Anger over Mainichi WaiWai column continues…

I’m not justifying 2chers, and I do not think they have any rights to slander women working at Mainichi.
But these slandes (28 and 46, including the “disclaimer”) are just WaiWai articles with “Japanese women” replaced to “Women working at Mainichi”, aren’t they? It’s Mainichi (WaiWai) who said “Japanese women are sexually stimulated by washlets”, so a 2cher said “According to Mainichi, women working at Mainichi (who are Japanese women) are sexually stimulated by washlets”. I’d rather call it a sarcasm (of bad taste, though).

If your Japanese is not good enough to understand the sarcasm in comment #70 of the same thread, you should probably refrain from commenting about 2 channellers.

Other comments like the ones you cited are basically the same.

“Yup. Anyway some people would interpret that as slandering, among them someone at Mainichi, I guess…”

So be it. By offending people at the Mainichi using their own articles, those 2-channelers try to make them understand how offending their articles were. Even though the Mainichi deleted all of their WaiWai columns, they have not made any corrections. Instead, taking the 2-chan comments as slanders to their female staff writers, the Mainichi is threatening 2 channelers with lawsuits, which reveals their elitism and double standard and keeps intensifying the anger toward them.

You must not spread false information like this, and you cannot make any excuses by using quotation marks unless non-negligible number of people claim so. I don’t think you really read about this at the 2 channel. Show me the link if you can.

Some people say the Mainichi has a connection with the Souka Gakkai because they print Gakkai’s Seikyo Shimbun, and others claim Daisaku Ikeda is ex-Zainichi Korean, which I don’t know if it is true.

Anyway, to the best of my knowledge, the Mainichi Shimbun is NOT owned by the Souka Gakkai.

> Are they okay with shūkanshi’s lies and outrages?

I would not call the Jitsuwa Knuckle, the Asahi Geino, and the Shukan Jitsuwa weekly magazines (shukanshi). You would never want to put these magazines on your coffee table in your family room. What’s disgusting to me is that the Mainichi and Ryan Connell intentionally chose these dirty sex magazines and dishonestly referred to these as “weekly tabloids.”

There are not many outrages because Japanese people know these magazines are pornography, their circulations were much smaller, and those underground writers do not have any privileges the Mainichi reporters enjoy as the reporters from a national newspaper.

I know. That’s exactly why the WaiWai supporters cannot understand why many Japanese people are angry about the WaiWai columns.

Sweetwater: I mean that other Japanese people call the Shukanshi. They call themselves Shukanshi. Their sales people call them Shukanshi.

What do you call them?

Ken: My point is that shukanshi is a too broad category for this specific topic. If you put Shukan Asahi and Jitsuwa Knuckle or Shukan Jitsuwa, for example, in the same category “shukanshi,” you could never understand why so many Japanese people were protesting against the Mainichi WaiWai.

Answering your question, I would probably call these magazines “teizoku-shukanshi” or “porno-zasshi.” I think Jitsuwa Knuckle and others are the magazines you would never want to read on the Yamanote line when you’re sober, although I may be wrong… You can try it if you like.

Nevertheless, if the “wacky, pervert Japan” stereotype exists, it’s not solely MDN’s fault.

It not solely their fault. And it is true there are real wacky Japanese people. And eroticism and wacky magazine are part of J culture just as any other cultures. There are also wacky magazines telling wacky things in Japan, truth or not. The Japanese know it and they know where they should be placed. You don’t dance naked on the street at noon and even if somebody said you did, few would believe it but might find the story fun, truth or not. As long as it goes, there is no problem.
But when Mainichi send such article in English without putting it into the context to the people who don’t know where to place it, especially when those people are already biased, it is misleading, and wrong.

Probably the article is worth reading for Japanese who is pervert-oriented or people who is interested in sociological tendency of pervert subculture in Japan. If put in the context, it is okay, but when put out of context, it is not.

You say you don’t care if the same thing happened to Colombia, I for one, don’t care if Mainichi put the article into the context, telling the readership these are articles translated from the magazines that you don’t put in the dentist waiting room, or public library;the articles are not the one for kids nor for sensible adults.(this happens to be criteria for the distinction between what sweetwater calls shukanshi and others, I guess)

But it is perfectly understandable many Japanese and many Colomibian people, nationalistic or not, will be angry at the media and journalists like Mainichi, especially when English media tend to over-focus on the wacky side of the country, no?
Of course I don’t endorse some of the way they protest, though.

Aki: Thank you for your blog post/survey article on the Japanese weekly magazines. It’s very informative, especially for us who are interested in the Mainichi WaiWai controversy; and I totally agree with your classification of the magazines, though I didn’t know much about the intermediate group.