“Flange”?
This story in the Mainichi Daily is a bit of a curious one, about a film coming to Japan where for a brief moment, female genitalia are visible. The story, titled “Film That Dares to Flash the Flange All in the Name of Art,” describes the offensive film and the fact that Japan’s censors are letting it slip by–as, so the story says, they let male genitalia appear on screen in Kinsey. (And, I observed, they let the same go uncensored in Schindler’s List on cable TV.) This time it’s an Austrian film about artist Gustav Klimt, which otherwise would have passed by unnoticed in small art theaters here.
A lot of people in Western countries assume that Japan and the Japanese are pretty blase about nudity, with the whole “nudity is often seen but never looked at” idea. Japan lacks privacy, as Mariko-san said in Shogun, and so nudity is not something Japanese mind so much.
Ha! Maybe in pre-Meiji Japan, or maybe even pre-WWII, but that is sure as hell not the case today. Modern Japan has kind of strange takes on nudity, probably a mix of Japanese mores and conservative censorship imposed by the US military during the occupation.
I remember the first time I visited Japan, back in 1983, and my tour group was in a countryside inn. The group leader told us that if we felt adventurous, we could all go together to the local bath house. Clearly everyone expected mix bathing, but when we arrived, to our collective disappointment and relief, it was a segregated bath–something which is very much the norm in Japan. Mixed bathing is rarely found in this country, mostly infrequent cases in the deep countryside, and is probably more common in California than it is in Japan. And even in segregated baths, people still carry small cloths which have little other purpose than to act as a fig leaf.
Outside of bath houses, nudity is not seen in public very much at all in Japan. One might see a flash now and again in terms of imagery, like in a manga cartoon book read by an oyaji (old guy) on a train, or in a poster outside a porn theater. Other than that, it tends to be restricted to pornographic materials. You certainly don’t see even a suggestion of private parts in public. Women always wear bras with sufficient padding so that nipples never stand out. On the beach, women almost always wear one-piece bathing suits, and I’ve never heard of a nude beach in Japan (though they might exist). In fact, you never even see shirtless men in Japan outside of beaches and swimming pools–or the odd festival where men might even wear fundoshi. Japan can be very puritanical in regards to clothing.
Pornography tends to strange contrasts here, on the other hand. The subject matter can get wild very easily (I’d rather not get into details), but because of the laws, genitalia cannot be shown. In fact, even pubic hair is usually covered with digital mosaics, though maybe a decade ago censorship laws relaxed enough to make showing “artistic” pubic hair legal, creating a boom of “hair nudes.”
There has also been a more conservative trend in terms of nudity on television. Back in the 80’s and early 90’s, nudity was pretty rampant on TV. Late-night shows featuring nudity were common, and by channel-skipping after 11:00 at night, one could almost always find some T&A going on. Um, so I heard. It was always very careful to restrict the view to boobs and bums, but it was common. One could even see the occasional women’s bath scene on daytime TV. Today, the trend is definitely away from that. Nudity on television is much more scarce, for reasons I do not understand.
So the next time you hear someone sagely explaining about how Japanese are nonchalant about nakedness, bring them up to date.
One night, while spending a drunken evening with one of my friends/business partners, in Tokyo, we came to conclusion that the digital moasics were actually birth defects. Japenese prents would cry when their children were born “Noooooo our child is a mosaic! She’ll be a porn star for sure!”
It made sense when we were drunk:-p
The Japanese are, in general, less uptight about nudity. Americans classify the extent to which nudity could be considering offensive by which body parts are exposed. The Japanese tend to classify it by the context of the exposure. For instance, the censored Britney Spears poster (which was later uncensored, I think), wasn’t a problem because of any specific exposure but because a pregnant woman’s belly is considered a private thing in Japan (where Demi Moore didn’t trailblaze pregnant nudity).
In the U.S., you wouldn’t get strangers soaking naked in a hotspring together but they still do that in Japan because they are not uptight about nudity in that context.
So, as with many things in Japan, the issue of offensive and acceptable nudity is “case by case” rather than specified by a clear set of rules (which is generally how things are handled in the U.S.).
About nude beaches, I tried searching for then on a friend’s request, but found none. While I won’t swear by my search prowess, I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t any.
My personal tale that broke the “Japanese are blase regards nudity” myth was when I forgot my running clothes when going to a martial art club’s training. I managed to find some shorts, but having no luck with shirt, decided to run shirtless. “No big deal” I thought, but my japanese colleagues were quite a bit surprised by that.
In the U.S., you wouldn’t get strangers soaking naked in a hotspring together but they still do that in Japan because they are not uptight about nudity in that context.In the U.S., you have strangers taking showers together (as in gyms etc.), and I imagine probably as many hot tub parties in California as mixed-gender bathing in Japan–it really is very uncommon.