Ten years is rather old for a blog, especially one that happened by accident. While I was aware of anime and watched it on Toonami, I didn’t have a desire to write about it, nor did I have a desire to study Japanese culture and history. Japan was cool, sure, but not my jam. My…
Author: Chris Kincaid
Looking Back at 2020
It’s time again for my personally indulgent look back on the past year. This is a part of a double post to mark JP’s 10th birthday. Many people describe 2020 as a dumpster fire. It has been a year of self-inflicted wounds, a year that made me realize introverts truly are the minority. Otherwise, the…
Yuki, The Snow Woman
In a village of Musashi Province, there lived two woodcutters: Mosaku and Minokichi. At the time of which I am speaking, Mosaku was an old man; and Minokichi, his apprentice, was a lad of eighteen years. Every day they went together to a forest situated about five miles from their village. On the way to…
Prostitution in Japan: Soaplands, Slavery, and Family Obligation
Japan’s sex industry exists because of the narrow definition of prostitution found in the 1956 law that ended licensed prostitution in Japan. Namely, the law defines sex as penile-vaginal intercourse which allows the legal offering of most other sexual services (Koch, 2016). In turn, the existence of the sex industry encourages human trafficking of children…
Slavery and Japan
Japan, like nearly all nations. has a history of slavery. Many Western historians in the past believed the concept of freedom was imported to Japan from the West. This misplaced, Western-centric view states the West wrestled with its heritage of slavery and awoke to human rights and freedom before showing the rest of the world….
Considering Violent Media and Killing
People have a built-in resistance to killing, but this resistance can be overcome through various methods. During World War II, only 15-20% of American riflemen fired at the enemy. This included men faced with Japanese banzai charges and other situations. Most people would rather die than kill someone else (Grossman, 1995). People often bluster about…