwork.
So, now we have arrived upon the symbol of our own post-post-modern era – Saaya Irie – the busty twelve year-old slowly becoming a household name. For a while, I had assumed that her existence was some weird mistake – that the shogakusei gravia market was actually targeted towards elementary school boys or something reasonable. Saaya currently has a three-member idol singing group called Sweet Kiss, and perhaps her bikini modeling was just part of that campaign. Alas, so far they have not released any music - just "idol DVDs."
Contrary to reports that Saaya would stop posing in suggestive swimwear, the latest issues of Weekly Pureboi have been full of her pictures, right between legal-aged women bearing all. Pureboi’s publisher will soon put out her first photograph collection called Tsubomi - “flower bud.” (I get it, she's not quite in bloom.) Tagline: 「12歳の衝撃」 - The Shock of a 12 Year-Old. There is no longer any doubt that her images are being sold within a sexual context – more specifically, they are being pushed within a magazine normally read with one hand. Suddenly self-pleasure while openly fantasizing about twelve year-old girls is a-okay – with a special vote of confidence from the public train system that features these adverts in prominent display on our daily commutes.
The Christian and child-development arguments against sexually-charged photos of elementary school girls are so obvious, I don’t need to harp on the points. But I do wonder whether there isn’t normally a natural barrier that reduces adult male sexual predilection for very little girls. I may be out on a limb, but I have always believed that a majority of men are not attracted to the bodies of pre-pubescent females. The dilemma here stems from the fact that Saaya’s mammary development is ultra-advanced. She clearly has the body of a late teen, thanks to some strange combination of heightened nutrition and post-industrial environmental factors. Fathers, however, who have raised their daughters from the womb to the first basketball practice should be somewhat numbed to the idea of tiny naked girls. Perhaps the low rate of childbirth is separating Japanese men even further from the childrearing process, and Saaya and her cohorts are still hot stuff.
Not to say that everyone in Japan thinks the Saaya phenomenon is a welcome development. I hear a lot of wretching noises when I ask around about the concept of elementary school semi-porn. But why no open protest - or at least, ballyhoo - against this boldly new sexual trope?
For whatever reasons, “adult movies” in America have always have had an association with “liberalism” – mostly an unfair political linkage of heightened liberty and loose morality. Playboy has a solid libertarian stance, but besides the Andrea Dworkin extreme-Left wing, the groundswell against pornography and filth in the United States has always been of Conservative origin. In Japan, I would go as far to say that the opposite is true: porn is right-wing, conservative, and hegemonic. Weekly Playboy’s pages brim with jingoistic China-bashing. The money pipe is long and complex, but adult video sales probably indirectly finance the ultra-nationalistic sound trucks. The appreciation of most porn in Japan essentially comes from a type of misogyny – a belief in a cosmic order that determines women to be objects formed for the sole mission of male pleasure. The same graying bigwigs who prevented the birth control pill from gaining legal status in Japan for thirty years are the ones who would gnaw off an arm before any government body takes away their rights to paid sex and dirty videos. The powers-that-be would have no tiff with Saaya Irie.
But if we avoid all the pretension of moral rectitude, the Saaya issue eventually comes back to one question: how does the girl herself feel about being publicly fetishized in Grade 6? Apparently, Saaya wants to be Britney Spears, who happened to make her debut the Mickey Mouse Club at age 12. I don’t remember young Britney in a bikini, flashing cleavage on the Disney Channel, but such goals and aspirations make it very easy for the production company behind this endeavor to get their girl performing the right moves for her multi-aged fan base. Also consider that many young girls would love to stay out all night partying, drinking, smoking, maybe even being ogled by her fathers’ friends, but grumpy old parents usually put a stop to it. Judging by the circumstances, Saaya may be an orphan – property of her management – or her parents got a big enough cut of the back-end to sacrifice any lingering sense of responsibility.
Some propose, however, that this may not be about sex at all – just a modern freak show. A low-teen with enormous breasts paraded around for gawking fans. The sexual content may be low, and we are all just taking pleasure from the shock of this mutant. This may explain some of the appeal, but her marketing suggests otherwise. Weekly Preiboi proceeds along with spreads of the young Saaya, selling her unique natural assets to an older male clientele.
Let's look on the bright side, though. The good news is that the way these trends are working out, you may not have to wait even a whole decade before earning a respectable return on your daughters. The market for glamour shots of soaking wet nine-year olds in bikinis will soon be ready for your children, your cousins, your nieces. Saaya Irie is single-handedly clearing the dead weight of social norms to open up a huge commercial wonderland. Are you ready to be a producer as well as a consumer?
