Today I was trying to figure out the connection between America's maladroit manga reading shut-ins & the Japanese "Lolita Complex", or quite simply and again needlessly simple, lolicon (much like the clipped phrasing of sexual harassment into simply, seku-hara)...

I'm not "researching" the matter say, like Pete Townsend (seriously--- Pete Townsend has a blog!?? That's another article entirely, but how UN-ROCK & ROLL is that???)

So, I'm wondering why, just why, so many American j-pop, manga, anime, self-proclaimed "Japanese culture" nerds seem to rely on Japanese purported endorsement of perversion to excuse their obsessive behavior as simply, "Well, when NOT in Rome...".

I ran into this site, simply googling the words "Japan America lolita condition". Within the first paragraph, it has this specious logic to offer:

The newest category of manga to hit the U.S. is Gothic Lolita, an aesthetic sensibility that has roots in Japanese punk style.

Okay... First off, wrong. I'm sorry to break your Gwen Stefani bubble, but although there are undoubtedly a segment of Japanese "punks"--- you can pick them out by the fact that they look as unkempt as their stateside brethren, the girls who dress up (on weekends mind you), down in Harajuku are not one of them. Secondly, gothic-lolita, and the rest of the cookie-cutter fashion styles of Harajuku-etc etc, don't have the same sexual connotations that people laud them with--- Basically, the scene is a group of highschoolers hell bent on waylaying the hell that is professional life in Japan (in a way, can you blame them)...

I'm not going to discuss the whole idea of of style over substance, Marxy over at Neomarxisme has a great blog that often covers just that--- It is in fact, the biggest threat I have to learning to read CyZo on my own. However, starting a sentence with a preposition, a lot of what people use as their excuse to write long lecherous diatribes about the goings on of the 11-18 year old Hello Project pervert magnet bands like Berryz, & to a much greater extent, Morning Musume (simply momusu to its fanbase), are simply their own preconceived ideas, fantasies, & unhealthy desires.

Try to tell people that older men chasing after uniformed school-girls isn't some sort of hallowed Japanese tradition (at least not an encouraged one), and they'll fire back at you stateside that you simply "don't understand Japan's culture of kawaii"... As if in one fell stroke, Hello Kitty, Panda Z & Jagainu-Kun tacitly endorsed pedophilia. It's the same logic idiotic people use against rape victims.

To give you some idea of the bullshit logic the work-a-day "Anime Fags" are operating on, for starters, being an "Adult" Morning Musume fan in Japan is equivalent to admitting that you still wet the bed & comfort yourself by sleeping with a lifesized Sailor Moon doll (anyone who saw the recent otaku-mentary on Akihabara on television lately won't find this statement far-fetched). Case in point, that maybe as an adult you shouldn't be collecting Kaws or Kubricks figures, maybe you shouldn't be listening to music that was made for 13-16 year old Japanese girls, maybe you shouldn't be watching shoujo anime, or scratch that--- ANY serialized anime... Do adults do these sorts of things? Apparently, kawaii-culture trumps all, and it's a green light to act like the type of people who show up later in the pages of MSN Mainichi [ed: Updated 01/02/2006] as the bizarre manga-collecting obsessed shut-ins who happened to have also been accused of murder.

But then, nobody ever makes THAT connection. Kuo-Yu Liang, v-p, sales and marketing at Diamond Book Distributors (a business operating in the United States), has this pithy quote to surmise the popularity of the gothic-lolitas state-side,

In the U.S we just don't have a sanctioned national obsession with young girls.

Orly? What a fucking nonce.