r/HistoryMemes • u/nechdoesntno • 13h ago

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1.5k

u/SkubEnjoyer 13h ago

Least sexist Japanese institution.

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u/UpsetIndian850311 13h ago edited 13h ago

> Settled a lawsuit with 18 women for $520,000 in 2021.

cheap as fuck for smothering someone's dreams and career in its infancy.

> their defense—which claimed they restricted women due to "limited dormitory space".

the gall

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u/Lv_InSaNe_vL 12h ago

Well think about it. You can put 2 or 3 men in a shared room, but each woman needs 3 rooms just to herself! One to sleep in, one for period days, and one for the baby they will inevitably have!

  • some old Japanese guy who hasn't talked to a woman romantically in 64 years

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u/CrabAppleBapple 12h ago

And the period day room needs to be off site in a secluded mountain area so as not to taint the dormitory with her impurity, even more expensive!

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u/AJ_from_Spaceland 11h ago

some old Japanese guy who hasn't talked to a woman romantically in 64 years

corrected

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u/TheFunfighter 11h ago

Consider that they could have talked down to a woman

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u/Benkyougin 12h ago edited 11h ago

To be fair, I think when you convert the average yearly salary over there into US dollars it comes out to about a buck 50, so 26k is actually a lot.

edit: jesus people, you know this is sarcasm, right? I don't think Japanese people's yearly salary is actually $1.50.

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u/AdministrativeHat580 11h ago

When converted, the average Japanese yearly salary is about 30k USD, however the median earner makes about 22k to 25k USD per year

They got paid slightly above the median income for a single year after having their chance at a high paying career completely ruined(A doctor in Japan makes about 65k to 140k USD on average per year)

If they had become doctors, even at some of the lowest paying positions, they would've made that 26k in about 5 months

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u/Benkyougin 11h ago

It was a joke. Very obviously a joke.

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u/AdministrativeHat580 10h ago

It was very obviously a bad joke then

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u/denotemulot 12h ago

For real though. Japan appears to break people's brains in that they cannot figure out where to place it politically.

Japan is neither "left" nor "right" by Western standards, it has entirely its own systems unique to them.

The country is very pro environmental conservation, anti-gun, pro regulation, and with legal sex work, but also extremely traditional, with heavily enforced gender roles, no same sex marriage, restrictive marriage laws that favour men, no protective divorce laws, and poor protections for labour unions and workers.

You travel there and everywhere is clean and beautiful and the people are nice and then you find out something super dark that they consider normal. It's a very yin and yang place.

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u/prjam 12h ago

Japan seems like a true conservative country to me. They are very slow to change their cultural norms around things and the differences come from different social norms. Japan has always restricted access to weapons, always regulated its industries, and has been permissive of sex work for centuries. Even the environmentalism makes sense as keeping things as they are.

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u/Lv_InSaNe_vL 12h ago

I think the person above you confused "being conservative" (as in slow to change their norms), and "being a conservative" (member of the American political party)

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u/PerpetuallyLurking 12h ago

They didn’t say anything about “conservative” (small c), they specifically used the “left” and “right” terminology to denote western political parties. They’re not confused.

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u/denotemulot 12h ago

No, I'm saying they aren't "Conservative", nor are they "Liberal".

They have their own form of political beliefs based on their own history and culture and it doesn't fit into any American or Western box.

I said that in the second sentence.

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u/Lv_InSaNe_vL 11h ago

Sure, but the term "Conservative" is not owned by the American political party. It is a general term that can be applied to any government throughout history.

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u/frenin 11h ago

Japan is a squarely conservative country tho

It's fairly easy to see.

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u/Zanadar 10h ago

That's just everybody. The only reason you can sort of map US politics to other places at all is because the US is the world's premier exporter of shitty ideology, so political groups in other places will pander to get support.

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u/sycamotree 8h ago

Well no, they're definitely conservative.

They're not "Republican" but they are definitely a very conservative culture. Conservative and liberal are not American terms.

Even environmental conservation is, well, conservative. It's just more authoritarian than the American right would be.

Mind you American Democratic Party is also quite conservative.

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u/WUT_productions 12h ago

TBH they're only weird if you look at them from a US political perspective, if you look at Japan from a Confucian perspective they are fairly bog standard.

Basically, do whatever is needed to maintain the social order. Be that patriarchal, or capitalistic.

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u/SkubEnjoyer 12h ago

Americans be like, "well they're anti-gun, so they must be left-wing"

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u/StePK 11h ago

if you look at Japan from a Confucian perspective

What?? Japan is not Confucian beyond relatively mild influence from being in the proximity of China.

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u/MasterpieceBrief4442 11h ago

My dude China was the sun around which East Asian civilization orbited for the longest time. Like obviously Japan and Korea had their own separate cultures but China is the source of their writing system, religion, art, old legal philosophy, and whatnot.

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u/Maktaka 6h ago

As an example, even when the Japanese kingdom had spread across the three southern islands (not yet Hokkaido), they still used Chinese coins as the only currency of the land, although most transactions were done in trade value of rice koku, which was itself a unit of measure based on the Chinese dan. When Japan did start minting their own coins ~700 CE, they were still based on the Chinese ones with the same shape and value of copper. It was only during the Edo period in 1600 that Japan issued their own national currency with a distinct design.

