Name: 古日本的夢幻性愛島 (The Fantasy Sex Island of Ancient Japan)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T08:30:51.000Z
Duration: 10 min 31 s
Description: 【看影片學英語】數萬部 YouTube 影片，搭配英漢字典即點即查，輕鬆掌握單字發音與用法，長久累積看電影不必再看字幕。

In 1682, a Japanese poet wrote a book that would take the nation by storm.

Called “the Life of an Amorous Man”, from its pages flowed the fantastical sexcapades

meant purely for the titillation of the newly emerging middle ages Japanese businessmen.

Sort of the original manga behind the curtain, so to speak.

And as you might suspect,  it did incredibly well.

Imagine if up until this point the internet had no adult content, and then tomorrow they start

But I'm not telling this story to talk about the arrival of overt sexuality into Japanese literature,

Because in those final stanzas, the protagonist finds himself retired to an island

An island entirely populated by women so undersexed that even the arrival of a single sixty-year old man

And once that entered the national psyche, it wasn't going anywhere.

Much like De Soto and the fountain of youth, once horny young Japanese boys heard about

this island, it was inevitable that they would try to find it.

Even if it didn't, you know,  technically exist.

Welcome to Yonaguni, the island of women.

It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that mainland Japanese men passed around stories

of an island where thin, beautiful women with light skin waited with bated breath to ravage

any potential suitor  who might come their way.

Really, I wouldn't be surprised if any society had the same tall tale anywhere on earth.

Hell, I'm pretty sure there was even a Star Trek episode with the same premise, although

if recall correctly their skin was green.

It also doesn't surprise me that the people who shared that story chose an island virtually

as far away from the mainland as their maps could take them.

After all, you're selling a book with the myth as its premise, you really don't want people going to check.

Those authors knew that the best fantasies are ones you can never actually touch.

But eventually, the Japanese mainlanders did touch the island of women.

And for quite some time, it sort of lived up to its name.

Although the women weren't all that thin and their skin was much darker than promised,

the most important part  of the story was proven true.

They were not just willing to have sex,  they were active in their pursuit of it.

Maybe not by modern club goer standards, but far more willing than the women of the mainland.

Why were women of Yonaguni that much more likely to engage in casual sex

And now, obviously there's more  than one answer to this question.

So I'd like to break it down  into three separate ideas.

In Japanese culture, Izanagi and Izanami were a brother and sister pair who desired,

to put it rather euphemistically, a union.

But their first attempt ended in failure, and the child it bore was deformed and broken.

They call him Ebisu, and according to the mythology, the reason he came out deformed

wasn't that he was the child of blood relations, but because the woman had made the first move.

Once Izanagi took charge, however, they were far more successful, and from Izanami's womb

spew forth all the islands of Japan, until at last she birthed a child

When she died, her brother-husband followed her weeping into the land of darkness,

only to spark a light and see her covered in maggots.

In disgust, he fled, sealing her forever beneath an unmovable stone.

And with her locked away, he'd take many more wives and set order to the universe.

Whether intended or not, the moral of the story is fairly clear to me.

In Yonaguni's religion, however,  that was not the case.

Just as on mainland, there were two Gods  who created the world.

And just as on mainland, they were  a brother and sister pair.

In the Okinawan creation myth, Shinerikyu and Amamikyu, as they were known, had five children.

Three boys, who would form king, lord, and commoner, and two girls, who would become

The secular, temporal world would be governed by men, but the spiritual would always be

Men would be split between ruling and ruled, but all women contained the same theoretical essence.

In effect, they were masters  of their own domain.

While there was clearly stratification between the  priestess of the king and those of the common farmer,

in theory all women were capable of achieving the same spiritual balance.

Even the lowest of women was still capable of bringing the harvest.

While men were divided and delineated from birth, in Okinawan mythology,

every woman was born containing  her own internal and indivisible power.

Just as with mainland, the idea was still that women  were here to procreate, and men were here to rule.

But unlike on mainland, how that looked in practice was entirely on its head.

In the aboriginal societies of islands and remote areas where access to new people is

hard to come by, fertility has always been treated as more important than manpower.

To the original people of Yonaguni, the loss of a few men was of little consequence

in the grand scheme of things, but a bad harvest could destroy everything.

Skirmishes between tribes might take a  few dozen men here or there,