Summary

To the Western mind, the Japanese attitude toward sex can seem bizarrely structured, at once puritanical and remarkably frank. This book is an attempt to shed light on the apparent paradoxes of Japanese sexuality and their precedents.

Japanese erotic horizons are unclouded by notions of sin; moreover, despite the demographic decline common to most industrial societies, the Japanese obviously continue to beget more Japanese. In the process, they face the universal dilemmas between procreative urges and love, between the pleasure principle and propriety.

In a land where many marriages are still arranged and a woman's place is most definitely in the home, 'love hotels' dot the landscape and late-night TV is notoriously unchaste. Censorship is seemingly perverse: pubic hair may not be shown or depicted, yet extraordinarily violent erotic comics featuring gang rape and mutilation are openly read on the trains. In this hyper-modern country, ancient Shinto fertility festivals survive, yet modern sex education lags sorely behind.

A uniquely Japanese culture of machismo sees sex as vaguely sissifying, yet there is a national cult for mawkish young female singing stars. Homosexuality has a long, venerable history of tolerance, but an office worker—gay or not—may forgo promotion if he does not marry. These are just some of the paradoxes explored in this provocative book.