-Jeanne

So what is it about the beautiful fourteen year old that presses Japanese buttons anyway? The idea from a western pov is next door to insane. To us, 'beautiful fourteen year old' is a contradiction in terms. No-one is beautiful at fourteen. If it isn't the nadir of masculine development, it's got to be very close. The fourteen year old boys I know are loud, obnoxious, arrogant, aggravating, desperately insecure, graceless, mannerless, and so on and so forth. A catalogue of attitudes to avoid. Like nineteen year olds, but with spots. No-one finds them sexually attractive, including fourteen-year-old girls, and people who do find them sexually attractive are rightly labelled perverts, up there with the fans of water sports and the scat aficionados. How could anything this unlovely become an erotic icon?

So I was musing one day in Tokyo, when I found myself on a train in the company of a bunch of junior high school students. And then I saw the problem. The Japanese are different from us. For one thing, where our guys start puberty somewhere around eleven, the Japanese defer it to the mid-teens. No spots here, no breaking voices: just that smooth gold skin and the liquid black eyes and the fan of silky black hair-- supposing their middle school doesn't require shaved skulls, as some unfortunately do. That's point number one. Point number two is the famous protruding nail that gets hammered down in the Japanese proverb. You aren't supposed to stick out in Japanese society. That means the individuality that's encouraged in North America is actively discouraged in Japan. I think that's what accounts for the more subdued manner of the Japanese youth, though it might just be that schools and families still teach manners over there. (And not all of them do, naturally. I had a couple of twelve year old horrors in one of my classes, whose vocabulary came straight from DragonBall and whose attitudes were modelled on some yakuza film.) 

But in general the youth have a grace and charm to them that one rarely sees over here. I remember two other students of mine, Shigetaka and Naoya, best friends who'd attended English classes together since they were six. Shigetaka, poised and friendly, had the warmth of a sunny day in spring. Naoya was morose but civil, a confirmed pessimist too polite to burden others with his dim view of the world. Shigetaka used to tease Naoya out of his dark moods, winning an unwilling smile from him with his affectionate and delicate banter. It was all very unsexual, but one could see how it might be turned into an erotic scenario. Give them a few years, change this and that, and I had the prototypes for Jan and Sabi sitting right in front of me. 

Nonetheless, I suspect that the classic Japanese bishounen isn't intended to be even remotely real, if we judge by the most (in)famous example over here, the characters of Maya Mineo. Mineo is the creator of Patarillo, in which we find the legendary red- haired Maraich, adolescent assassin and live-in lover of Major Jack Bancoran of M16. I've only read about a quarter of the Patarillo series so far, but that means 17 volumes, as many as Angel Sanctuary and Earl Caine combined. As a bishounen exemplar, Maraich is in fact unique: no other character is quite the same improbable combination of baby doll, deadly knife-wielder and middle-class hausfrau that he is. But there are any number of little bishounen in the series whom Bancoran pursues and beds with s much resemblance to real adolescents as Ban himself, with his kohl-blue eyelids and black hair to his knees, bears to yer average English official.

They're cute and sweet and giggly; they're romantic and clinging and possessive; they're all of them, to a boy, infatuated with Bancoran and dying to sleep with him. They probably think about sex as much as a real fourteen year old does (Maya got that part right) but their blushing approach and coy hands-over-the-mouth attitude isn't standard male body language in any culture.

In fact, the true oddity about them is that they seem so obviously intended to be disguised females. They act like the teenaged fans of the Beatles did in my days- all romantic fantasies and innocently horny thoughts, all giggles and squeals and fainting fits. I could see how a female mangaka would map her own experience of adolescence onto these putative adolescent males in order to produce some sort of boy-girl amalgam. (Oh, and among my Unforgettable Students was six year old Masahiro who told me, in English, what an okama is: 'He is boy girl.' Do you know any American six year olds who could tell you, in a foreign language, what a drag queen is? Think about *that* little cultural difference some time.) 

The only problem with the disguised female interpretation of the Maya bishounen is that Maya himself is male. He has no memories of female adolescence to draw on. One has to wonder what kind of adolescence he did have: vaguely picturing something Capoteish and ambisexual, perhaps, an effeminate young boy who always preferred dolls and dressups to baseball and pachinko. Or perhaps not. Fairly reliable rumour says that Maya is both gay and married- a several times father, in fact- which isn't at all unusual in Japan where marriage is still a vocation for many women and a career requirement for most men. Whatever he may have been in youth, he certainly doesn't look effeminate now. This and that about his photos suggests to me, in fact, that he's the prototype of Bancoran himself. So the question of where all those little Eddies and Bunnies and Reynards come from- the ones who still sound like the Sheilas and Annettes and Litas I went to school with- continues to be a mystery.