Hentai Rag Forced to Back Down
- Filed under: Japan, News
- Date: Jun 21, 2008 17:29 JST
- Tags: Bizarre, Censorship, Mass Media
Ultra lowbrow English language tabloid WaiWai, a part of the Mainichi Daily News and known for its extremely liberal handling of source material in pursuit of page hits (if not outright fictional news), has been forced to back down over its more extreme stories (examples below) thanks to a sustained campaign waged by 2chers and others, which finally began to break through into the mass media. Several of their more egregious stories have now been pulled.
WaiWai has made a habit of creatively interpreting and translating stories (falsifying might be more accurate) under the direction of editor Ryann Connell; it seems this policy has been a moderate success given the occasional appearance of WaiWai trash stories on such sites as Digg or Fark.
However, side by side comparisons of English translations of the Japanese source material rarely reveal anything but the most tangential links, and sources appear to be entirely absent in many cases
Japanese observers have grown increasingly unhappy at the distorted news presented by the arm of a major Japanese newspaper, and the campaign crystallised through 2ch into this rather vitriolic wiki (though perhaps justifiably so). Pressure on sponsors and the reputation of Mainichi seems to have finally forced a climb-down on the worst cases; examples are reproduced below, but please treat them as fiction.
More moms going down, to ensure grades go up!
Dad comes home from an “adult toy store” and hands his wife a chastity belt. She nods and turns to the couple’s 15-year-old son. “Let’s go,” she says. They disappear into the boy’s bedroom. The story begins with Japan’s obsessive exam culture. A boy’s whole future can depend on the senior high school he gets into. Some mothers will do anything to make sure their junior high school sons pass the all-determining entrance exams.
Anything? Pretty nearly.Asahi Geino hears the story of (not their real names) Meiko, 38, and her son Haruki from Kanagawa cram school director Yukio Shibagaki, who wrote a book on experiences like theirs.
Every evening at 8:00, Haruki would vanish into his room, ostensibly to study. Meiko was pleased — until one night she caught a glimpse of him through the slightly open door and realized he was not studying but masturbating. Intrigued, she peeked into his room the following night, and the night after that. The conclusion was inescapable. At the rate he was going, he would not be ready for his tests.“I’d better have a talk with him,” she thought — and did.
“Mom,” he said, shyly but firmly, “I wanna do it with you.”
“With me!” What to do? Be shocked and angry, or calm and understanding? “Let’s see what your father says.”
Father was surprised but kept his head. “No genital sex,” he stipulated. “However, if it’s just a question of making the boy feel good, I won’t say no.”
And so every evening Haruki’s studying was prefaced by a 15-minute maternal blow job. His concentration improved; his marks soared. Everyone was happy — except dad, whose doubts grew as time passed. Weren’t things going a little too far? The chastity belt, at least, would close the last frontier.
Our first reaction is disbelief, but Shibagaki swears the story is not only true but also fairly typical, and special high school instructor Tadashi Sato, to whom Asahi Geino goes for confirmation, agrees.
“I often hear stories like that,” he says. The mother-son relationship has always had rich dramatic potential; the steadily contracting nuclear family can enrich the drama to the point of deviance. “Mothers do want their children to pass those exams,” says Sato. “We’re not talking about just a few cases.”
Nor are we talking only about 15-year-olds. Akiko (as we’ll call her) is 28, her son Atsushi 12. He too faces entrance exams — junior high school ones. The boy seemed to be studying. Why was he floundering? “Why?” Akiko asked him one day. The answer was a seeming non sequitur, but Akiko saw the point. “I want to see a woman naked.”
Akiko undressed. “I’ll do it again for you if you do well on your next test, OK?” He did very well.
There are endless ramifications to the sex-for-grades business, Asahi Geino discovers. Teachers too get in on the act. Some third-year junior high school teachers are not above capitalizing on the leverage they wield. Some ask for money in return for influential written recommendations. Others ask for sex. Thus Mari, 37-year-old mother of a daughter about to graduate junior high, took to visiting the girl’s divorced teacher at his home. One afternoon the teacher’s 14-year-old son showed up unexpectedly. “Me too!” he insisted.
