She Was Seventeen
I was thinking about Saki and Yosuke again, and a massive throughline opened up throughout multiple characters that is really messed up. So, I want to talk about childhood. Here childhood is defined as literally just the time before you’re legally considered an adult, so it includes your teenage years.
But I want to talk more on its characterization. I find that childhood is conveyed as perfectly free and safe, where kids can always be themselves without issue. As a mentally and physically disabled person whose worst day of their life occurred at the ripe old age of nine, I know this is bullshit. Kids are in reality, often very vulnerable to control from the adults in their lives, which can be for the worse, and moreover, deeply susceptible to influence given from other kids (who are influenced by the adults controlling them). This is consistent from the first social interactions of the child to the end of primary education (in Japan's case high school, but whatever the highest form of education available to minors is).
A child is particularly vulnerable because [they rely] so extensively on the capacities of [their] caregivers and society to perceive and meet her or his developmental needs, including those of the physical self as well as of the psyche. While malnutrition, damage to the body, deprivation, and exploitation overtly interfere with a child’s life, it is essential to note that food, warmth, and shelter alone are not enough for a child’s survival, much less a child’s wellness. The lack of availability of an emotionally present and responsive caregiver can amount to psychological annihilation or even lead to death (Spitz, 1945; Winnicott, 1956, 1960). Furthermore, in the midst of their struggles, children are still developing their selfprotective capacities, and have far less access to internal and external resources than do adults. Only gradually can a child, if she or he is able, acquire mobility, verbal skills, physical strength, and other developmental capacities—some of the keys to adult privilege. Indeed, children have only very limited means for defending and protecting themselves, which are all the more limited the younger they are. [...] At the same time, one decisive aspect of a child’s situation is that adults maintain and exercise vast and often unrecognized power over the child, “a use of power that can go undetected… like no other” (A. Miller, 1983, p. 17). As Flasher (1978) elaborates, “[t]he extra power adults have comes from their special legal and socioeconomic responsibilities, rights, and privileges, from the generally greater physical strength of adults as compared to children, from the special abilities of adults to be nurturing, and from the need and wish of children to be nurtured by adults” (p. 517). Adults can and do, however, routinely take advantage of this very power. The magnitude of the power differential between adults and children is such that children have few safeguards against abuse of power by individuals, groups, and societal structures. It follows that adults are afforded nearly limitless possibilities in what they can do to children. For instance, governments can decide to separate immigrant children from their families. As another example, adults can impose compulsory schooling on children, wherein they can be consistently silenced, coerced into conformity, and, in numerous states and countries, hit, humiliated, paddled, and belted (Fletcher, 2013; Hecker, Hermenau, Isele, & Elbert, 2014; Langhout, 2005; Straus, 2001). Within homes, too, adults hold tremendous power. In the first years of life, in almost any way an adult chooses, a child can be “dominated, … scolded, and punished—without any repercussions for the person raising the child,” with the exception of the most extreme cases of abuse and neglect that garner legal consequences (A. Miller, 1983, p. 6). Accordingly, as Herman (1992) puts it, many children live in conditions of “domestic captivity” (p. 74). In essence, children’s struggles, disadvantages, and subordinate status, as well as adults’ position of power and privilege, though longstanding, has only recently begun to be recognized, described, and regarded as a subject of importance.
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Especially since children are often conditioned to accept societal norms that may be damaging to them, and will give into peer pressure that way due to wanting to shape their identity that way. You can see it with regard to verbal abuse of non conforming adolescents--they often have nothing done about their mistreatment, as the behavior is silently approved of in order to force them to conform.
However, bullying does not always make the bully an outcast. Verbal bullying of outcast students in the service of the norms and identity of a popular crowd is generally okay, at least in the eyes of popular crowd leaders. Some kids bully other in hopes of being accepted by a high-status crowd. It's a way of proving one buys into the norms and values of the crowd. [...] Who sets the norms? Based on these findings, cool/popular crowds establish the norms in middle school and in some small high schools. In large high schools many crowds exist, and the norms the leading crowd imposed in middle school continue to influence because they effect the sorting of students into crowds. Each crowd maintains a distinct package of norms and these influence the members' behavior. How do crowds choose norms? Norms are partially inherited from earlier generations of the crowd and partially established by the current leaders and core members. Popular crowds define school wide norms in ways that it reinforces the popularity and authority of the crowd members. If insecure students are afraid of asserting their individuality, they will evaluate themselves by what the secure, confident students consider "cool." High school crowds tend to value the abilities, resources, and personality traits that the crowd's leadership has in common. Since crowd leaders exemplify the crowd's norms, self-serving bias of the leadership works to reinforce the popularity and authority of the crowd's leadership. Individuals tend to join crowds and cliques that have similar value systems to their own, so a crowd's size depends on the popularity of the normative system and identity that it exemplifies. The views, values, and actions of the popular crowd, and its leadership represent powerful influences on the peer pressures all students endure.
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So, many children are denied freedom to explore their identities as a kid, whether intentionally or by genuine accident. Many kids are forced to mature early, treated like adults when they’re not. They are considered nocent, or guilty, for reasons outside of their control. The TV World is a great way to portray this, as it takes many shadows that resemble childhood toys, such as paper-mache kings, teddy bears, and balloons, and makes them threatening. Your teddy bear is actually trying to kill you. Something fucks me up about the Lexies and it's how apt a metaphor that is, how childhood can be a very agonizing time in a person's life due to their humanity being denied as a kid. I’m going to exemplify this through nine characters, but only some get their own sections, as they can all be categorized by the methodology of how their status as children is denied to them.
