Google, no love today

[zenkatsuo]

Google, my friend and trusty companion on the journey to the deepest recesses of the internet, is being a total fucktard today. It won't let me do a basic search in japanese. I can still image search, but it turns everything to gibberish if I try to input anything in the basic search window. And this once I was going to look up stuff properly

Comments

[zenkatsuo]

...Okay, I think a part of my brain just hemorrhaged out...

I could list a lot of things they're getting wrong starting with getting nanshoku and shûdô mixed up with man-love in the Genji Monogatari (products of two very different societies), not recognizing kabuki nanshoku as prostitution (oh yeah, that's true love for you) and thinking that it was the arrival of Christianity that killed the practise (!). The last one I find the most offensive. It was Western influence, true, but instead of Christian morals it was the sexology of Kraft-Ebing (if I remember correctly, translations of his works also gave the Japanese the concept of gender), and the Japanese were the ones to ban the practise themselves in their eagerness to appear modern and civilized. You can justly blame missionaries and Christian moral standards about a lot of things, but not this.

As for how cute samurai nanshoku was, by sheer coincidence, last nights image searching yielded the perfect visual. It's from the blog of an amateur artist and seppuku enthusiast, so a warning: please don't look at it if you dislike blood or viscera, although it's not that hard core (in his own words)...

To me, the appeal of man-love in yaoi is the fact that the characters have to overcome the obstacles of heterosexuality and their own masculinity and commit to a relationship that's (still a little) taboo. I love nanshoku too, but as a genre it's totally different. If the OP of that thread loves the idea of RL guys doing it so much, why isn't she camped outside a gay bar..?

That said (in a most long-winded fashion), I don't know if my blood pressure could take getting into an argument with someone a decade younger than me whose primary source of information is Wikipedia... Unless you really want a tag-team partner. Man, knowing that thread's out there will haunt me in my sleep.

[army_kitten]

yeah, i think the most frustrating thing to me is that i can tell they're getting it all wrong, but since i know so little about it i'm unable to articulate all the inaccuracies. i would LOVE to have an intelligent discussion about nanshoku and shuudou and related topics, or a discussion about yaoi but... they are so not the same thing! AT ALL. *tears hair*

you wouldn't have to get in an argument necessarily.... *shifty eyes* i think a nice "fact-correction post" would be lovely. i keep coming across bits in nashoku ookagami that beg to be quoted (like the whole paragraph about kabuki boys having little choice but to take "patrons" so they could afford to live, among other things), but i would never be able to succinctly lay it down in a few paragraphs like you could.

and, y'know, don't you think you'd be able to sleep better if you knew you'd played a part in educating the misinformed? *pours sugar on top*

that picture of samurai love is just... whoa. it looks just like schalow describes it! O_o i don't see any biting off of pinky-finger joints as offerings of devotion in there, though...

[zenkatsuo]

Urk, you give me way too much credit. Clearly, in the near future, you will be terribly disappointed when it dawns on you that I'm a complete air-head. I'll try and compose something, but the prospect is quite daunting, since, well, the mistakes are so huge and the subject itself so diverse... I'm worried about writing something so lengthy and rambling that no one's going to survive it to the end.

I'm not a quitter, I just get so pissed off that I tire fast...

When I first stumbled upon the guys art, I was kinda taken aback by the blood and spilling guts, but now I'm pretty impressed. Some of the pictures that feature less severed heads and open bellies are actually quite reminiscent of Tom of Finland. And everything reminiscent of Tom of Finland is A-OK in my book. His preoccupation with seppuku is somewhat disturbing though... And pretty difficult to overlook, since there's someone committing one in almost every picture...

[army_kitten]

but an intelligent, articulate air-head nonetheless. XD

i'm trying not to hemorrhage at the moment, because i keep checking the thread to see what other ill-informed posts will follow mine. the latest said something like, "what do you mean the kabuki actors didn't have any choice about sleeping with patrons? they were young and hot! see?" *headdesk repeatedly*

i'm not going to touch it until you give it a go, though. i'm taking some deep breaths instead. i guarantee people will read your rambling, though. it's easy to read & understand, for one thing. for another, they do seem at least a little bit interested.

as for that guy's art, i don't think i could spend any time looking at it, though that one was in pencil, so not as bad as it could have been. i'm actually really sensitive to that kind of thing. i once stumbled into a thread that had a ton of guro stuff, and not knowing what guro was i looked under some spoiler tags... and i will never, ever recover. X___X