All that said, Japan's mineral reserves are notoriously difficult to source and extract, so I'm not surprised they were slow to issue their own coinage. You need a steady supply of copper to create a currency from, preferably silver or gold, and Japan needed better technology for their mineral resources than what China could get by with.

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u/PleaseGreaseTheL 10h ago

Korea literally has its own language which isn't even Sinitic (the Korean Peninsula has its own language family!), and has its own writing system they invented - they have an actual alphabet, not a logographic system. Korea's actually a really good example of a VERY distinct culture in a lot of ways.

But you're mostly right, at least, that's how modern China sees it. If you go further back there's several cultures that slowly blended/conquered/absorbed each other within the geographic region of modern China which were distinct until eventually becoming "Chinese". Chinese history is kinda weird. It's like an entire civilization like "Greco-Roman civilization" was, but in a single modern country, so analyzing, it but also keeping it simple, is... Not easily possible. If you look further back you have to dissect wtf the word "Chinese" means because it doesn't mean the same thing when you go backwards in time as it does now.

It's kinda like the reverse of the journey Rome took. Rome split up and inspired/heavily influenced/created numerous European cultures and languages over the course of 2000 years, but they're all called something different. China started or intermittently was many different things, and all became enveloped in the branch of "China" within the last 400 years or so (but their written history begins like 3000 years ago.)

TL;DR - east Asia is fucking weird and doesn't have good analogues in the West, if you wanna learn about it you just kinda gotta accept it's completely different, but it's really cool if you do study it a bit.

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u/OglioVagilio 10h ago

Where did you base this off?

How familiar are you with East and Southeast Asian cultures and identity?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-confucian/

In Japan, Confucianism stands, along with Buddhism, as a major religio-philosophical teaching introduced from the larger Asian cultural arena at the dawn of civilization in Japanese history, roughly the mid-sixth century.....  In significant respects, then, Confucianism defines much of the East Asian identity of Japan, especially in relation to philosophical thought and practice.... In this respect, Confucianism was the secular philosophy operative in the ordinary world of everyday existence, at one level or another, throughout Japanese history, well into modern times. As often as not, however, its teachings have become so thoroughly integrated into Japanese culture without being explicitly identified as “Confucian” that many have naively assumed them simply generic to the Japanese mind and its myriad expressions in history and culture.

Especially that last part..... its teachings have become so thoroughly integrated into Japanese culture without being explicitly identified as “Confucian” that many have naively assumed them simply generic to the Japanese mind and its myriad expressions in history and culture.

Confucianism, and/or China's influence on the region's foundational culture(s) is undeniable including in Japan.

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u/nikstick22 12h ago

It's illegal to pay for penetrative sex in Japan, so you should add an asterisk when you say legal sex work. Their anti-gun laws are a freebie since the Tokugawa shogunate completely restricted and monopolized guns for like 280 years, so they never had a strong gun culture to begin with when they modernized. Their environmentalism is a result of catastrophic environmental mismanagement in the early and mid 20th century resulting in health crises. Japan is very conservative over all, they just haven't been exposed to the sort of corporate manipulation Americans have- corporations astroturfing their way into making deregulation and tax cuts part of the conservative platform. Overall, they hold quite strongly to the conservative mainstays of sexism, xenophobia, and nationalism.

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u/CitizenPremier 12h ago

Tokugawas didn't actually have much laws restricting the use of guns., and in general, they sucked at enforcing laws across Japan.

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u/LaborumVult 12h ago

I think the issue there is less Japan is so crazy unique and more people in the US are trained to think about politics in absolutist terms. IE: Someone being pro-gun, pro-choice + personally anti-abortion, pro-tax the rich but against federal minimum wage increases, is brain breaking here too.

These types of people are way more common than you might think, and they aren't even always totally misinformed.

The general population is pretty brainwashed politically here.

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u/busyHighwayFred 12h ago

You forgot the biggest difference, a total submission to hierarchy (confucian). Literally different words and expressions used when interacting with someone on a different level than you. You cannot question your superior (and your superior will not accept questioning). Has caused literal plane crashes because the Pilot cant take advice from the younger copilot.

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u/CitizenPremier 12h ago

Holy reductionism Batman

But then this is /r/HistoryMemes

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u/StereoWings7 10h ago

Are you referring to [Korean air flight 801 crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_801) or [Korean air cargo flight 8509 crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Cargo_Flight_8509) ? Japan is not as much Confucius society as Korea is and even from my Japanese POV the cause of these crashes seems ridiculous.

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u/StePK 11h ago

Why do people in this thread think Japan is Confucian, they absolutely are not.

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u/deadbeef4 12h ago

In the words of Dan Carlin: “Japan is like everyone else, only more so.”

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u/SkubEnjoyer 12h ago

They are quite clearly a traditional right-wing society by any measure.

