The General Thrust

If I were a racist, I wouldn't want us to run out of Japanese people. I would welcome any news that suggested that young Japanese people hate fucking* and are dooming themselves to annihilation, like the Zone-dwelling Herero refusing to procreate above the death rate in Gravity's Rainbow.

Because this world is a fair world, just having the combination of pretentiousness, gall and snobbery to even make a reference to that book would be just as likely to get me laid as if I were myself some kind of racist** who wanted us to run out of Japanese people. Which I would like to reiterate I am not. A racist, I mean. The Pynchon reference happened and I can't undo it. The consequences are just going to have to be what they are.

It's possible that I'm not a racist because I am only concerned with getting myself laid, but I think all that really confirms is that I am not a Japanese person. The proof of my non-racism is that I would absolutely consent to being laid by/with a Japanese person. I guess that's not actually proof given the proclivity of clearly racist slave-owners banging away on the people they held in chattel servitude, but in my case I wouldn't be sleeping with a Japanese person in any sort of condescending or patronizing way. I'd be doing it to save them from themselves.

We need Japan. Ever since we realized the death of the American automotive industry was probably going to happen eventually anyway so long as we left Americans in charge of it, they've been way less scary. Plus they like baseball and gluttony and they seem to have more or less shaken off that target-of-the-only-nuclear-attack-in-history thing we did with a shocking amount of aplomb... they're not so scary as they were back in the '80s, when we thought of them as a faceless, clockwork, seamless, ruthlessly dispassionate yellow horde gently roiling in the wings before crushing us at the hour of their choosing. No, we have the Chinese for that in 2013. The Japanese give us anime and Iron Chefs. We need them.

The projection is that, based on current attitudes understood from this one study, especially among people under 30 in Japan, their population will drop by up to a third. I would like to suggest it's possible that this isn't actually what we're seeing.

I'm not sure if courtship and marriage as we westerners understand them aren't constructs of the cultural fireswamp of Christianity and King Arthur. King Arthur itself was a Christian gloss on pagan hero tales, chock full of superstitious pre-conversion hocus pocus and fantasy elements, like giants and dragons and sex magic. The Arthurian legends are probably the most enduring legacy of Christianity, not its inflexible insistence on the literal truth of its textual spine, but in its adaptability to its surroundings. The old gods got dressed up in sensible non-animal-skin clothes, slapped a "St." in front of their name and turned their particular point of animistic association into their pet cause. Or they became super-fey comic book heroes. Sure, Thor looks acts and talks all butch, but all I have to say is: cape and matching boots.

The ideas of love and courtship are older than our religious root, later mulled over, codified and transmitted as chivalry, then again by Shakespeare into white-hot, soul-animating romance, then by the birth control pill as a combination of all those things, underlined by (finally) a gender-equal playing field of choice.

There were some reversals in there with Victorian moralism and Lutheran austerity, but not surprising: iconoclasm is a Protestant thing. Cleansing to purity by destroying. Very German idea. We won those wars.

It's possible that we just don't understand the ins and outs of the love-sex-relationship matrix in the Japanese (non-western) milieu. This is the country with the vending machines selling panties worn by schoolgirls. These are the people who invented bukkake.*** Maybe that's not extremism, maybe that's just the way they think it's done? Very hard to beget a child in that way, bukkake. I can only assume they think that many men involved will increase the odds of insemination? I don't know. These are the people who gave us the digital watch and the Toyota Prius hybrid. The premise that they just haven't put together the mechanics is a little hard to swallow.



---


*I don't mean hate fucking in the Urban Dictionary sense, like non-procreative sex for the sake of spite or some kind of masochistic self-schadenfreude, I mean apparently they're just not all that DTF.

**I suppose being a racist wouldn't preclude me from getting laid by other racists. I wonder if that would limit me to only sleeping with racists of my same race, but I think we're all the way back around to hate-fucking as a concept again.

***Link mercifully not provided.