Also, the fourth section covers sexual assault. I talk about sexual abuse of kids a lot in the fourth section and in the conclusion. It’s ridiculous.
Living In The Future (Yukiko Amagi, Shu Nakajima, Kou Ichijo)
These three basically are all treated the way they are because their prescribed futures are seen as inextricable from their identities, and the way they take back agency is by being affirmed that they do not have to live inside this future, allowing them freedom in both the future and the present to shape their identities as kids.
I’m going to start with Yukiko, the wakaokami (heiress, manager in training, basically) of the Amagi Inn. It’s literally all anyone talks about around her. Every time she’s seen on the news, it’s in relation to her inn. It weighs on her psyche, considering she’s considered to have no identity outside of it by the general public.
To add to that, a lot of the boys in her school make a game out of asking her out, calling it the “Amagi Challenge.” The reason for this is related to her being an Amagi, because she is implied to be an only child. Also, everyone knows that she’s expected to marry someone so they can help her with her duties as Okami (manager). This overwhelms her, and is shown in her Midnight Channel Episode, when her Shadow, Konohana Sakuya, actually references the Amagi Challenge. This shows that the fact that she’s expected to marry someone is deeply weighing on her mind.
In short, what weighs on the mind of Yukiko the most is the future she has ahead. She is tired of being reminded of it, and is fearful that she does not have a say in the matter considering it is all anyone talks about in relation to her. Yukiko is a teenager who is still learning about herself, and is not given the opportunity because everyone just assumes they know what she is going to do.
Now to talk about Shu. Shu is a gifted middle school boy in the highly competitive sphere of the Japanese education system. He cannot afford a cram school, so he has Yu as his only tutor. Shu's mother asks Yu if he thinks that Shu could get into Tokyo University, the most prestigious university in Japan. She is firm in her belief he should be able to get there, so that he doesn't suffer.
As a result, Shu pretty consistently obsesses about grades so he can get into a good college, talking about high school and college constantly when he's just a middle schooler. The reason for this, he reveals, is because he believes it's the only way to help his mother, and the only reason he believes she loves him.
Shu in particular is interesting because he believes as a child that he has to protect his mother from the societal discrimination she faces. In this sense, he is forcibly putting himself in a more mature position than he reasonably should, since he’s fourteen. A great sentiment, but not much you can do at that point when you’re a kid on top of all the discrimination you also face for being a single parent’s kid.
As for Kou, he was explicitly adopted to become the next head of the Ichijo family. As such, his grandmother wants him to behave in a manner “proper” to an Ichijo, which means forcing his interests to align with what she likes.
This suffocates him, and makes him question if he at all deserves to be an Ichijo if he can't do what his grandmother wants. She wants to mold him into the perfect head by her standards, and considering he is failing to live up to her standards that he was literally adopted for, he questions if he deserves to be an Ichijo at all. It’s implied he believes that he HAS to search for his biological parents because it’s either become the exact mold his grandmother wants or be kicked out of the Ichijo family.
All of these three are impacted because their lives are in part dictated by their hypothetical futures. This is actually a real phenomenon that occurs, where kids’ futures are pretty much chosen and assumed for them without them feeling like they have any choice, which damages their mental health.
Parental conditioning or expectations are often associated with various adverse psychological outcomes in children and adolescents. Besides, the emotional environment of the family, including how these expectations are communicated and reinforced, greatly matters in a student's mental health outlook. Students subjected to high expectations and without adequate emotional support or autonomy are more prone to various forms of stress, anxiety, or depression in their lives. Such children may consider love and acceptance as being conditioned on achievement rather than inherent worth. According to research, adolescents who reported feeling pressured by their parents to achieve academic success are at a greater risk of developing chronic stress and, further, mental health disorders such as depression (Deng et al., 2022). The cumulative risk of this pressure eventually internalizes the fear of failure even in the best of students, who would have developed poor self-esteem and a constant feeling of unworthiness. Students do not feel motivated; a deep sense of insecurity blankets them, insisting they are never "good enough," regardless of their efforts. A longitudinal study reported that students whose parents kept high expectations and used harsh language were noticeably more likely to internalize problems such as anxiety and depression (Wang & Kenny, 2014). The induction of these psychological consequences seems to exacerbate when parental approval is perceived to depend on performance, so much so that children end up attributing their self-worth towards achievement rather than any intrinsic aspect of their self. Through time, conditional acceptance could foster emotional withdrawal between parents and children, trust breakdown, and the collapse of open communication.
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This is damaging to the child as it denies them autonomy and control, because they see two roads—the one prescribed to them, or rejection. This is the case with Yukiko, Shu, and Kou. All three of them fear being rejected by their families because they feel trapped by the future prescribed to them, because they believe it to be prescribed and the only way their family will love them. This is entirely what Yukiko's dungeon is about, the fact Yukiko is forced by the public to live in this future, and fears that her family will too and wants to get away before she knows for sure. She is frightened by the future because she believes she will be forced into one against her will. We can also see what the source shows above, how her self-esteem is critically low in part because she feels she is failing as a person.
In Kou’s case, it’s because he believes he just has no future if he doesn’t follow his grandmother’s wishes, and Shu doesn’t want to fail his mom. Shu in particular has a complicating factor of wanting his mother to stop being discriminated against for being a single parent.
I also want to point out that none of them believed they had a voice in the situation. All three luckily manage to get their voices heard, and thankfully learned that their futures were way more secure and free than any of them believed. Their parents made a mistake by not letting them know that. I think the problem here is that parents tend to assume their kids are aware they love them unconditionally, when this is not true. Especially when a parent does not manage to fight the societal pressure their child is facing, like these three suffered, then the child assumes their parents are willingly contributing to said pressure. When it more often than not is false and the parent genuinely does not want this pressure to damage their child, even if they do unintentionally contribute. The parents are just not attuned to what the kid is going through, and when they realize, they try to help. because that's what a good parent should do: listen to their children.
