Japan, after Germany, is infamous for its sadomasochistic porn industry. But consumers are fully aware of what they are getting and are free to buy it or reject it. What is perhaps more disturbing is that as a dominant theme, sadomasochism seems to permeate many of its cartoons for children, as it does with some of the country's higher literature and popular entertainment. Because this is implicit, it carries a subliminal message that is not immediately detectable and so all the more insidious. I have no idea what effects this may have on children who, according to Freud at least, are born polyamorously perverse.
I ordinarily wouldn't worry too much about this but for the fact that so many of these cartoons end up being extremely popular with local children. My own children, all under seven, have recently become addicted to the Keroro cartoon series, about a group of fun-loving frog-like aliens from outer space who come to destroy humanity and take over the planet but keep forgetting their primary mission because they have been having so much fun on Earth. Sounds pretty innocent, right? I do admit there is a certain humour to the series, until I was made to watch its latest full-length movie, Keroro vs the Army of Water. Stripped of the sci-fi animation, the story sounds a lot like John Fowles' novel The Collector.
In the cartoon movie, the villain Prince Meyl is a cute little doll-like creature from the Planet of Water who is clearly delusional and psychotic. After living alone for centuries underwater on Earth with his faithful servant Marl, he decides to kidnap Natsumi, the teenage girl who befriends Keroro and his gang, and makes her his bride. He imprisons the gang, and makes Natsumi wear flimsy, revealing clothes. He recreates, from her memory, her hometown in virtual reality to make her less homesick, except it has no people in it. He suffers migraines, memory lapses and an extreme lack of social skills. Natsumi takes pity on him and develops sympathy, if not love, for him. Instead of being doll-sized, he reaches adult size when he is ready to wed Natsumi. The physical transformation - or is it a metaphor? - is none too subtle.
If it sounds a lot like the 1999 Japanese movie The Perfect Education, that is because it is. The category-three movie became a big hit in Hong Kong. It starred popular Japanese actor Naoto Takenaka, who played a middle-aged man who kidnapped a high-school girl and made her fall in love with him. It has since spun off into a highly popular X-rated sadomasochistic movie franchise. This fantasy must be universal and archetypical with men across cultures. What men have not desired women, or other men, who are not attracted to them in real life? The more deluded ones may trap them and make their victims desire them. This is the same recurrent story in Fowles' first novel.
Published in the 1960s, it is about a lonely young man who became bored with collecting butterflies and trapped a young woman he secretly admired. He treated her nicely and, despite the sexual undercurrents in the book, she was never violated. This was, after all, before Thomas Harris and the advent of Hannibal Lecter. But there is a direct line from The Collector to The Silence of the Lambs. After his victim died, Fowles' villain decided to become a fully fledged collector of women instead. 'Buffalo Bill', the human skin collector in Harris' bestseller, was fascinated by moths.
Camille Paglia, the US literary critic and anti-feminist, argues in her provocative book Sexual Personae - which was based on her PhD thesis - that sadomasochism is a dominant theme in all western literature. Sexual mutilators dig deep into the female body to find the womb that gives birth to the enigma. I have no idea if Professor Paglia is right or not, but the same, to a great extent, can be said about much of Japanese culture. What effect all this may have on children's psyche, I am too afraid to ponder. But I will definitely discourage my children from watching any more Keroro movies.