I know it’s been literally an entire semester since I’ve posted a Weeaboo Wednesday, but look, I actually don’t know that much about Japan. I guess I could have kept reviewing weird hentai that I “accidentally” came upon, but I am pretty tired of getting hits from search terms like “world of warcraft tentacle” and “kkids fucking”.
In any case, I HAVE SOMETHING TO SHARE WITH YOU, SOMETHING ABOUT ANIMES!! CLICK HERE FOR JAPAN BOINIC BOOBS SKUNK FU HENTAI TENTICLE
So I’ve been stricken with some kind of horrible and life consuming strain of flu. While my initial plan was to sit around and feel sorry for myself, I had a realization: this was a golden opportunity to try some of the ways the people of Japan deal with their colds, flu, and other horrors. I did some research (and tapped into my own tremendous store of Japanese knowledge) and went to work on healing myself. One of the maxims of eastern medicine being that the bitterer the better, I knew I was in for a taxing experience.
Robotic cats are symbols of good health in traditional Japanese culture
Hit the jump for my quest for a cure!
This is the third and final part of Weeaboo Wednesday’s examination of the JRPG. You can find parts one and two here.
Over the last few weeks, you’ve come to learn what to expect from the story and characters that you’ll find when you take your first steps into a Japanese role-playing game. You know now that it doesn’t matter whether or not you care what’s going on, or if the characters are likable—you’re just along for the ride. And now, you’re at the end. You’ve spent 30 hours getting through the story, another 40 hours forcing birds to fuck, and another 63 hours leveling your characters so you can actually finish the damn game. Now all that remains is to take on the effeminate villain who awaits on the other side of a vast expanse of pain and suffering that we experts call the final dungeon. So come with me on this last leg of our journey so we can put an end to this once and for all!
Sarah’s fascinating post last week inspired me to further investigate the nuances of other media from the glorious East. This time, however, I’ll be investigating the more personal connection that lays between anime and its consumers. More specifically, what we can learn about a person’s personality from what kind of anime they enjoy. While some of you might immediately dismiss this idea as silly, cliche, and more suitable for a MySpace quiz, I can’t help but remind you that it’s totally tsundere of you to point that out (and if you get that without clicking the link, you simply cannot judge me). Now then, without further ado let’s move on to the main attraction:
It is, of course, totally wrong for me to talk about a country’s manga, since only one country can claim to have manga, and that country would be Glorious Nippon. Comics in that style written and distributed in China are called manhua; in Korea, they are known as manhwa.
Today’s column will feature sweeping and poorly justified generalizations based on the offensively unscientific sample of the manhwa section of onemanga.com.
It may strike some of you as strange that this post focuses on Korea, especially in light of the fact that word weeaboo (as used here) stems from a forum filter on the portmanteau “wapanese”. On the internet, “weeaboo” is a pejorative term to describe a white person who think they’re Japanese– people who post wanted ads on Craigslist for kawaii pinku bento boxes, own wall scrolls, or push their glasses up the bridge of their noses while going, “Ummmm actually it’s pronounced ‘mahn-ga’.” The reason why I am going beyond the jurisdiction of this column as its title would suggest is that while Kyle is definitely a weeaboo (white, thinks he’s Japanese, owns wall scrolls), I am not (Korean, thinks she’s white, does not own wall scrolls).
Kyle Smith, Comic-Con 2009
I do know a decent amount about shoujo anime and manga, but does this make me a weeaboo? No, this just makes me really susceptible to lame shit. Just like I own over twenty Star Wars novels, just like I spent finals week two semesters ago watching hundreds of hours of The West Wing, just like that time last winter break when I spontaneously spent an entire night watching Hugh Grant movies back to back, just like that time the winter break before that when I watched the full 16 hours of the acclaimed BBC drama Life on Mars in a span of 48 hours while writing a final paper. When I get on a roll, I really get on a roll. It just happens that I’ve been on a roll with anime and manga for about three years.
oh man is that the new chapter of Princess Resurrection?
So why not write a post about Japanese shoujo manga? Well, it’s a much much larger field than shoujo manhwa. (Or at least, the number of shoujo manga I’ve read exceeds the number of sunjeong manhwa I’ve read by an exponential amount). It would require me to sit down, think really hard, and then do a lot of intense categorization. On the other hand, I could just spout a poorly advised opinion that reflects embarrassingly on my hopelessly broken relationship with my parents, whose calls I have been ignoring for the past four days because they keep calling while I’m playing World of Warcraft.
But anyways.
Manhwa.