“My dad is always railing against me,” Sam, a boy of sixteen, shared with me when his father brought him to therapy. “In his eyes, I’m always doing something wrong. First he told me to join the hockey team. Then when I joined, he didn’t like the position I played. Next he told me to join the football team, which I did. Now he badgers me because he doesn’t think I play well enough. If it isn’t sports, it’s my homework. If it isn’t my homework, it’s my attitude. I can’t keep up with him. There’s always something I’m supposedly doing wrong.” Phil, Sam’s father, couldn’t believe his ears when he heard his son say these things. He had no idea that Sam harbored such feelings. Phil could have sworn that no one loved his son more than he did, and he felt he had sacrificed countless hours to improve Sam’s odds of becoming a success, pouring money and energy into every pursuit he thought the boy would relish. So how did all this love on the part of Phil translate to so much agony for Sam? [...] Skylar, a twelve-year-old, spent her entire first session with me in tears. “It feels as if my whole existence is about making my mother happy,” she confided. “Yet no matter what I do, it’s never enough. There’s always something more I should be doing. If I screw up in any way, she acts as if the world is coming to an end.” Skylar’s sentiments echo those of a hundred or more children I’ve interviewed and counseled. Most children feel they are on earth to live a life that matches up to their parents’ standards, in return for which they hope to receive their parents’ love. As they yell at or punish their children, parents claim, “I’m only doing this because I love you.” Our intention may be to love, but it doesn’t mean it will be received as such by our child. On the contrary, much of the time when we think we are being loving, it’s experienced by our children as control. Our ability to tune in to how our love is being received is therefore a crucial element of parenting. Understanding the difference between our intention and how it’s being received by our children is an essential element of conscious parenting. Our children have little regard for our intentions, instead tuning in to how our interactions make them feel. It’s at the feeling level that dysfunction occurs. Only when we tune in to our children at their feeling level, not our own, are we able to meet their spirit as it manifests moment by moment. For this to happen, we must step outside of ourselves and become aware.
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Yukiko’s family attempted to signal it, by helping her in literally anything she was trying to learn to do. They attempted to help her with her homework, help her cook, help her ride a motorbike.
Kou’s parents did it quietly, implied to have been the ones making Kou’s grandmother back down from her controlling behavior, and so she would give him her blessing as they recognized how important basketball was to him. Though, because they never unveiled themselves to be responsible for this, Kou assumed it was a rejection of him and not them fighting for him to keep his autonomy.
Shu’s mother did screw up when she realized he cheated by almost disowning him, but eventually apologized and decided to actually listen to her son, after realizing how much pain this expectation caused him. He needed the apology and change, considering he literally questioned after his cheating whether he even deserved to be alive.
All three of these kids were helped by the reassurance that yes, they had autonomy, and did not actually have to fit an exact mold. Kou’s parents helped give him a break, Shu’s mother attempted to listen to him more, and Yukiko’s family simply told her that they knew she was thinking of leaving and were chill with it. This led to all three of them rethinking their lives with their newfound autonomy, and beginning to mentally recover. Yukiko and Shu still suffer from societal pressure, but now have a stronger support network to fall back on, now that their support networks know what they’re going through. These kids were allowed voices in their lives when they were originally overridden by the voices of the people surrounding. This allowed them to live in the present by not forcing them to be so stressed about their futures, and to have them choose what they could be.
Picking Up The Pieces (Nanako Dojima)
Nanako’s case is the only one here that was a genuine accident, so she is given her own section. When her mother was killed in a hit and run, her father Ryotaro still had his job to do, in order to keep themselves financially stable. As a result, he struggled to find time with Nanako, and his own trauma led to him growing distant from her. Due to this, Nanako had to learn do some actions for herself early. I never learned to boil an egg until I was literally triple her age. This leads to Nanako becoming surprisingly mature for her age, something many older characters comment on.
However, this isn’t something she should have ever had to be. In this forced self-maturation, she attempts to suppress her grief over losing her mother, because now she has a lot more responsibilities to hold. She feels she has no time to grieve. This is something that happens a lot to grieving children, where they feel like they have to mature.
The opposite of regressive behavior among grieving children is the “Big-Man” or “Big-Woman” syndrome. This is apparent when a child attempts to grow up quickly and exhibits adult behavior in an effort to replace the person who has died. This forced maturity can be the result of simply carrying out the instructions of respected adults: “You’ll now have to be the man (or woman) of the house.” Although well-intentioned, adults who deliver this message are unaware of its potentially damaging impact. Sometimes a child unconsciously adopts this syndrome as a symbolic means of trying to keep the one who has died alive. By filling the loved one’s role, a child doesn’t have to acknowledge the full effect of the loss on his or her life.
[Source on page 8]
And since her father is trying to drown his grief in his work too, she has nobody to communicate with, even though she wants to communicate with someone. As a result, she ends up suppressing her grief and convincing herself even in her own dungeon that she isn't lonely, just to keep the pain down.
This is where Yu comes in to help fix the situation. Yu is a very necessary support network for Nanako, and her favorite dialogue options are those that let her be a child with a family—her older brother, now. This allows her to properly grieve and feel like she doesn’t need to be as mature as she used to have to be. She has someone to lean on and to express her feelings and pain to, without need to bottle it up. She likes it the most when you tell her Chisato's in heaven, and she likes it when Yu calls himself her brother. She likes it when Yu is emotionally warm and responsive, because she's had to just stoically bear it for a year now.
