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Full-Text Articles in Japanese Studies

The Costs Of Lolicon: Japan’S Pedophilia Trade, Megan Sluzhevsky May 2022

The Costs Of Lolicon: Japan’S Pedophilia Trade, Megan Sluzhevsky

Senior Theses

This thesis investigates Japan’s normalization of pedophilia via the proliferation of popular culture and media. This analysis will begin by looking at historical examples of pedophilia, specifically focusing on chigo in Medieval Japanese Buddhism, wakashu in Edo Period pleasure quarters, and the spread of soft power diplomacy after World War II. This phenomenon will also be viewed in the modern context by discussing lolicon in Japanese media and advertising, idol culture in the Japanese music industry, the JK business, and “real” child pornography. The ways that Japan benefits from this culture economically and politically will also be investigated. Finally, this …


Dawn Of A Silver Millennium: Millenarianism, Futurity, And Utopia In Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Matthew Dentice Apr 2022

Dawn Of A Silver Millennium: Millenarianism, Futurity, And Utopia In Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Matthew Dentice

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

The story of Sailor Moon, told and retold in countless forms in the thirty years since the original manga’s publication, is imbued with a cosmic sense of time. The modern-day protagonists’ personal journeys are tightly interwoven with the distant past of the Silver Millennium and the far future of thirtieth-century Crystal Tokyo. But only the manga is fully willing to grapple with what the future means for its own present moment. Written in the early 1990s during Japan's "Lost Decade," Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon dramatizes the angst that accompanies the imminent arrival of a new millennium. As the Sailor Guardians …