Semester at Sea Fall
2006 Voyage 
Explore Around a Bit
- Home
Sweet Home
- Amy DeWitt, by Amy DeWitt
- "Meandering" Comparative Migration Project
- Japan:
Large-Breasted
Migration
- Hong Kong: A Coagulation of
Migratory Beauty
- Burma: Full Length,
Feature-Film Migration
- Egypt: "Fil Mish Mish"
- Turkey: Where have all the
Muslims Gone?
- Spain: Migration is an Olive
Offer
- Open Letter
Migrational Implants
Migration
is a pair of large breasts. I opened the page of a right-bounded
PlayBoy and was stared back by a fully nude, tastefully posed,
blue-eyed double D - blonde hair flowing over tanned skin. Was
this a Playboy commonly found under the bed of an American
adolescent? Absolutely not. Rather, it was displayed on a
popular magazine rack amongst beauty magazines, mangas, and real estate
brochures on the corner of a busy Japanese street in Kobe. There
were Asian models, but only those that had wide eyes, wore
light-colored contacts, and were masked with dark shades of make-up,
comparable to their fellow Westerners paraded amongst Japanese
articles. Does the Japanese population of Playboy aficionados
desire this voluptuous image? And does this desire affect the
prerequisites for compatibility within a relationship, or is it simply
for visual pleasure?
Flipping
through the pages of this audacious literature left me with multiple
questions. I don’t have any answers to these questions, not yet;
the atmosphere did not prove welcoming for a Playboy opinion
poll. But it opened my eyes to the wider picture, framing the
city of Kobe. Advertisements commonly portrayed Western,
blue-eyed bombshells in Western influenced styles. Can the
migration of images and products affect the Japanese sex appeal?
In history, the mystical demure of the geisha with her porcelain skin
drove men wild. It is most evident in the whitening agents used
to maintain that classic ideal that Mikiko Ashikari thoroughly
discusses in her article, Urban Middle-Class Japanese Women and their
White Faces: Gender, Ideology, and Representation. Is the pale
geisha’s allure now an aspect of history that is slipping through
Japanese fingers, perhaps stomped out by a pair of large breasts and
blue eyes?
It is
just a Playboy, right? Just a magazine? It is a form of
media, media that gets swallowed up and regurgitated by the masses,
subtly imbricated into the subconscious, shaping desire iteself.
What will this do to the Japanese woman? Will she be left
struggling to chase after a far-fetched ideal that flowed into her
culture by way of the migration of images and products? Japan
generally opens arms to new ideas and further development, but has it
unknowingly assimilated an impossible portrayal of beauty that sets
unviable standards for even our own Western women? Migration of
mediated images carried on the stealthy wings of globalization is
developing an “eye of the beholder” that wears the same foggy, tight
waisted, large breasted, curvaceous lens evident in all aspects of
media along the streets of Kobe.