From the popularity of tough guys to the prevalence of nianggun, Japan's "niangbao culture", the United States has been the driving force?

Source: Global Times

In recent years, the East Asian entertainment industry has been enthusiastic about "small fresh meat" and male actors pursuing feminine wind, which began in Japan and South Korea, and Japan is earlier than South Korea, and the United States is believed to be the driving force behind it. Some commentators said that for a long time after World War II, the United States used its huge influence and discourse power in Japan to reconstruct Japanese society, and the "yin and yang decline" of Japanese performing arts culture gradually had a penetrating impact on the aesthetics and lifestyles of the public, and spread to neighboring countries and regions.

From the popularity of tough guys to the prevalence of female cannons

The tough guy image has been "dominated" in Japan, such as the popular movie "Hunt" in the 1970s, and the male protagonist Ken Takakura is deeply loved by audiences in Japan and Asian countries. Ken Takakura is also known as "the last tough guy of the Showa era". From the late Showa period to the present, tough guys have gradually declined in the Japanese entertainment industry, replaced by feminine male stars with long hair, makeup, and neutral dresses. The commonly known "mother cannon culture" is becoming more and more popular. "Niang cannon culture" mainly refers to the phenomenon of femininity of men from the entertainment industry, who are feminine in terms of dress, appearance, language, action, etc., packaged into small fresh meat, feminine, and lack of masculinity that men should have.

In 1974, Ken Takakura, stills from the movie "Master".

How did The Tough Guys of Japan get replaced by the Lady Cannon? This has to mention one man, Kitagawa, and the entertainment kingdom he single-handedly created, the Janis Studio. Johnny Hitagawa — whose cross-cultural background is a glimpse of the name that combines things — is a Japanese-American who was born in Los Angeles in 1931. After World War II, Kitagawa returned to Japan, first working as a translator at the U.S. Embassy in Japan, and later entering The Japanese showbiz.

Kitagawa is arguably the first of Japan's modern entertainment and idol industry, and his position in the Japanese entertainment industry is unsurpassed. The superstars of The Janis Office are basically distinguished from well-known "boy bands", such as Takuya Kimura and Masahiro Nakai of "SMAP", Tomoya Nagase of "TOKIO" and so on. In 1995, Janis's popular male star Takuya Kimura shot an advertisement for a new lipstick in Japan (pictured), and his soft eyes and sexy action of applying lipstick instantly detonated the Japanese female group. In the next two months, Takuya Kimura's lipstick sold 3 million!

According to Japanese media reports, Kitagawa personally selects about 200 teenagers aged 8 to 15 years old to enter Janis every year to train as reserve artists. Janis receives as few as 400,000 applications from teenagers each year and as high as 1.5 million a year.

Brainwash Japanese people with entertainment programs

Kitagawa's success was inseparable from the social context of the time. When he returned to Japan, anti-American sentiment was on the rise. In 1954, the United States tested the first hydrogen bomb on a bikini reef in the Pacific, causing casualties among 23 crew members of a Japanese fishing boat sailing on the high seas, provoking a new round of protests and anti-American upsurge among the Japanese. After the end of World War II, Japan became a puppet of the United States politically, economically, and culturally, so in order to completely submit to Japan, the United States at that time began to implement a long-term plan, taking a series of actions to transform the Japanese ideology and culture.

First, at the strategic level, the person who proposed this strategy was George Kennan, a veteran American diplomat, whose starting point at the time was to use Japan to contain the Soviet Union. According to its strategy, to control Japan, we must first control the japanese people's thoughts and public opinion, and the control of Japanese public opinion must be left to "experts who understand Japan." Therefore, under the arrangement and instruction of the United States, some Japanese war criminals during World War II escaped trial and became media tycoons and became important pawns at the tactical level of the United States. For example, Shotaro Masatoshi, a war criminal who encouraged young Japanese to invade China, founded the Yomiuri Shimbun with the support of the United States. It was under the strong impetus of this man that the Japanese accepted baseball, which originated in the United States, and also accepted the Atomic Energy Program of the United States. Masatoshi Matsutaro suggested that the United States take the popular route, brainwash the Japanese people with entertainment programs, and weaken the masculine temperament of Japanese society through public opinion propaganda and turn it into a flexible temperament. In the news reports of the United States, Shotosontaro was fully affirmed, calling him "Kane, a citizen of Japan."

The vanguard of U.S. strategy execution is Kitagawa. Kitagawa's first translation job after returning to Japan was reported to serve the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group. Moreover, the first "boy band" trained at the beginning of Kitagawa's acting career was mainly performed by the US military. There are also media in Japan that have tried to investigate in depth the connection behind Kitagawa and the United States, but those involved in the investigation are allegedly threatened by the Japanese underworld, making the investigation impossible to conduct... Some people are convinced of this, and some people think that these are nonsense.

To this day, Kitagawa's relationship with the CIA remains an unsolved mystery. There are many opinions on whether Japan's female cannon culture is behind the United States, but the CIA's manipulation of culture and public opinion is not lacking in precedent, such as the famous American feminist pioneer Gloria Stannon and the "Lady's Magazine" founded by it. There are also foreign media mentioning that many modern pop trends and art models, as well as popular artists such as the American painter Jackson Pollock, have been exported by the CIA as cultural weapons during the Cold War.

The Nianggun culture has soil in Japan

Of course, the popularity of the Nichigan culture in Japan is not "water without a source, wood without a root", nor is it something that can be promoted by Kitagawa alone. In the final analysis, there is a "soil" in traditional Japanese culture that nourishes the growth of the Mother Gun culture. According to japan's "Ancient Chronicles", the ancestor of the Japanese emperor, Takezun, once mixed with men and women to assassinate the leader of the enemy army when he was 16 years old. In Japan's long-standing Kabuki culture, it is also the male appearance that is more feminine in appearance to play the role of women. The monarchs of the Edo period also summoned beautiful teenagers throughout the country to perform song and dance performances in feminine costumes.

In modern times, the star Mei Lun Akihiro, known as Japan's "drag queen", has pushed the artist's "male and female" style to a new height. As a male star who wears women's clothes on stage and in real life, he has many famous "fans", such as Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata. Yukio Mishima once praised Akihiro Tsuneyoshi as a "beauty from the sky", and there was a romantic story of the wind and snow moon between the two of them. Later, when Akihiro Miwa openly admitted his homosexuality, he once said: "This is not murder and arson, this is the history and culture of Japan since ancient times." ”