Yu actually goes so far as to grab Ryotaro and call him out for his mistake. Through this, Ryotaro actually comes around after realizing that this is in fact what he’s been doing. It's the same as above with Yukiko, Shu, and Kou in a trauma context--he realized that he didn't see how much Nanako was suffering due to drowning in his own grief, and was unintentionally harming Nanako as a result. Because he realizes this, and realizes how much she's changed, he makes sure he listens to her so the adaptations she's made due to grieving don't become a problem, and so she can be a kid and he can be her father again.
I think she gets one of the happiest endings of the bunch here, as the person who accidentally forced her to mature ended up making sure to acknowledge her childhood and allow her to just be a kid. He also allowed her a support network that he had initially failed to provide. This was necessary for her, as kids cannot support themselves nearly as well as an adult can, and therefore will rely on the adults in their lives. This especially applies to young ones like Nanako, so it's great she can get it back, even if the impact is still there.
Extensions of a Job (Naoto Shirogane, Yosuke Hanamura)
So, Naoto and Yosuke are both denied the fact they’re kids because of their jobs. This happens in notably opposing ways. In Yosuke’s case, it’s through basically being outright ostracized and considered an "other." Everyone links him to Junes, and anytime they see him, bam, they start discussing the negative impact Junes has had on Inaba.
Even though this impact is very real and the adults have a right to be disturbed, it’s still very off putting that they would take it out on this teenage boy. And there is a reason for this, that being in fact that Yosuke is a teenage boy, and not an adult who can do very much in response. These people could actively fight against Junes, confront the owner of the specific establishment (who is not Yosuke’s dad, who is explicitly only called a manager. I can go into the type of corporation Junes is, you know!), contact their local leaders, and actively create meaningful change. But no, they just willfully ostracize and shit-talk a random kid that’s the son of a manager. Yosuke is a teenager being scapegoated for a giant company that he just happens to work for because he’s an easy target.
And the reason he’s an easy target is because he’s a teenager with some connection to the store. He works there and so does his dad. Furthermore, he does not really have the power to counter the mistreatment he faces from the general public. He's not anyone with enough power to get them to shut up at all, this is why people can shit-talk Saki around him and he will just have to take it.
In Naoto’s case, she is not scapegoated but looked down on precisely because she is a teenager. Ryotaro Dojima, upon meeting Naoto, is initially frustrated by her presence entirely due to her being only sixteen when the two meet.
As a result, Naoto feels the need to hide much of who she is in order to be respected. I’ve covered the gender aspect of this before, but now I’m talking about the age aspect. Professionalism requires a lot of self-suppression, and doing it too much can affect the mental health of the individual.
However, self-control does not always promote self-expression. Another stream of research suggests that when people exert self-control, they may feel like they are suppressing themselves. Taking a closer look at the way self-control is assessed in laboratory studies, such as watching a sad movie without showing any emotions [31], provides a first indication of this perspective. Building on the premise of self-control as an ‘inner dictatorship’ [32], ego fixation theory proposes that self-control might alienate individuals from their intuitive dislike for aversive experiences [33]. A study directly testing the effect of self-control on self-expression found that evoking the notion of self-control reduces the degree to which people see their choices as expressions of their preferences [34]. Self-control likely highlights external mandates, norms and expectations at the expense of personal urges and desires, making people feel that their choices do not necessarily correspond to their preferences.
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The result is that Naoto feels like she has to skip childhood altogether. This is why Sukuna-Hikona, her Shadow, has the power to Enervate—which is to forcibly age. The objective of Sukuna-Hikona in Naoto’s dungeon is to force Naoto to become a physical adult, a metaphor for the pressure kids face to become adults, and how kids are denied autonomy or even the chance to be taken seriously before becoming an adult in the first place. She even points out to Naoto how the adults refuse to take her seriously just because she is a child.
I think their situation is a bit of an extension of Kou, Yukiko and Shu’s, but not exactly the same since they already have the futures they’re bound to, and Naoto in particular vehemently wants to stay in it.
I also would like to point out that what actually helped them in the end happened to be related to letting them be just teenagers with their own thoughts and feelings. You can especially see this with Naoto, who was disallowed from being passionate due to it being seen as unprofessional during her detective career. Meanwhile, her social link is all about examining and rediscovering her passion, as Yakushiji hides her homemade tools all around Inaba. Naoto is allowed to be a detective without being professional, letting her indulge in some genuine fun for her. This lets her know that she has more identity than just detective.
In Yosuke's case, he initially gets it from Saki Konishi, who I'm about to talk about. She told him that it didn't matter who his parents were to her, and that she only cared about what Yosuke's actual character was like.
Yosuke needed to hear this, it was the first step towards him being able to actually explore his life as a teenage boy again in Inaba. Saki, in these lines, expressly permits him to do that in an act of solidarity. Because, good grief, Saki genuinely couldn't have it worse in this aspect!
stop sexualizing literal kids or it’s going between the eyes. (Rise Kujikawa, Saki Konishi)
These two legitimately get it the worst. It’s so bad. It’s so, so bad. This is the section where I’m giving a warning, I cover Saki’s death which features an attempted rape. I’m going to start with the somehow less bad situation of Rise in order to stay sane. So, Rise became a pop idol at the age of about fourteen. This led to her skyrocketing in popularity. Unfortunately, part of the industry of idols is how they are marketed. I want to show you the gravure magazines that Rise stars in. They feature her in swimsuits, and make comments on her body on the magazine.
