froghawk on 24/10/2014 at 00:24

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Definitely not kid friendly, but I just watched Paranoia Agent, and it was great! Shockingly deep, complex and ambiguous storyline for a brief TV series. You can't go wrong with Satoshi Kon. It's a shame his career was cut so short.

I seem to remember Kon's films Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers being kid friendly, but it's been a long time since I saw them. Still, they're great movies, and neither has an R rating, so check them out.

Tony_Tarantula on 25/10/2014 at 18:06

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It's kind of like the recurring "nosebleed" gag. Best bet is to incorporate some cultural sensitivity, chalk it up to "being japanese" and roll with it.

demagogue on 27/10/2014 at 10:57

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I'm on Burmese unstable internet, so making a post is difficult, but I'll try.

I can offer maybe a little insight, but it depends on how deep down the rabbit hole of Japanese culture you really want to go.

There's definitely a thing with "body" humor in Japan, and something like kancho (kids' practice of sticking two hands up somebody's crotch) has to be one of the oldest running gags ever. There's a thing that it's always interesting to pay attention to people's butts. Public nudity, especially baths, isn't as much a problem. This is the strain that's part of Shinto naturalism of Japanese culture, where there's nothing wrong about the natural part of the world... It's the reason cleaning women have no hesitation cleaning a men's restroom right under the stream of a man urinating, because that's just natural part of the world and nothing to even notice.

Then that's in contrast with another strain about privacy, violations, and public humiliation also being a real thing that people feel strongly (the "wa" or harmony being shattered), which goes with the whole Asian and Buddhist thinking about respect and deference.

So the boundary between what's acceptable and unacceptable with regards to other people's bodies is both more fluid maybe, or anyway there are these two contrasting strains, one of them says the body and nudity is nothing special, the other saying touching people is a public humiliation that sink people to the lowest hells, so the stakes are higher (violations are more ambiguous and more humiliating). So my theory is something like that is maybe the engine of getting humor out of inadvertent boob and crotch grabs.

And then you have dirty minded gropey ojisans that are historically considered the funniest people ever, and for younger people, Japanese kids stereotypically have zero confidence, so there's always the joke they'd never be so bold to actually grope someone; it'd have to be an accident. Ah, then there's also the Japanese brand of fantasy-stoking, where the guy really wants to grope, but has to do it "accidentally" or through some excuse, and women want to do it too so we can all pretend it's not just a male power fantasy... And that's a joke. They aren't as self-conscious like Westerners would be that it looks like we really just want to outright grope the girl and are playing this accident version to get a voyeristic thrill.

But I mean, like I started with, kancho, the backside crotch shot, is the oldest gag ever, and that juvenile part is still around, or their flavor of it. It may not really need all that explanation.

I mean it's humor, so it's an ineffable thing that you can't really explain because it's something people feel, so what I said is probably still bullshit. Everybody has their favorite theories of Japanese culture that always keep changing because who really knows these things. But it's still something you definitely feel living in Japan, why it's funny and why it's a thing the way it is.