08/08/03 21:15:52
URLﾘﾝｸ(www.e-fccj.com)
Wai oh why?
by Gavin Blair
>Heard about the restaurant in Roppongi where bored rich Japanese who have tried everything can have carnal knowledge
>of animals before getting carnivorous with them?
>Readers of the Mainichi Daily News’ popular WaiWai Web site were treated to an account of said establishment back in
>September 2007 in a story that had been translated from a monthly men’s subculture magazine.
>The story lacked just one element: veracity. Of course, there isn’t such an eatery, and nobody with their mental faculties
>in even partial working order would believe that there was.
>There were those who firmly believed they shouldn’t have, and after angry protests by bloggers, including the ubiquitous
>“2-channeler” bloggers and an anti-Korean right-wing group, the Mainichi axed WaiWai in June. Some of those claiming
>it portrayed Japan as a nation of perverts, or even that it led to an increase in sexual assaults on Japanese women abroad,
>were undoubtedly sincere. For others, it appears to have been simply a politically motivated attack on the Mainichi.
>Links to WaiWai stories began to appear on Web sites, forums and blogs around the world, some of whose readers, judging
>by many of their responses and posts, were seemingly unable or unwilling to recognize that these stories were often nothing
>more than the product of a tabloid journo’s overactive imagination.
>No matter how much of a diet of “those wacky Japanese” stories someone has been weaned on, no matter how much of
>a Japan-hater someone may be, no matter how detached from reality someone is, could anybody truly believe that
>Japanese fisherman get oral relief from razor-toothed moray eels? Evidently, some did.