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Remember that classic thread : Japanese mothers having sex with their sons
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Japan began to move beyond the infanticidal mode of childrearing at least two centuries ago.(146) Therefore, reliable accounts of traditional Japanese childhood sexual life are harder to find. Furthermore, there is currently such a taboo on talking about sexual molestation of children that current official figures report only a few hundred cases per year in all of Japan.(147) Although some recent visitors to Japan, witnessing almost everyone reading soft-core pornographic comics (manga) that feature young girls "being accosted, surprised, tied up, beaten, knifed [and] tortured,(14 wonder whether the very low official child abuse figures reported are accurate, personal letters I have written to an-thropologists, educators, psychoanalysts and others specializing in Japanese psychology have brought nothing but denial that sexual molestation exists in substantial numbers of families in Japan today.
Ancient Japan resembled both India and China in having institutionalized Greek-style pederasty of boys - by priests as well as warriors - temple prostitution of both boys and girls, and widespread child prostitution, including the ancient geisha system.(149) Japanese brothels would start girls in sexual service at S to 7 years old.(150) Pederasty (shudo) by the aristocracy and priesthood is well documented since at least the 14th century, with young boys given by their parents to be used anally by samurais and by priests in monasteries - the buggered boys sometimes having been worshipped as gods incarnate in religious cults similar to those of the cult of the Virgin in the West.(151)
One of the most endogenous societies in the world, Japan has approved of incestuous marriages in court circles even in historical times.(152) Preferred sibling, cousin, uncle-niece and aunt-nephew marriages have been so extensive that genetics experts have discovered that the inbreeding has affected their size and health.(153) How often this incestuous marriage system occurred in traditional Japan is still largely unexplored. One indication of what is likely to be found is a 1959 study by Kubo showing that there were still rural areas in Japan where fathers married their daughters when the mother had died or was incapacitated, "in accordance with feudal family traditions.(154) Kubo concluded that incest was considered "praiseworthy conduct" in many traditional rural families. In the 36 incest cases he studied in Hiroshima, he found that there was often community moral disapproval of the families who lived in open incestuous marriages, but that the participants themselves did not think of it as immoral. In fact, when the father was unavailable to head the family, his son often took over his role and had sex with his sister in order "to end confusion in the order of the home." Other members of the family accepted this incest as normal.
In traditional Japan, quite young girls were introduced into sex by older boys who visited their bedrooms at night with the complicity of the girl's parents (called night-prowling, yobai). The boys "assembled in communal huts and instructed slightly younger village males in sex approaches and techniques..." Although they recommended "gentle persuasion,"(155) there was no guarantee that all was so gentle in fact, since the parents "looked the other way" in accordance with custom while the older boys had intercourse with their young daughters.
Western observers even today often notice that Japanese mothers still *beep* their young children during the day in public and at night in the family bed - in order, they say, "to put them to sleep."(156) The average Japanese today sleeps with his or her children until the children are ten or fifteen years old,"(157) - one recent Japanese study found daughters still sleeping with their fathers over 20 percent of the time even after age sixteen.(15 Even when the home contains a dozen rooms or more, parents and grandparents feel "lonely" if they sleep apart from
the children in the family, and therefore go to bed with some child every night (the mean age in one study of children sleeping alone is 12.7 years).(159) Since so many families still practice what is termed dakine co-sleeping - with the parent or grandparent sleeping while physically embracing the child, a practice said to be beneficial to the health of the adult"(160) - and since most Japanese parents still regularly have sexual in-tercourse while the child is in bed with them,(161) one wonders how scholars can continue to maintain that nothing sexual usually happens to the Japanese child in the family bed, particularly since none have yet ask-ed the children themselves about their sexual experiences.
This stone wall on information about incest in Japan has been breach-ed somewhat by four recent studies. The first is a Japanese feminist sex survey modeled on those of Shere Hite that reported one-third of the respondents having memories of being sexually abused by relatives or close friends as children, a figure considerably higher than comparable American questionnaire studies.(162) Secondly, other studies show that the majority of urban parents in 1981 reported that they had lately begun to be bothered by the thought that children with whom they slept might be aware of their intercourse - a growing guilt about incestuous activities that was increasingly common in the West in early modern times and which led for the first time to separate beds for children.(163)
Thirdly, two recent books on Japanese incest provide new insights into the subject. The first is a report of a "hotline" set up in Tokyo by a counseling service, which analyzed the hundreds of calls they received dealing with incest.(164) Since official Japanese statistics deny the occurrence of incest, they were surprised to find that their hotline was flooded with such calls. One of their major findings is that, in addition to the usual father-daughter and sibling incest found in the West, 29 percent of the Japanese calls complained about mother - son incest. This is an extremely high proportion compared to other countries, but about what could be expected considering the common frequency with which Japanese mothers sleep alone with their sons while the father is out having sex with other women - extramarital sex still being the rule for most married men in Japan.(165)
The most commonly reported incest occurs when the mother sees her son masturbate as a teenager and tells him, "It's not good to do it alone. Your IQ becomes lower. I will help you," or "You cannot study if you cannot have sex. You may use my body," or "I don't want you to get into trouble with a girl. Have sex with me instead."(166) The researchers found that Japanese mothers and sons often sleep in the same bed and have sex together, although the exact incidence in the population was not investigated. According to the phone interviews, Japanese mothers teach their sons how to masturbate helping them to achieve first ejaculation in much the same manner as they earlier helped them with toilet training.(167) Most of the sons had no sexual experience with another woman, and became jealous of the mothers' having sex with their fathers, feeling they should have the right to monopolize the mothers - perhaps helping explain why one informant told a family planning expert: "We have no Oedipal problems in Japan - there's no competition from the father.(16 Mother recent Japanese book, based on one hundred incest reports, confirms these observations, including the unusually high rate of mother - son incest, although it, too, provides no way to determine true national incidence rates.(169)
Finally, a recent psychohistoncal study of Japanese childhood by Kitahara (170) provides a number of new details about Japanese incest, in-cluding the acceptance of sibling incest in early historic times, the routine acceptance of pederasty up until recently, the wide extent even today of co-sleeping and co-bathing, and the degree to which incest depends on co-sleeping patterns and upon the very limited contact fathers have with their families.
The Universality of incest
Lloyd DeMause
The Journal of Psychohistory, Fall 1991, Vol. 19, No. 2
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