Don't talk about Japan like they're some sort of alien culture so far removed from the rest of the world that they don't hide their shame and freely display acts of lust and debauchery openly. They're not. The mindset you're pushing right now is some anime bullshit.
I said they were LESS reserved, not that they were butt fucking rodeo clowns on top of children. In many ways, they are more uptight than Americans. However, when it comes to breasts, especially in their media, they are not.
When I was in japan, the only place I saw napkins with naked ladies was in Roupongi
Dude, it is so ubiquitous that there is an NPC handing out naughty tissue packs in front of the train station in Tokyo Xanadu. He even refuses to give it to the main character because he is too young. This is a recent game intended for teenagers.
Your idea of what Japan is sounds like it's only gleaned from Yakuza games.
You literally quoted me saying that I lived there for six months. At least try to at least make it to the fourth sentence before rushing to hit that reply button.
"But exposed titties is part of their culture!" Get the fuck out of here with that bullshit. And I say it that bluntly because it is BULLSHIT. It's not true. It's enthusiast media bleeding into the mainstream as technology changes. It is ANYTHING but the norm. It is DEFINITELY seen as embarrassing there as it is here.
I lived in Japan 17 years ago, pre-Moe and the rise of otaku culture. There was otaku stuff there, but it wasn't anything like it is today. It certainly wasn't enthusiast media bleeding into the mainstream as technology changes. While I lived there, DVDs were the hot new thing thanks to the release of the PS2. And yet at the local Deo-Deo (roughly equivalent to a Best Buy, but with an annoying theme song) you could find porn video cds sitting on the shelf literally next to Microsoft Word.
It's good that you put it this way, because it was 17 years ago and I was worried that they might have gotten a little more uptight in the intervening years, but you seem to be arguing that it is worse now than ever.
Women dress extremely conservatively here and cleavage is particularly not okay (short pants/skirts are common, though).
This was true 17 years ago as well, but I wasn't arguing that every woman over there is dressed as a stripper. I was saying that nudity, especially in places where it is deemed acceptable or expected, is less of a problem there. You'd never find a mixed bathing hot spring in the US - ever. At my local grocery store, they put blinders in front of magazines that show any sort of skin - like Runner's World where the cover model is in a sports bra. In Japan, the entire PC gaming magazine section was basically just hentai games, open and available where anyone could browse through it. It wasn't even on a shelf where children couldn't reach it.
Heck, watch Japanese TV as opposed of otaku-pandering games.
Dude, I watched the entirety of Showgirls on broadcast television in Japan. They blurred out the crotches, but there were boobies everywhere. On Saturday nights, there was this news program/talk show which had a credit sequence that was literally a bunch of female butts in thongs dancing to music. At the end of the credits, one of the thongs would break and pop off, showing bare ass. The show itself often had bare breasts in it as well. It was obviously a show intended for adults, but I didn't have cable. I was a college student. It was broadcast tv. The only way you can get bare breasts on broadcast tv in the US is I, Claudius reruns on PBS.
Where are the "fanservicey" outfits?
Dead of fucking winter, like 10 degrees outside, snow falling, and the school girls are still wearing skirts that don't reach their knees. They might wear thigh highs with their miniskirts too. Japan is the only place that I know of that has a name for the patch of thigh between the thigh high and the skirt. I'm convinced that these outfits are very formative in Japan's obsession with panty shots. Once the girls get into college though, the dresses reach down past their ankles.
Dudes got this idea that Japan is some porn bastion and everyone is perfectly okay with everything about it.
I said that cultural nudity was more accepted, not porn. There's a difference between communal bathing and shotacon porn. You guys' problem is that you seem to think that anything flesh colored is porn, regardless of context or intent. It's like you think taking a shower is porn. So I guess it is only natural that you would think cleavage is porn too.
But for the record, since you brought it up, Japan is a porn bastion. Seriously. They release over 4,000 adult videos a month and have something like 10,000 porn actresses (only 70 male ones though). I remember reading somewhere that something like 1 in 100 girls in Tokyo of a specific age range have appeared in porn. Now, you can argue a lot of things about Japan, but I don't think you can doubt their porn.