Being a healthy male, I’m naturally fascinated with the opposite sex, and I find the subject of Japanese females to be an especially complex and interesting one. Over the years I’ve known many Japanese females, from students I taught English to, to girls I dated, and of course my wife, and while each of them is unique, I have noticed some patterns. Japanese females are often very concerned with how they appear to others, wanting to be chanto shiteru (roughly translatable “doing things properly, as they should be doing”) in all things, and when it comes time to, say, split a lunch bill, out come the calculators so they can accurately compute the amount that each person must pay. Often, Japanese girls feel the need to cultivate a certain kawaii character about themselves, and it’s not that difficult to find a girl in her high teens or twenties who thinks its cute to hold her coat sleeves in her hands to make herself look “super deformed,” to refer to herself in the third person or to spontaneously channel a “catgirl” without warning. (As you can see from looking at Colonel Sanders wearing a maid costume, there’s no natural upper limit to what can be made “cute” in Japan.) While there are exceptions, most Japanese girls are extremely slender, and I’ve known grown women here who, when visiting the U.S., need to shop at Gap Kids if they want to find their size. Thanks to eating rice three times a day, Japanese females are constipated more often than not, and spend great quantities of money on exotic Chinese herbal remedies, when all they need to do is eat a little less rice. I could go on, but I wouln’t want to ruin the mystique of Japanese women for anyone, and besides, they confuse me, too. At J-List we’ve got a wacky line of T-shirts, polo shirts and hats that say “Now Accepting Applications for a Japanese Girlfriend” in kanji, and based on its ongoing popularity, I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only one fascinated by the enigma of Japanese women.