This is a fifteen year old they’re saying has a perfect body, just to remind you. She turned sixteen right before she started hiatus, on June 1, 2011. This is certainly a phenomenon that exists within the pop star and idol industry, worldwide.
The findings of this study support the concept of age compression in the sexualization of females. While in the study conducted by Lambiase (2003) minor female celebrities were not found to have suggestive or partially clad images on their websites, in this study the minor female celebrity had a majority of suggestive images. This suggests that in the past seven years, age compression has begun to influence celebrity images as well. Suggestive and submissive imagery on a 17-year-old celebrity’s official website indicates that content previously judged only to be acceptable for adult celebrities is currently considered appropriate for a minor. The age compression does not appear to apply to the minor-aged male celebrities. While the imagery on the female site has grown to correspond with that of adult female celebrities, this is not true of either minor or adult males. These findings suggest that sexualizing oneself for public attention is a phenomenon that is primarily used by female celebrities, even those under the age of 18. This focus on female sexuality supports the findings of previous studies that have found that females are often portrayed in media as sexual objects (Kilbourne, 1999; McMahon, 1990; Reichert & Carpentier, 2004). It appears that female celebrities, including those under the age of 18, use their sexuality to gain attention to a larger degree than male celebrities do. These results also suggest that female celebrities, including minors, may be endorsing the ideas of sexual empowerment rather than traditional empowerment.
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Furthermore, for Rise, social interaction is part of her job, and part of the work of an idol is to form a one-sided relationship on the fan’s end between themself and the idol in question. Take for example the Akihabara 48, who use chances of meeting them as a way to sell their content, in effect selling both their merchandise and some form of closeness.
Shinshi Okajima and Yasuhiro Okada (2011, 5) describe AKB48’s success as a “paradigm shift.” Namely, AKB48 developed a more intimate relationship with their fan community. According to Okajima and Okada, they were produced and promoted as “idols that you can meet” (会いに行けるアイドル) (Ibid., 14) through the establishment of the AKB48 Theater in Akihabara, where they perform live shows daily. The group’s success originated in practices aimed at developing a loyal fan base. Many of these practices are not uncommon as sales techniques in Japan, but AKB48 brought them together in a way that cultivates the affective sensibility of fandom. The affective sensibility of fandom, argues Lawrence Grossberg (1992, 57), involves increases in both quantity and quality of meanings and pleasures. The quantity of the relationship is measured in terms of the frequency of its energy or volition, while the quality of the relationship is defined by the specific meanings affixed to experiences. In its relationship with its fans, AKB48 appeals to both in the structure of its business and marketing practices. The longstanding practice of selling the same product multiple times has become closely associated with AKB48 (Okajima and Okada 2011, 16–17). For example, the group’s eighth CD single, released in February 2008, came packaged with one of 44 distinct posters. Only those fans who collected all 44 versions would be allowed to attend a “special event” featuring the group. [...] However, if “votes are your love,” as one AKB48 member put it (Daily Sports 2011), then the logic is clear that one man can have more love for an idol than another, and he expresses that through purchasing multiple CDs and casting a number of votes proportionate to his love. Since votes are acquired by purchasing CDs, this equation of votes with emotion is a form of commodity fetishism. It aims to conceal the material cost of voting in the rhetoric of love. The logic achieves the ideological effect of reinforcing the materialistic and commodified nature of human relations in capitalist societies: love is something bought and sold. Fans, for all their grumbling about fairness, are deeply embedded in an “asymmetrical” relationship (Yano 2004) with the idol (mass affection directed at the individual, who responds to an unindividuated mass) and are willing to settle for any sort of relationship over none.
[Source on pages 20-22]
This is one impact on Himiko’s behavior: is the way she portrays herself as a stripper, which is another occupation that sells intimacy and finds sexualization to be part of the job. The juxtaposition between this strip club energy and the fact Rise is sixteen is intentionally jarring, as it shows the reality of how badly she’s been affected by this lack of control she has over her marketing. We can also see this selling of intimacy mentioned above when Himiko tells the Investigation Team they have to "prove their love" to her. I want to point out like I have in previous writeups that Himiko actively mimics the public face of Rise, unlike any of the other Shadows, who actively make fun of and avoid it.
Another present impact on Himiko's portrayal is the juxtaposition of youthful adorability and sexual attractiveness within Rise's line of work, and impacts how she is perceived. I want to point out that Himiko's breasts are slightly larger than Rise’s, as the latter states when Yu, Yosuke and Kanji warn her about being kidnapped.
This is actually relevant, as human breasts are frequently sexualized, and a large chest is seen as more mature than a small one on those who actually have fat on their breasts like Rise precisely because they are more intensely sexualized. After all, Rise's bust size is in reality slightly smaller than what official records say. (I want to note that this is not a sentiment native to Japan, which is why Rise compliments Yukiko for having a smaller chest than herself during the checkup scene because it means she fits in more traditional beauty standards.)
Breast development in particular is implicated in the shift from a relatively asexual gender system of childhood to a highly sexualized gender system of adulthood and involves a reorganization of self and body image. [...] The developing breasts that are symbols of puberty and menarche are indeed highly constituted in our culture as objects of male desire (to be gazed at) and contribute to the experience of puberty for many girls to be synonymous with objectification.
[Source] (I didn't know what menarche was. It's the first time someone with a uterus menstruates... why does it have such an elegant name? just call it first period or first time menstruating...)
