Japanese Women and Boyz Laabu

Thanks for that recommendation -- it sounds fascinating and I plan to dive into it. I note that the author, Atsuko Asano, is a woman - I followed the wikipediea link. Provides yet one more piece of (admittedly anecdotal) evidence that somehow Japanese women "get it" -- or at least some of them do, certainly more so than their sisters elsewhere. I wonder why this is. Is it because the demise of a pederasty-soaked culture happened so much more recently than it did elsewhere and thus the cultural memory is so much stronger? (I've been told that the demise is even more recent in Iran but I've never looked into it. And if I'm not mistaken, pederasty in Iran was tolerated in the way it was in Elizabethan England or Renaissance Florence, but not celebrated and made central to the culture the way it had been in Japan from the 12th century through to the early 19th. Certainly it's been some 1700 years now here in the West since pederasty was openly institutionalized and celebrated.) And if so, why women rather than men? I suppose one could make a case that the celebrated novelist Yukio Mishima was a pederast of sorts -- he did, after all, put together his own private army of fetching youths with rightist leanings -- but he is the only recent Japanese male I can think of who made art out of pederasty. Is it because the rupture of Japanese women from the household economy that Mary Harrington spotlights in her book took place so much more quickly and more recently than it did in the West? Is there an overall sense of cultural loss that is far closer to the surface than elsewhere? Can't answer these questions -- but certainly the pederastic pole around which stories and relationships revolve lt is more strongly illuminated in works such as No. 6 than anything I am aware of elsewhere. The entire Boyz Laabu genre has been constructed around that pole -- again, though, it was originally conceived entirely by Japanese women with an overwhelmingly female audience in mind. The usual explanation: the genre permitted women to raise issues in a disguised or oblique form that were of direct concert to teenage girls (questions of identity and how to deal with male lust) but were more easily discussed -- made more palatable as it were -- when instead of a man and a girl you had a man a a boy -- the seme and the uke as it were. But I'm not entirely convinced. The underlying premise of the genre: a world in which the homosexual identity does not exist. Rather people are drawn to other people -- in this case, men being drawn to boys or younger men -- and that this does not make them "gay" or "homosexual." The ACTS may be homosexual, but the identity is not in the picture (one reason whey the genre has been condemned by Japanese gays who have swallowed the Western LGBTQ propaganda line.) I've only watched/read examples from Japan and Thailand but I've noticed that the Thai "boyz laabu" dramas I've seen seem to be much more "gay" and that the people involved in the production seem to be all men (or, in some cases, Katoey - the Thai term for what we would call transwomen). Not so the Japanese. No. 6 appears to be a case in point. What is probably the single most successful Japanese Boyz Laabu drama -- successful in the sense that it attracted a huge readership/viewership -- Cherry Magic, was, when it first appeared as a manga, written by a woman. Women were involved in every aspect of the wildly successful TV series (the first one in Japan to be made for mainstream television -- then it went viral becoming, for example, the number one TV program in Taiwan in any genre for some weeks). The story theoretically involves two thirty year old office workers, but the uke was played by the heart throb Eiji Akaso who was only 25 when the series was filmed, looked younger still, and had been one of Japan's top models when he had been in his teens. The story follows all the classic pederastic tropes -- the seme is presented almost as an ideal older male lover. (Posters who need a pre-pubescent boy to make viewing worth their while should check out Our Dining Table -- the series hints that the uke falls as much for the devilishly cute 8 year old boy as he does for his older brother who plays the seme.) Contrast that with what is probably Thailand's biggest hit: The Tale of a Thousand Stars -- true, there is an overt nod towards women absent from Cherry Magic. The uke has had a heart transplant; he follows in the footsteps of the (female) donor who had been an idealistic teacher in a poor upcountry village school and was killed in an auto crash for which the uke bears some responsibility- yeah, there are some cute boys in the 9-12 range among the students -- yet the whole series feels "gay" in the way Cherry Magic doesn't. Bad Buddy, perhaps an even bigger Thai hit, drops all pretense of being a depiction of a pederastic relationship -- not even clear which of the principals is the uke and which is the seme. It does, to its credit, preserve the Boyz Laabu conceit of a world in which people fall in love with each other without that forcing them into some category of sexual identity. (And a pretty cute boy of about 11 appears in some of the later episodes; is clearly intrigued by the relationship between the two principals.) The Thais are currently broadcasting a remake of Cherry Magic with the same plot line -- I haven't watched it but I plan to; it will be interesting to see the degree to which the story has been "gayed" up as it were. I haven't watched any of the Korean, Taiwanese, or Filipino Boyz Laabu shows; I'm curious whether they lean towards the ped or the fag end of things. Still, the whole genre raises some really fascinating issues. Thanks again for bringing my attention to No. 6. SR