Non-professional, consentual-sexual relations are concealed from public view but allusions to them are not. Valentine's Day is a unique event in Japan when girls and women give a boy or man they are attracted to chocolates and a note expressing their interest (female subordinates are also expected to give their superiors sweets on this day). Exactly one month later, on March 14th, the boys or men are expected to answer with sweets in kind and a note responding to the female's inquiry though the Valentine's Day note is sometimes ignored.
Japanese attitudes towards sex are no doubt confusing to Americans. I was surprised when I went to Japan to see how popular it was for high school and college girls to wear very short skirts. Sayaka told me that schools usually regulate the length of skirts and they are suppose to be down to the top of the knee or lower. Teenage female students roll up the top of the skirt to show off their legs because they know the boys will be attracted. When I told her that women that show off so much of their legs in America are often considered to be sexually loose and preyed upon by American men, she said that this wasn't at all the case in Japan. Japanese boys or men may look, but even this is done subtly. It would be very unusual to see a Japanese couple holding hands, hugging, or kissing in public, but this puritanical approach to public displays of intimacy belie other aspects of Japanese attitudes towards sex.
The Japanese high school and college version of spinthebottle or truthordare is called the osama game (the king game). In this game where at least four people play, we'll use Sayaka's example of six people, enough chopsticks are gathered so that each person will have one. The chopsticks are numbered from one to five, and the sixth one has a crown written on it to represent the king. Then everyone in the game secretly chooses a chopstick and the person who chooses the crown chooses two numbers without knowing who is holding which number. The king then orders the two numbers to kiss eachother. If two boys are called they cry out their dissatisfaction, but must kiss eachother. So it goes if two women are called on, but everyone agrees that it is the person from the opposite sex they are hoping to kiss and the boys will not hide their pleasure when this is the case although the girls may. When I asked if the boys told to kiss eachother would just say "no," she said that they would do it even if they didn't want to because it was just for fun. This game is often introduced after a party has gone on for some time and a bit of drinking has already started. Sometimes this game may be used to bring the couples of a double-date closer together. Kissing is the general point of the game, but passing ice cubes or candy from one person's mouth to the other is also an option for the crown. When I asked Sayaka if anything heavier is added to the game she said that sometimes the crown may tell the two to hold eachother, as in hugging. When I told Sayaka that this did not seem to heavy, and that it is common place for Americans of the opposite sex or two women, to hug eachother if they haven't seen eachother in awhile, she told me that this is quite unusual in Japan and was much more embarrassing to a Japanese person than kissing. Sayaka explained participants of the osama game are often quite drunk when they play the game and so they forget what occurred the previous night. When one participant encounters another at school the following day the meeting is embarrassing for both of them.
I have read about Japanese women being groped or fondled by sarariimen (salary-men) on crowded commuter trains*. I have also ridden on these trains, but never noticed this sort of activity despite the high profile it is given in the Western media so I asked Sayaka about it. She explained that a man had grabbed her ass once while she was on a train. When it happened she looked round her with a disdainful face, but could not discover the perpetrator and moved to another car on the train. When I asked her if she had discovered which man grabbed her, would she have yelled at him she answered, "Probably not." She explained that the humiliation the man would have experienced in a crowded train would have been too severe a punishment for what he had done. On another occasion she had walked to within a couple of dozen steps from her house when she heard a motorcycle stop behind her. She thought it might be her cousin whom she lived with, and turned around, but it was a stranger. The motorcyclists got off his bike without removing his helmet, stepped forward and slid his hand down her shirt to grabbed her breast then he ran back to his motorcycle and left. She tried to scream, but the shock kept any sound from escaping her mouth. When I asked her if any of her friends had had a stranger touch them in a sexual way on a train she replied that they all have experienced this sort of abuse at one time or another. Then she added that men, on two different occasions, had exposed themselves to her from their cars when she was between the ages of seventeen and nineteen.
[*From an article appearing in the New York Times ("'Threatened by Older Women, Tokyo Men Chase Schoolgirls," by Nicholas D. Kristof, April 2, 1997): "Groping of teen-age girls on crowded subways is very common in Japan - 69 percent of high-school girls said in a recent poll that they had been abused in that way - but most other crimes are much rarer in Japan than in other industrialized countries."]
Love motels, where couples and businessmen can rent a room for an hour or two for sexual relations; hostess bars, where sarariimen get inebriated and use sexually charged language, or fondle hostesses; striptease shows; and soapland, various massage oriented sex parlors are frequent sights in certain areas of Japanese cities. I asked Sayaka to translate some small sex ads (about 1 1/2 x 1 1/2 inches) I found in telephone stalls and on telephone poles in Japan. Sarariimen are enticed with phrases in these ads like: "immature female college students", "nursing students", "office lady", "21, 22, 23 years old, young girls", "fresh girls", and/or "wife"; "variety menu", "please sit down on her lap", "twice o.k.", "blowjob, 69 o.k".; "'F' cup"3, "glamorous", "body conscious" [tight-fitting clothes] and "patent leather"; and "80 minutes for ¥20,000", "120 minutes for ¥30,000". Sayaka told me that school girls always avoided public phones where these ads were hanging and areas where these ads were found in general. I also asked her about the large number of magazines found in Japanese stores with numerous naked girls and young women in them. We had seen men that looked as if they were soliciting people to pose for these pictures when we were at a Buddhist temple (groups of school students were visiting) and an outdoor mall. One of her friends has been approached at least three times in Osaka shopping areas by a "scout" who asked her to model. She would listen for a few minutes only for the conversation to end when he finally explained that it was modeling for nude photographs. Then I asked Sayaka if she knew anyone who had posed for any of the numerous magazines which have so many nude photographs of young women in them and what she thought of the women who posed for these magazines. She said that she knew of no one who had posed for these type of magazines and would feel contempt for anyone who did, but acknowledged that she was probably prudish by Japanese standards.
The extreme to which Japan is a male dominated society is no where more apparent than in world of the sarariiman. Office work for women is usually limited to serving coffee or making photocopies. These same women are expected to quit by the time they are in their mid- to late-twenties when in Japanese society they are expected to get married and stay at home. Extramarital affairs happen in Japanese society, but the business culture that requires men to get married by a certain age if they expect to be promoted also encourages infidelity. Sarariimen are expected to attend informal after hours entertainment sessions with co-workers and their bosses (often male-only events) at karaoke bars and hostess clubs where women are paid to encourage the men to have fun while the sarariiman's wife waits anxiously at home. Host clubs for women are rare, and the patrons at these clubs are typically hostesses rather than the wives of sarariimen. Some Japanese women may consider divorcing their husbands after learning of an extramarital affair, but the social stigma of bringing the affair out into the open is so damaging to the wife that she is unlikely to do so.
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