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Tales from the Dark Side

By James Hadfield

Ryann Connell interview

Japan's weekly magazines (shukanshi) are the seedy underbelly of the country's media, scurrilous gossip rags that glory in peddling the kind of tat more "respectable" publications won't touch. Sex, scandal and, er, sex scandals are all par for the course in this netherworld - and every week, the Mainichi Daily News's Ryann Connell delves in to extract the juiciest bits and translate them for his website's well-loved WaiWai section.

The weekly mags seem pretty titillating when you first read them, but what's it like trawling through this stuff every week? Do you ever feel like rinsing yourself clean and getting a job writing about gardening instead?
I still love it - it's hard not to. I was brought up in a strict Catholic background, so WaiWai can often mean some pretty heavy guilt trips. No amount of rinsing will ever make me clean again! Luckily, WaiWai is only one tiny part of my job, so there's plenty of other stuff to enjoy if I get a bit jaded with it. It's probably a lot harder for readers having to take me day in, day out, than it is for me to try and find something to please them.

How do you choose which stories to run on the WaiWai site? What qualities do you look for in a story?
Copy all the index pages, post them on a wall, put on a blindfold and throw a dart. Not really! I don't have a formula. It's just a sense. We can track every story we run, so have a fair idea of what's popular and what's not, which I must admit plays a part in my decisions. The first thing I like to find is something odd. If there's a bizarre fad, trend or goofy character, I pounce on it. I love laughing and if I think I can make others laugh, I'll choose it. We know readers like sex stuff, so I try to cater to that in as fun a way as possible.

We also have our People's Pick WaiWai, where the topic is selected via an online poll where readers pick their favorite story from a list of candidate headlines and Masuo Kamiyama writes it up.

What do you think the weekly magazines tell us about Japan?
Way, way, way too much more than we really need - or want - to know. For instance, the current issue of the women's weekly Shukan Josei (Aug. 22 to 29) has a five-page lead story about the correct method for inserting tampons. Five pages??? And there's only a couple of small photos and diagrams. That story is followed by another piece about the right way to wear a bra (that one's only two pages, though).

There's a tendency for Japanese to want to have their country portrayed overseas in a positive light. Because the weeklies are produced on the assumption that outsiders (and by "outsiders" I mean Westerners) aren't going to be reading them, in some ways the weeklies can provide a much more accurate depiction of what's going on here than the mainstream media does.

What's the funniest story you've come across in the course of your work? And the most appalling one?
From my point of view, probably the funniest was the story I've written was about actresses in bestiality films complaining about being paid less than the "butter dogs" they performed with. As for most appalling, to be honest, it takes a lot to get me shocked. I guess any story where somebody has been hurt appalls me, and there are way too many of them to list up.

Do you reckon Japanese people are any more or less obsessed about sex than Westerners? How do attitudes differ here?
This is a really hard one to answer. I think everybody is pretty much sex obsessed but the extent of their obsession is obvious only by how overt they are about it. To that extent, people are pretty much the same just about wherever you go. Perhaps the Japanese are more accepting of sex than Westerners. There's definitely less prudishness about sex here than in the West, but then there's a fierce fight going on here to prevent schools from providing sex education even though rates of sexually transmitted diseases are skyrocketing and Japan is the only industrialized country where the rate of HIV contraction is growing.

One area that clearly stands out as a difference is that men here still wear the pants when it comes to sex and Japanese women haven't achieved the sexual liberation of some of their Western counterparts. We're going back a few years, but attitudes to sex here were best summed up for me in 1998 when Viagra was let onto the market just six months after it applied for release, while women had to fight for almost 40 years to get the Pill approved. Things have changed considerably since then, and women do get a better deal than they used to (and are actively making better deals for themselves), but there's still a strong sense among many men that women are here to serve them and nearly all of the weeklies, even those for women, strongly reinforce this idea.

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