Anime, IT, and young western men
I haven’t thought about this particular group of young men for years but recent developments have brought them inevitably back into my mind.
In the 1990s, I was working for a UK Russell Group university in “student mobility”, which is how the higher education sector refers to students spending a short part of their degree at another university in another country. At that time, most of the students who went abroad from UK universities were students of modern European languages going to France, Germany or Spain. Business schools seemed to the be the first UK university departments to systematically make it possible for their students to study abroad, and other disciplines followed with more or less enthusiasm. As the university where I worked started to encourage students in departments other than Modern Languages to study abroad, and as modern languages departments started to offer languages other than the traditional French, German and Spanish, a distinct subgroup of students started to appear.
This distinct subgroup consisted of male students of Computer Science who wanted to go to Japan. Back in the 1990s, I thought this was commendable. Computer Science students, particularly the male ones, are often real shut-ins, and this desire to go to Japan seemed to me to demonstrate a desire to get out and experience the world. These men had also often shown what looked like a genuine commitment to learning Japanese, joining the Students’ Union’s Japanese society and socialising with the university’s Japanese students. The fact that our Japanese student population was almost exclusively female did, even back in the 1990s, make me feel slightly uneasy about these male students’ keenness to join the societies which would give them access to these young women. But I second-guessed myself, as women so often do about men’s behaviour, and told myself I was being unfair on this group of male students. After all, it was hardly their fault that most of our Japanese students were women.
(Sidebar: the reasons why the Japanese student community on our campus was overwhelmingly female are, of course, redolent of sexism. At that time (and it is still the case) Japanese men were expected to be the providers for their families. For a middle-class Japanese family, this means that their son will be expected by society (even if not by his own parents) to get a solid degree in a STEM subject, with no scope for messing about learning a foreign language or studying outside Japan. Japanese women are not subject to the same expectations; their higher education ambitions are allowed to be more geared towards the humanities or social sciences, and may even be regarded by their families as more like time spent at a finishing school than a serious education undertaking. Accordingly, the students who joined us for intensive language courses and a semester taking academic classes in departments were far more likely to be women than men.)
The male students who made appointments with me to discuss studying abroad in Japan were stereotypical computer science students. Nerdy, unkempt shoegazers with underdeveloped social skills. Colleagues at other UK universities also working in student mobility noticed the same trend.
I haven’t got anything clever or trenchant to say about these young men, but I wonder now how many of them were getting off on anime porn, something I was completely unaware of then; I thought anime was My Neighbour Totoro and the like. As this was the early days of the internet, these students would have been in an ideal position to be exploring its darker corners, which must have been in fully swing by the mid-1990s. How many of the apparently harmless lads graduating in Computer Science in the 1990s are now fully formed autogynephile sissyporn addicts in senior positions in working in the tech industry?