Females are fetishized in terms of specific body parts--breasts, pubises, and buttocks-and, in this fetishization, they are constructed as objects to be looked at and enjoyed by primarily m!!~~. Images, sketches, cartoons, photos, toys, paintings, and drawings of either females who are naked or naked body parts proliferate in Japan with little official regulation. [...] All of the previous, but particularly breasts, appear in anything explicitly coded as sexual-adult pornographic magazines, x-rated movies, strip shows, and late-night adult TY, for example-as well as in media and forums whose subject is overtly something other than sex, such as police shows during prime-time television, photos appended to news magazines, public advertisements for whiskey or cigarettes, and call-girl fliers deposited in residential mailboxes. As many friends and informants, both female and male, have told me, such display of female flesh is appealing to men even when not directly connected to sexual acts.
[Source] (The previous source was America-centric. This serves to prove that this phenomenon is something Rise must worry about too as a Japanese girl. There's a lot of sexual talk in this book, If you're sex repulsed, you may not want to read more of this. Later parts turned me off.)
This is, interestingly, connected to the juxtaposition of the performance of her job. She's meant to come off as cute, as her bright, light voice would pretty nicely put her into soprano range, the highest voice register. At the same time, through her gravure magazines, she's considered, in a sense, to be "mature," that is to read in this case, sexual. And this is a common phenomenon with idols in their juxtaposition, such as the case of Namie Amuro.
However, the new sexual assertiveness in post-idols has not actually entirely eclipsed its “cute” antecedent. My interviews with male Namie Amuro fans revealed that the performances of Namie Amuro and all thecrest of the idol dancers were offshoots of cute idols’ male-attracting gestures. A female Amuro fan told me that Amuro was just another cute idol when she was not singing on stage: “She appears to be very feminine when she is not performing, and I love that gap between her acting and her real personality. She is cute when she doesn’t perform, and powerfully sexy once she begins performing.” This indicates that in spite of the assertion that the so-called post-idols allow new sexual assertiveness for women, they essentially back up the existing gender-role expectations and sexual stereotypes for adolescents – whereby female subjects continue to be sexually objectified by many, especially male, viewers. As far as Amuro herself was concerned, there was one clear goal in mind, as she commented in a television interview: “I would be happy to be widely adored by anyone and everyone … not only by women of my age, or men, or something like that” (Golden Disc Prize Special, NHK, 3 May 1996). What mattered for her was her popularity. The fact that she and her style were being discussed widely by many people was a sign that she was accomplishing the dream of self-establishment.
[Source on pages 158-159]
This contrast is pulling Rise in two directions, neither of which are totally within her control, and creates a specific image of her that she starts to resent. It's an image that she questions whether she feels real within, because she is expected to both have youthful cuteness and the sexuality of an adult. And she's not entirely keen on this.
It’s to the point that a piece of her fears that she is exactly what her marketing portrays, which is why Himiko behaves the way she does. She is afraid of having to perform this romanticized and sexualized view of herself, and that she will never have genuine intimate connections as a result of this marketing. This is why Himiko rejects Risette, because she is a representation of her fear that the sexualized, adultified and yet cutesy image of her is all anyone will ever see. She's forced into two worlds, and she fears that even if she decides to bail out, her image is forever shaped by this juxtaposition that deeply disturbs her. This is why Himiko says this, because she feels that she will only be seen as this persona.
A kid shouldn’t fear being seen this way. Shouldn’t even need to. But between Rise getting stalked and her private life being constantly invaded, it’s justified that she has this fear. She’s not allowed to just be a sixteen year old. In the anime, there’s a scene where Yu helps Rise get away from the paparazzi. They are literally not allowing her to be a high school girl, all because they do not see her as that at all. They only see her as her marketing, a celebrity. And that’s dangerous to her. They’re only allowing their own views of her to go by, views that dehumanize her and intentionally forget she’s a kid.
Speaking of people who had others’ views of them forced onto them, with the fact they’re a kid being conveniently left out, let’s talk about Saki Konishi. Saki gets a combination of everything the others get. So, let’s start with the “living in the future” part, which also rolls into the job part. She is the heir to Konishi Liquors. We unfortunately don’t get a lot of her view on everything for a reason that is going to be mentioned, but it’s implied she felt some resentment over being considered a traitor because she just didn’t work in her own family business, considering her dungeon is her being overwhelmed with gossip about her working at Junes while being the Konishi family’s daughter.
In this, the society around her is forcibly imposing the future of “inherit Konishi Liquors” onto her, and when she diverges from the prescription, she gets mistreated for it. The world around her doesn’t let her live in the present.
Furthermore, Saki, like Rise, is sexualized. She’s even sexualized postmortem. See Yosuke’s social link, where his two coworkers loudly talk about Saki, and talk about her dating a guy in college.
The "if we really want to" is about hitting up an older guy, such as Saki supposedly did. It also implies the gossiping girls are used to doing it, opening themselves up to potentially dangerous situations, and therefore not seeing this situation as the eyebrow raiser that it is. In this sense, they both adultify themselves and Saki and ignore their potential victimization. This is evidently a pervasive sentiment about her, considering what one girl says about her immediately after the news is broken that she died, and it’s appalling. She says that because of the rumors surrounding her that the two girls mentioned above, she doesn’t feel bad that she was murdered.
Not only is this misogynistic as hell, considering Taro Namatame, who cheated on his wife and got fired for it, got a more sympathetic reaction, it’s also ignoring the fact that Saki is a seventeen year old girl. Divine punishment? For being a seventeen year old girl that's had a boyfriend!? This is proof of the extreme control put upon teenagers, and this includes sexualization of minors like Saki. The sexualization of minors is a deeply dangerous phenomenon used to control kids’ forms of dress and behavior. It’s used to blame them for being sexually abused and assaulted, when in actuality, the abuse was another measure of extreme control leveraged against them. It’s a way children are blocked from being children, by forcing a responsibility on them that they never actually had. You can see this in the school dress codes of Japanese children as well--though Yasogami is much better about this than the schools mentioned in the research paper, looking at the first years' attire, it's a culture of victim blaming all the same.