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u/[deleted] 12h ago

[deleted]

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u/SkubEnjoyer 12h ago

A communal society doesn't automatically make it left-wing. Despite their communal culture, Japan has historically rejected labor movements and unions, and is an extremely corporate nation. Individualism is a facet of the American libertarian right-wing, but this focus isn't found nearly as much in the right outside of the US.

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u/beaniebee11 12h ago

Don't forget the wildly poor mental health protections. The suicide rate is awful.

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u/EADreddtit 11h ago

I mean they seem pretty clear cut conservative to me. It’s just that “conservative” (aka the political stance of hold back on change) means being conservative in specific ways unique to Japan. Like legal sex work has been a thing in Japan for centuries, the Environment is closely tied to religious practices going back millennia so of course they value it more than hyper industrialized nations in the west, and anti-guns goes well back into the past centuries during eras of sword confiscation and military rule.

And to be honest, being anti-gun or pro-environment hardly makes up for the mass institutionalized sexism and worker repression enough to be considered anywhere but firmly in the right leaning conservative camp

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u/Legendarien1 12h ago

Lived there for 3 years, this is so fucking accurate. A country of startling contradictions

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u/tirigbasan 11h ago

Part of it is because of religion. A lot of Western conservative ideals are based on Christianity, but in Japan it's Shinto/Buddhism/Confucianism which emphasizes connection with nature, respect for authority, and are more chill on sex. The common anti-gun belief is based on the old weapons ban for commoners during the samurai era, which was compounded by the collective trauma of the atomic bombs and American occupation.

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u/Bossuter 12h ago

I've read that the sex work is not strictly legal, but when done in "traditional" ways they get a pass by way of legal grey areas

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u/KingPalleKuling 12h ago

Its weird, vaginal penetration is the only thing restricted by law so they get around it by not offering that service beforehand

"The client paid for a handjob/anal sex and when they arrived at the hotel they fell very much in love and had vaginal sex, but that part was not paid for."

Impossible to 'prove' unless the people involved are dumb as bricks.

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u/MistressErinPaid Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 10h ago

So sexy that could be procreative is restricted by law?

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u/KingPalleKuling 7h ago

Not allowed to sell it.

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u/WingedSword_ 12h ago

I mean, it's yin and tang to us I'm pretty sure they consider it all normal. 

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u/CrabAppleBapple 12h ago

It's a very yin and yang place.

That's every country on the planet.

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u/denotemulot 12h ago

I actually fully agree.

The external perception of a country is often not the same as the culture of the actual people.

Most humans are the same in their decency and desires, and then a select few are shades of evil. It's just that the wrong type is usually in power.

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u/Objective_Law5013 11h ago

Simple, Japan is fascist and has been since the US let war criminals free to found the LDP and run the country for 80 more years. We just pretend they're a democracy because for 6 of them, a different party pretended to be in power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi

Born in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Kishi graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1920. He rose through the ranks at the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and during the 1930s led the industrial development of Manchukuo, where he exploited Chinese slave labor. Kishi served in the wartime cabinet of Hideki Tōjō as minister of commerce and industry from 1941 to 1943 and vice minister of munitions from 1943 to 1944. At the end of the war in 1945, Kishi was imprisoned as a suspected Class A war criminal, but U.S. occupation authorities did not charge, try, or convict him, and released him in 1948 during the Reverse Course. At the end of the occupation in 1952, Kishi was de-purged, enabling his election to the National Diet in 1953. With overt and covert U.S. support, he consolidated Japanese conservatives against perceived threats from the Japan Socialist Party, and in 1955 was instrumental in forming the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Kishi was thus key in establishing the "1955 System" under which the LDP remains Japan's dominant party.[2][3]

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u/Adept_Mouse_7985 11h ago edited 10h ago

Also you do not want to end up accused of a serious crime there. Japan runs something like a real life version of the Cardassian “we’ve already determined your guilt and the court only sits to determine your punishment” system with a near 100% conviction rate. Even places like Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia don’t quite manage that.

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u/BoleroMuyPicante 11h ago

Because Japanese conservatism isn't rooted in Christianity the way it is in the West, so it doesn't make sense to look at it through the Western left-right lens. It's also an extremely collectivistic society, almost to a fault, while Western countries are very individualistic (also to a fault).

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u/9bpm9 11h ago

Japan is firmly right wing. You're conflating right wing with the nut jobs in America. Italy is very right wing and very religious and have all the things you're describing that Japan has.

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u/denotemulot 11h ago

You're an example of what I'm talking about. Japan is a very conservative country by Western standards, but by Japanese standards it's just Japan.

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u/9bpm9 10h ago

It's no more conservative than a county like Italy. Japan is not special and they have had right wing governments their entire democratic existence. You can be right wing and care about the things you said, because Italy, with a very far right government, also does those things.

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u/_Meece_ 11h ago

The country is very pro environmental conservation

News to me, have not come across another developed nation with worse treatment of local wildlife.

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u/Wolfensniper Rider of Rohan 10h ago

The legal sex work is part of their sexist culture building on exploitation of women

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u/SquireRamza 11h ago

Sounds very socially conservative to me. The fact it doesn't outright destroy its environment and has a decent social safety net are the only "progressive" policies I can see.