Odd but interesting

[james_davis_nicoll]

Hokkyoku Nigo is part of a small subset in Japan with a fetish for wearing outfits called “zentai” — an abbreviation of “zenshintaitsu”, which means “full body suit” — who say they are seeking liberation by effacing the physical self.

Image is a link.

Comments

[andrew barton (from livejournal.com)]

Well, that's one way to defeat facial recognition.

[rwpikul.livejournal.com]

I've seen people seriously suggest that we might react to a surveillance society by adopting something from Renaissance Venice:

To deal with the fact that you couldn't go anywhere without being seen, people wore cloaks and masks. When the guy you are trying to track is one of many who are 5'10" and wearing a black cloak and a Guy Fawkes mask you're going to lose track of him quite quickly even if he doesn't try to do anything funny.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

Are they using "effacing" ironically?

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

And I'm sure no one is surprised that people combine zentai with other things, like bondage.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Like the colour black, everything goes with bondage.

[agoodwinsmith.livejournal.com]

This is a quotable quote, oh yes. :)

[agoodwinsmith.livejournal.com]

Blue Men! Or something.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

I was thinking Herb Tarlek, actually.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Those are awfully festive costumes for people who want to efface themselves. I like them better than if they were plain and black. Also, I imagine, since the zentai suits are so revealing of body form, only people who comfortably feel that they are within the acceptable normal range of body types would feel comfortable dusplying themselves in this "effacing" way.

We have an accordion player here, The Great Morgani, who wears a different costume every day he appears (usually on the main street, often for festivals of which we have many since this is a tourist town). They all cover his face like that. But most of them involve clothing-like outer parts and hats and shoes. And many of them involve sequins or little mirrors and stuff.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Well, this is Japan, where dressing up for an occasion will mean gorgeously-patterned kimono, while the wearer also still has to conform to the social constraints of Japanese society. In that light I can see the act of masking oneself to be socially liberating, perhaps, while there would be nothing particularly remarkable about the mask being gaily patterned.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Liberating, but I wouldn't call it self-effacing. A full black burqua with veil? That's self-effacing (except maybe somewhere very liberal :)). This is self-expression, with visible nipples.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Shrug. I'm not zentainonen, nor the translator who provided the english phrase "self-effacing", but even though the whole experience is foreign to me, I can see how putting one's carefully constructed social face aside can be both self-effacing and liberating.

After all, don't proponents of burqua and other forms of hijab claim that it does liberate them in ways that the make-up and clothing conventions of Europe and North America do not?

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

Burquas are self-effacing. Wildly patterned, brightly colored outfits so tight you can see the nipples are not.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

I can often see nipples under western clothes, if I'm boorish enough to look (and I am that boorish, far too often); does this mean that a woman can't be self-effacing at all when wearing western clothes?

While I'm being boorish, I note that among the seven figures above, I can only see one pair of nipples, and to be frank, they weren't obvious to me. Does this mean that the zentainonen in red is not being self-effacing, while the others are? Do male nipples count as being as auto-unself-effacing as female nipples? Are your feelings about nipples (male or female) necessarily the same as a typical Japanese?

There's skepticism, and there's refusing to take the stated word of someone from a different culture about their psychology because their culture is different.

Edit: If you're saying that if you were wearing a zentai outfit, you wouldn't be self-effacing, then that's fair enough; but if you're saying that someone else couldn't be self-effacing because you wouldn't be, then that's just absurd.

[azurelunatic]

There are at least some places where the traditional color is not black, and when that's combined with it being a matter of personal choice rather than government mandate, from what I hear the tendency is towards very fashion-forward (if not adhering to European/North American fashion) combinations. One of my US-born-and-raised friends who studies feminist activism in the Arabic world has mentioned feeling generally underdressed, not in amount of clothing but in coordination and effort -- as the foreigner, she is the one whose handbag and headscarf do not go together and might not be ruined by a dip in the mud.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Nod. If you do a Google image search for "hijab fashion" you can see plenty of fabrics as colourful as the fabrics above. Does this mean that the women wearing them are not being modest, as per local custom? If, by chance, a stray lock of hair escaped their scarves would that destroy any claim to hijab-moderated modesty? If so, when did we become the Morality Police for foreign cultures?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I … honestly didn't realize this was a new-to-the-Internet thing. Have you seen the ones where the legs come together to make a mermaid tail?

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Definitely not new to the internet, but I can buy that it's new to Western traditional media (or James).