The further lack of reprimand from boards of education in most school prefectures or cities has further propagated sexual harassment in schools, especially through such violative and bizarre checks. Additionally, even if these teachers have been fired on such accounts, they can still continue teaching, primarily because of the existent loopholes; while teachers who receive such disciplinary dismissal lose their teaching license, the teachers who resign voluntary are not deprived in any way and may be hired in other prefectures; even if the teaching license is annulled, the required credits for teaching that are obtained at university do remain valid and thus those whose license had been revoked can get it re-issued, thus simply aiding the offender. Thus, the lack of stringent laws, leaves most students extremely vulnerable. Another bizarre rule that Japanese schools have introduced, is prohibiting their female students from wearing their hair in ponytails because the 'nape of their necks' being visible could 'sexually excite' male students. The reasoning behind the same is to apparently reduce 'sexual harassment' cases in schools. Further these rules also dictate the length of skirts, eyebrow shapes and hair colour. Students in various schools across Japan have also been forced to dye their hair black. However, the same have only been on the female students, with schools leaning towards a more lenient set of rules for boys. Not only does this perpetrate paramount sexism and further 'rape culture' but also to a degree aid in justifying the same, while taking away from students their right of self-expression, which is usually protected under Article 21(1) of the Constitution of Japan.
[Source]
I also want to point out Mr. Yamada, who (alongside Kashiwagi and Morooka to lesser degrees) is meant to be a hint at this overwhelming problem in school systems. He's occasionally shown to behave rather creepily to Yukiko, and although he doesn't go terribly far with it, I think it would be enough to raise eyebrows. And yet this never changes, because the kids are used to it. We can also see it with Kashiwagi, who explicitly calls Rise Kujikawa jailbait.
But almost nobody questions this, because they’re used to Yamada and Kashiwagi being creeps, and used to the system around them sexualizing kids like themselves. And then they turn around and blame another kid for dating people frequently, and that supposedly being the reason for her death.
Well, those invasive assumptions and rumors are in fact related to her death, since she wasn't killed by anyone she dated (and even if she was, how the hell would that justify it!?). I don’t have a happy ending for this one. Due to becoming known as the only witness to the murder of Mayumi Yamano, she appears on the Midnight Channel. This leads to her catching the interest of the person interrogating her--the killer of Yamano, Tohru Adachi, who is desperately looking for someone else to latch onto after he was rejected by Yamano. I want to note that Adachi is a massive control freak and doesn’t hesitate to violate people's autonomy. He is implied to have stalked Mayumi Yamano, and he killed her for dating another individual—this killing was unintentional, but he intended on psychologically damaging her. But he also attempts to exert undue influence on Saki, now that his eyes are on her. I would argue his behavior towards Saki is worse than it was towards Yamano, and Adachi himself implies it was in part precisely because she was a kid.
Adachi is sexualizing Saki’s behavior towards Namatame. When we get Namatame’s account, nothing sexual was going on—he was just trying to protect her so she didn’t get killed. But Adachi attempts to say that he thought making advances on her would be fine, since he immediately believes they were dating, when all she did was talk to Namatame. In this, he attempts to adultify Saki and justify his behavior towards her, and pretend he wasn’t being unnecessarily controlling and frankly creepy about a literal child a decade younger than him. The truth is shown in in-game cutscenes. In reality, he immediately lost his temper after luring her to the interrogation room and attempted to rape Saki, and then killed her when she defended herself by breaking out of his grip and striking him. I’m not showing an image of that.
I want to emphasize that Saki was seventeen and was lured in by someone who was a whole decade older than her. Someone who was abusing his power as a police officer. In Adachi’s recollection he consistently ignores the fact that Saki was not old enough to vote when he tried to assault her. There's no happy ending for Saki, who was killed because she objected to what was clear violence against her.
The reason I say Adachi behaved so heinously because she was a mere teenager is due to his own words immediately after the flashback. He says something chilling about killing her by pointing out Saki's age and resulting physical build after the flashback ends. He notes that she weighs less than Yamano did, and therefore she was easier to throw into the TV, attributing her light weight to her age.
To spell it out: Easier to kill if she tells him no, which she did by slapping the person who literally had her pinned in the face. Adachi heavily implies here that he was so willing to get aggressive and controlling towards her precisely because she was just a child, and therefore if she fought him, he could overpower and kill her. Saki genuinely was targeted because she was a child while having that status denied to her at the same time, and this killed her. Because she tried to have a say in how people acted towards her.
Saki and Rise are denied voices in these matters, with Rise through her song lyrics originally being written by others, and Saki, well, I don't need to say. She tells someone no and gets murdered for it. These girls' voices are suppressed, passively and violently, for a specific narrative about Saki being some kind of renegade and Rise being this sort of teenage deity. They're being sexualized throughout it, too. And it's all so these kids will not get the chance to be kids.
Rise at least gets a chance. Rise ends up managing to wrest some control when she decides she wants to go back to being an idol, choosing to become a songwriter in her own right.
This is very necessary, as kids like Rise, as we see with Saki, are constantly talked over, having words put in their mouths they never said.
This will in no way fix everything. It is only a first step towards Rise gaining her autonomy as a teenage girl, and more than just an idol. But at least Rise can now influence how the rest of the world views her, away from the image she feared. If she can control her lyrics, then she can start to control her marketing better, step-by-step.
