So I found a pre-license fansub site for japanese Manga, which are a kind of comic book without retardation. You read them right to left. Lots of manga go on to become popular enough to be turned into anime. Sometimes those stories are changed or simplified for audience reasons. Sometimes for censorship. Japan only allows one kiss in a broadcast. That's it. More than one and its pornography. But they have love hotels specifically for screwing when unmarried or cheating, and nude mixed public bathing at hot springs. Those are okay. Just no kissing. Holding hands is risque. This ultraweird victorianism is America's fault, actually. During the Occupation, after the war, we banned a lot of their porn because we were worried that poverty to create brothels again. Japan had a lot of those before the war. Debt slavery driven by a lack of modern banking options meant that loan sharks were the only place to get money to start a business, and you'd better hire an assassin to kill the loan shark if he wouldn't accept agreed payoff and tried to scam you for more. Japanese Yakuza also unofficially police Ginza and Shinjuku night city in Tokyo, even today. They keep things safe and clean and remove any violent drunks because happy drunks spend money and everybody is happy for it. Funny how that business works. The Yakuza run the pachinko parlors and they get a cut of all the profits, tax for their services keeping things calm and cheerful. The end result is Japan has relatively safe night life, but standards for what constitutes pornography are really skewed compared to America. Ironically, this opens the door for Manga, which allow for stories pretty similar to 90210, with young people hopping beds and getting emo about who to sleep with this month. They don't turn those stories into anime very often. It is a little too grown up, and I wondered if such stories existed.
A couple years ago I watched a pretty good anime called Golden Time, which is about a new college student who had recently recovered from severe brain damage that resulted in complete memory loss from before the accident. He still knows how to speak and read and write, but he has no memories of life before the accident. He has had to reinvent himself as a new person. He's healthy enough, now, to pass his exams and get into a law school in Tokyo. He meets some interesting people, including a woman who was rejected by a classmate after years of being engaged through high school. She's pretty neurotic and adjusting to this big rejection is hard for her. Another woman belongs to the folk dance club, and tries to recruit the hero to join and make friends. She is nice to him. Its a rather tragic story, as you might expect, because a woman is the root of his troubles, even if he's forgotten her. She feels guilty about it too. People remember him, the old him, but he has no idea who they are. The pitying looks are something he wants to escape in the anonymity of Tokyo. You expect a certain amount of adult romance. They are college students, but there's a lot less than you want. Its awfully clean. The hopping beds doesn't seem to happen. Holding hands, no kissing. That's about it. I found it kind of frustrating.
Honey And Clover was another college level story about love and ambition and the harm people do each other. I've written on that before. That's more tragic, but also plausible characters. People do get that obsessive and broken in college, where they have no governor on their behavior. They can go to extremes and ruin their reputations and hurt a lot of people. Whether they recover from that or not is another question. I knew a lot of people like that. Some of them are probably still alive.
The thing about manga is that you can dig and eventually find something more plausible and not such a gimmick. I found Hetakoi, which is about a guy who has just come of age, 20 in Japan, and went to a hot spring alone for his birthday. There he sees a stunning woman naked, passed out drunk. He yelps, she gets rescued by the staff and he's rather shocked by the whole thing. Then he starts college. Where he meets the girl. Every time he sees her, he remembers her naked. IN Japan this is practically a marriage proposal, which begs the question: why do they have mixed nude bathing then? Hypocrisy much? In my experience, the sort of women you see in mixed nude bathing are the sort of women that you never want to see nude. The sort of visual scarring which might put you off of marriage because they sag in terrible places, and the stretch marks are awful too.
This story is about a couple that are probably a good match except their timing is off. They don't get into the right place in their lives at the same time. They have lingering issues that ruin things between them, and its kind of tragic, which from what I've seen is the preferred kind of love story in Asia. The kind where everybody dies at the end. Or worse, one dies and the other lingers in regret. Not a happy ending. The opposite from America, where Happy Endings cause all sorts of irritation in people who are sick of cliches. This is why I mostly ignore American movies and most American TV shows. Hollywood's love affair with cocaine and cliches and rampant sexism and racism really put me off. I don't want them to get any of my money. I don't buy the claims that Michael Bay is mocking racism in America by making racist movies (like Transformers). Hollywood is evil. We already know this. People who say nice things about Hollywood are evil. People who listen to vapid drug addled movie stars for their political position on important topics are evil. I hope they die soon. The only thing good about Hollywood is the drugs kill movie stars. I just wish it killed them faster. They are bad people. The quicker they die, the faster people will have to find a new starlet to obsess over. Flavor of the month, according to the Tabloid fans. They don't mind. They like the drama. Sigh. Horrible people. If libraries start stocking actual tabloids I am changing careers. Or I'll privately refer to them as fishing for idiots.
I haven't finished reading Hetakoi. I suspect it may get a happy ending after all this drama and missed timing. The couple is rather tragic. That's their primary problem.
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