Japanese Reading Report: 20 July 2025

タコピーの原罪 episode 3

I'm back home in Australia. I managed to get quite a bit of reading done on my flights home, but I was also hit with some pretty heavy jet lag after I arrived, so I ended up sort of breaking even. Ah well.

My final semester of university is coming soon. I'll be trying to maintain my goals, but there'll probably be some adjustment in the first few weeks while I try to figure out the best balance of scholarly and personal needs.

英雄伝説　空の軌跡ＦＣ

Continuing my revised playthrough of this game, I've completed the Bose chapter and started the Ruan chapter once again. Currently on the beach heading down to Ruan proper, I'm excited to finally catch up to the new content which I should come across soon.

Even though it's been a bit slow catching up this week, I think the fact that every sidequest is voiced really improves their repeatability. Hopefully new things to comment on next week.

タコピーの原罪

I watched two more episodes of this. A lot of my issues from the first episode felt like they were handled better in episodes 2 and 3. While the show is still quite depressing, the pace balanced the high and low points better than episode 1, presenting the more worrying aspects more accurately (in my opinion) from Takopi's perspective and masked by his naivety.

I think episode 3 worked really well. Azuma is introduced as a proper actor within the story. He's a shy, bookish boy with a crush on Shizuka. After following Shizuka and Marina into the woods he discovers the event that marks Takopi's titular original sin and is then convinced to help Shizuka and Takopi hide the secret and also find Shizuka's dog, Chappy. The episode also introduces Azuma's brother, Junya, and creates some context around Azuma's own struggles as a child. This episode also shows Takopi's own character development as he assumes the role of Marina and starts to feel guilty for doing so.

感じない男

I read quite a bit of this on the plane. I finished the chapter dedicated to school uniforms and started the chapter about lolicon.

The ultimate point about school uniforms was a little bit complicated and there were some points I agreed with and some where I felt it was a little bit too personalised for the author in particular. Points of agreement:

  • It doesn't really matter what the uniform looks like, the key to school uniforms in sexual media is the association with a time and place. In particular, there is a nostalgia for a prior time in the viewer's life, a longing for what could have been, and a desire for simple, raw sensations.
  • There is a connection between school uniforms and the institution of schools and associations people make with both. Particularly, the author claims that middleschool and highschool are somewhat associated with brainwashing. His main point is that it's the years of life where teachers and society shape young people in ways that make them more patriotic and hegemonic, and that feeling of "a malleable mind" follows into erotic depictions of girls in school uniforms. I think the uniformity of uniforms does plenty to evoke a sense of mind control without needing to dig deeper into the Japanese educational institution, but I broadly get what he's going for.
The main point that I found myself uncertain was his followup to the previous idea. He says that because these girls evoke a character awaiting brainwashing, he believes they are asking for the viewer to insert their own wants and needs onto them. This is apparently expressed by the male reader projecting their mind into the girl's body, adopting her youth, beauty, and sexual availability, before finding sexual gratification and moving onto the next available body. This sort of follows from his idea that modern men desire sexual experiences as depicted by women in pornography, but I guess I'm still not totally sold on that yet.

I was anticipating the chapter on lolicon because it's a topic I find very interesting, so I was a little bit disappointed to find out how he approached and defined lolicon; the men who are it and the targets of their affection. Just like the rest of the book, it primarily focuses on flesh and blood eroticism. That causes the issue of limiting this discussion to only men who find real underage people arousing, which I think misrepresents the subculture as I understand it.
To his credit, he has plenty of examples of pop culture and mass media in Japan which he describes as aspects of lolicon culture. In particular, he points at several jpop girl groups whose members are quite young but who are dressed up intentionally (perhaps) to evoke a sexual response. He sort of implies that this is an unspoken market of such groups.

I'm not going to lie, I've been trying to find some scholarly explanation for lolicon culture in Japan for a long time, and I was hoping this might touch on it in an interesting way, but I'm a little bit disappointed by the scope the author has drawn a line around. I'm not at the end of the chapter so maybe it will elaborate in ways that interest me. Time will tell.