Saki never got even that bone thrown to her. And she's not alone. How many kids are dead in the ground when they could be alive with us, all because someone didn't want to acknowledge them as a child for any reason? I'm American, so I can think of a lot of ‘em. We need to make sure there are less of these situations, where kids have their childhoods clipped short, sometimes their very lives clipped short entirely because nobody let them be a goddamn child. We need to treat kids, all kids, like human beings, who deserve their own autonomy, whose safety isn't just extreme control, but knowledge and the power to run around and not get hurt. And we need to treat them as having their own identities, because they do. There's a reason Yosuke's first connection he made in Inaba was with a teenager his age: it's because she actually allotted Yosuke his own identity. And this is because she knew what it was like, she offered him solidarity. And with respect to Saki and Rise, the other kids sure as hell aren’t reaching to help them. I would argue that one of the obvious things to do is to stop being so unnecessarily controlling towards these children and let them have autonomy over their lives. It has been proven that to deny a human autonomy only endangers them, as they will attempt to find their autonomy through slipping outside the bounds of control, which puts them at risk. Take for example parents who use corporal punishment on their children. Their children usually will face this abuse multiple times for misbehavior, implying that corporal punishment won't work on the child. It'll also estrange the child from their parents as they rightfully recognize their parents as unsafe and abusive.
Children also report feeling estranged from their parents after being spanked. One seven-year-old girl in the United Kingdom said that being spanked makes “you feel you don’t like your parents anymore,” while a second seven-year-old said, “you [feel] sort of as though you want to run away because they’re sort of like being mean to you and it hurts a lot.” Such accounts directly from children are consistent with a concern in the research literature that parents who use corporal punishment may do so at the risk of undermining their relationships with their children.80 Because children are motivated to avoid painful experiences or agents, children will begin to avoid their parents or to become distrustful of them because they are agents of painful corporal punishments.81 Children who are avoiding their parents will be less able to develop feelings of closeness with their parents, and in the absence of those feelings, the children will be less susceptible to their parents’ positive socializations.82 Several research studies have indeed linked parents’ use of corporal punishment with more negative relationships with their children; one research summary found this relationship in all thirteen studies examined.83 Subsequent research has found that frequency of corporal punishment is negatively associated with children’s attachment security at fourteen months of age and with their self-reported attachment to their parents in adolescence.85 Young adults who reported more-frequent corporal punishment from their parents also judged their parents to be less emotionally available.86
[Source]
As a result of the newfound distrust of the parents held by the child, they will look to other people to validate their autonomy. This has a chance of endangering them, as they have lowered standards for what being treated well means, and have a chance at being abused by other people.
Third, as a result of being exploited to meet the needs of the parent, these individuals may have learned to play the role of the victim in intimate relationships. In addition, clinical observers have suggested that experiencing seductive behavior with attachment figures may increase one’s risk for selecting romantic partners who are either victims or perpetrators of physical aggression (Crittenden, 1997). Individuals with histories of boundary violations may adopt the role of aggressor, victim, or both in their romantic relationships. Such implications of relationship histories from childhood and adolescence may well be clues to potentially fruitful avenues of intervention with individuals experiencing romantic relationship violence and also may inform preventive programs aimed toward parents. In addition to the significant impact of boundary violations, negative parent– child interactions in adolescence also contributed to likelihood of later physical aggression. Negative interactions in the parent– child relationship at 13 years of age were positively associated with victimization at 21 years of age. Individuals with a history of hostile, negative, and conflictual parent– child interactions were more likely to be victims in their romantic relationships. These results imply that deficient skills in regard to managing conflict and negative emotions in intimate relationships may be rooted in familial experiences and may persist into the close relationships of adults in the form of victimhood.
[Source]
In a national sample of men, ASA (Adult sexual assault) victims were 5-times more likely to have a history of CSA (child sexual assault) than nonvictims with revictimized men reporting greater levels of psychological distress than those with a history of CSA-or ASA-only, and non-victims (Elliott et al., 2004). It is thus important to examine patterns of childhood maltreatment, adult sexual victimization, and revictimization in men, and how these patterns differentially associate with long-term mental health problems, and other risk factors, such as anger and masculinity.
[Source]
Now, obviously I do not believe a kid should smoke or drink. But they deserve autonomy, and to be safe while exercising it, no matter what age they are. Because if they do not get that, they are more liable to be exploited.
The solidarity shown within the Investigation Team and their friends are a great first step, as they are all children. They allow each other to shape their own identities, which is necessary for their health.
With respect to Nanako, whose suffrage is more accidental than the others here, we need more ways to support kids in their grief. Ryotaro, for his part, did start to fix the problem. He's a sign of people in this world actually being willing to help, but not everyone has someone like Ryotaro who is genuinely capable, even if he is unstable. Support networks are needed for children to properly thrive, especially when their parents, their first and primary networks, cannot do it. Whether this is teachers or trustworthy extended family, or even close friends, they need it.
We also need to actually listen to kids and make sure they feel comfortable piping up and having voices of control over their own lives. Yukiko, Shu, and Kou were all affected with the simple weighing fact that kids normally do not have this say over their lives thanks to not being listened to, and simply froze in fear. Nanako couldn’t voice her grief mainly because Ryotaro was struggling to process his own, so he simply couldn’t hear Nanako’s. And, well, Saki’s dead. Killed so her voice wouldn’t be heard on multiple levels. So she couldn’t say no, and so she couldn’t tell anyone who the Midnight Channel Killer was. This is why need to make sure kids have their voices heard, because if nobody talked over her, if nobody forcibly imposed their messed up views of her onto her, she wouldn’t be dead. Full stop.
