I suspect that an over-riding, motivating issue of the described Mainichi “controversy” was probably national embarrassment because the admittedly sensationalized stuff was being published in English. Differences in “sexual habits of the Japanese” have presented a problem for Japan ever since the first Westerners arrived in Yokohama and started reacting to traditional practices like mixed public bathing and open, socially integrated prostitution

Of course, Mainichi’s Wai Wai no doubt “stretched believability” tabloid-style, but while we lived there, Japanese media standards clearly appeared to reflect essential cultural differences about the place of sexuality in human life. Legitimate Japanese-language papers routinely published a daily crotch shot or other obscene (to Western eyes) photo or graphic, often on the front page. They were everywhere you looked on the train, actually could not be avoided…

Japanese attitudes toward sexuality do not correspond to Western ideals, and why should they? Americans, formed by the Victorian overlay of sexual shame on Judeo-Christian ideas about gender relations, are accustomed to living with a different set of assumptions from Japanese culture, where sexuality seems historically to have been kept in its place as a bodily function like eating, not loaded with moral baggage.

Fact is that many Asian cultural perspectives (non-Muslim anyway) on sexuality are in general just fundamentally different from the West’s. And Japan, though experiencing rapid cultural transformation, is not an exception.

Judging from translations of Japanese literature, both traditional and contemporary, sexual activity in adolescence appears to have been accepted/ignored, not seen as a social problem, and sexual experience or virginity in a bride was/is not considered nearly as important as good ancestry.

Abortion has historically been a standard birth control method. The pill was not approved yet when we were there (80s and 90s) and IUDs were considered unacceptable for Buddhist reasons having to do with body integrity.

A popular genre of comic books – purchasable from vending machines by any age group (as were beer and whiskey) – featured sexual practices considered perverse in the US.

Prime-time television programming – especially comedy/variety – was remarkably different regarding sexuality, in ways that could provide hours of anecdotal material.

So the list of topic examples in the story about the Mainichi reformation is not that surprising if you have lived in Japan.

(Note: although prolonged exposure to Japanese pop culture impressed me that our cultures may share fewer values than one might have assumed before living there, I emphasize that we unquestionably share a common humanity worthy of mutual honor and respect. We just can’t expect to look at other, usually older, cultures and expect to see a mirror image of our own.)

A final observation: our local Nebraska paper is currently running a long, ongoing front-page series on sensational (and solved) murder cases of the last fifty years in the state… Now that’s American.

The primary difference – in what is after all the universally profitable media exploitation of sensational topics – is that until now the Japanese press operated in a cultural context that allowed them to be more explicit about sexual content.

They were trying to be a legit news outlet?