And Mari obliged, says Shibagaki.
The Cook, the Beast, the Vice and its Lover
A disgusting and twisted restaurant in the Tokyo entertainment district of Roppongi is enticing warped rich folk with the opportunity to figuratively have their cake and eat it, too — with animals, according to Jitsuwa Knuckles (9/25).
Roppongi’s bestiality restaurant is being regarded by its main nouveau riche patronage of young company presidents and venture capitalists as a decadent practice only possible among the wealthy.
“Apparently, the restaurant started off quietly in the basement of a building that a real estate agent in Roppongi who couldn’t find any other tenants,” an S&M club worker identified only as M tells Jitsuwa Knuckles. “News about the restaurant spread through word of mouth and it became popular.”
M says she visited the members-only restaurant about half a year ago after being invited there by one of her regulars, a well-heeled lawyer.
At first glance, the first floor restaurant appears fairly nondescript. When a customer goes in, they give their name to a receptionist. When they are approved, they pass through a wooden door to be greeted by another door, this one made of metal. Passing a membership card over a scanner outside the door will automatically open it. Inside is an eatery that resembles just about any other Italian restaurant.
Membership in the restaurant is open only to those with an annual salary of at least 20 million yen, and a minimum cash flow of 100 million yen.
“After we got into the main restaurant, an employee escorted us down to the basement,” M says. “The walls were pitch black and the floor covered in a blood red carpet, so I guess the place must be a refurbished S&M club.”
Once the customer feels prepared, they will be presented with beast of their choice. In the lawyer’s case, it was a sow.
“I’d been told what to expect, but when I actually saw what was happening, it was as shocking as you’d imagine it to be,” M tells Jitsuwa Knuckles. “Later, the lawyer told me the appeal of the place just came about because when people have got money and done everything else, they turn toward bestiality.”
Once the lawyer had finished porking the pig, the couple returned to the first floor and sat at a table to dine. M says she was totally shocked when staff members carried in roast pork — made of the same sow the lawyer had earlier been with.
“I was about to vomit,” M says. “It was the same pig that had been squealing just moments before. Now, it had been roasted whole. I managed to avoid eating it by only having salad.”
Incidentally, prices range from 200,000 yen to 500,000 yen for a chicken, dogs cost somewhere between 300,000 yen and 800,000 yen, while pigs and goats start at around 800,000 yen. Charges are higher depending on whether the creature is female and how active it is.“The owner says he is prepared to cook up any kind of animal at all,” M tells Jitsuwa Knuckles. “He even said he’d prepare elephants … but I think he might have been joking about that.”
There’s a comprehensive collection of these kind of stories on the anti-WaiWai wiki.
As far as Sankaku Complex is concerned regarding these kind of issues, mistranslation or liberal interpretation is a serious matter and will never be countenanced, news is treated sceptically, and we should probably be of the opinion that Japan is no more or less demented than any other part of the world.
Well, whether the guy had been translating creatively or not, you can’t really expect quality journalism based on sleazy tabloids. Still, I confess I actually believed that, save for his really bad wordplays, Connell was more or less faithful to his source material. What little I’d read of such rags as Shūkan Gendai made it sound plausible enough.
Anyway, the whole WaiWai section has now been pulled from the website with an apology.
I saw - now he is back to selling his dreadful books.
I strongly suggest that Mainichi will have statement to “review and correct” these articles and not just deleting them but display and distribute such correction for more than the period that these crazy articles have been in place, more than 7 years.
The fact that Mainichi has mislead the world, instead of spreading the truth which is a special role for journalists, is a huge mistake and Mainichi will have to “reborn” and take these back from the world in every possible way that they can.
Lastly let me add that the Japanese Mainichi site includes far the most sexual articles among the Japanese newspapers, Asahi, Yomiuri, Nikkei and Mainichi, and this Japanese site including these sexual articles are easily “linked” from the “Mainichi Elementary School Newspaper”site.
Again please do not “delete and hide” but “review, apologize and correct” the situation there as well.