From left to right: Red Lion, Hot Blooded Woman, H2O, Goong, Cutie Boy, It's Love
Generally we view Japan as a society of polite, and reserved people. Over the last few weeks, Sarah has shown us just how untrue that is. The truth is that Japan is host to a profound separation between public and private spheres (in-groups and out-groups). That separation produces some pretty hilarious results for us gaijin to laugh at. While that certainly doesn’t explain all of the weird things to come out that country, it certainly helps us understand the phenomenon that we’ll be examining today: the love hotel.
Love hotels are exactly what you think they are: motels that serve the modern, on-the-go couple looking for a quickie. They generally feature hourly rates, entertainment like karaoke and video games, and a comfy place to bone at will. Some of the places even have really nice websites. So yeah, today we’re talking about these strange little places called love hotels. Hit the jump for a journey into strangeness.
During the last section of Philosophy 12A (Introduction to Logic), my GSI wrapped up his explanation of the deduction as he usually did– meeting the blank stares and tortured sighs of a classroom full of clueless freshmen and lazy seniors with a skillful but unsuccessful attempt to draw out anything like interest, or even a useful question. With a good twenty minutes left in the hour, he simply gave up and opened the floor to questions– any questions of any sort. Hands immediately shot up. “Does this deduction system carry over anywhere else?” “Where does this come into play in philosophy?” “Would we find this kind of abstract logic outside of the university?” One after another, students asked several variations on what was pretty much the same question:
“Why did I take this class again?”
The Squelch has a word for this curious admixture of exhaustion and bewilderment: Magician Basketball. In the immortal words of our old editor-in-chief, who at the time was finishing up his PEIS senior thesis on the fascinating topic of third world agriculture:
(pauses, looks around at circle of gathered players, sighs) Man, why did I ever decide to coach magician basketball?
We all get moments like that. Some of us feel it because we just spent an entire week of all-nighters writing about some Brazilians you’ve never met, whose language you don’t speak, and whose struggle is growing ever less important than your physical and mental health; others because we just stumbled through an entire semester of incomprehensibly abstract symbology that isn’t necessary (and certainly not sufficient) to understand even someone as obscure as Saul Kripke. And then sometimes you find yourself writing the third part of a series of columns on a really weird hentai video you discovered. We’ve all been there.
This last post contains the shortest temporal part of the video, but by far covers the most material. But as exhausted as I am, I find it difficult to provide a commentary… in any case, Lust Train speaks for itself.
In my travels across the internet, I have seen wonders and heard tales of a land across the sea called Japan. There, one can seek the company of a loli without some prick from NBC spoiling your fun, read manga all day without your step-dad telling you to man up and wash your face, and even spend hours laughing at a TV show that has no premise beyond a ‘monkey and a dog are friends.’ Japan is almost too glorious a place to describe in one post so today I will take you into the home of a Japanese person, and show you a small sample of the wonderland called Japan.
All Japanese people live in homes like these
You would be amiss to assume this house’s old-timey hidden ninja village look carries through into the interior. In fact, this house holds technological wonders that we won’t see for another 15 years. The items inside this home are a testament to the efficiency and industry Japan. Since the Japanese are a trustworthy people, doors are rarely locked, lets look inside!
It was with great hesitation and mild dismay that I logged out of a satisfying session of World of Warcraft in order to bring you more horrible, horrible porn. Although I was initially very excited about the potential comedy value of “Lust Train,” going as far as to describe it as the “best thing ever,” two or three or twelve repeat viewings have definitely dimmed my enthusiasm. Although the combination of hilariously wrong, morally reprehensible hentai and transforming gundam robots is pretty excellent, watching huge boobs getting lashed together by slender tentacles and then milked like udders is kind of a downer if you subscribe to anything remotely resembling feminist principles. But I promised to bring you more– so here I am.
If you haven’t read the first part of my write-up yet, you are a) one of the few readers who didn’t stumble onto this site while looking up “skunk fu hentai,” b) probably better off for it.
If this image loaded on your computer, the FBI is already on their way.
This week’s post is going to go straight into the mind-bogglingly unerotic. Just to make it entirely clear: this post is NOT WORK SAFE, it’s not even mind safe. THIS IS REALLY A REVIEW OF HENTAI. Brace yourselves for a truly terrifying journey…
Japanese games have always set themselves apart from those of west. During the 80s and early 90s, they did this through innovation and creativity. Now, Japan defines its niche in the games industry by baffling their consumers with any means available to them. The Japanese are so adept at this that the very titles of their games are often ludicrous, barely-coherent strings of “words.” Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: The Endless Frontier is obviously a product of this Ha Ha ha school of thought.
