Happy Valentine's Day 2018
ハッピーバレンタインデー2018
Happy Valentine's Day to everyone! Since you all come from many different cultural backgrounds, I hope you all enjoy your varying celebrations!!
I celebrate the Japanese way. I've already given chocolates to my fiancée and she'll give me chocolates on White Day (ホワイトデー), the 14th of March. As lesbians, it's complicated trying to figure out who gives on which day, so we decided that the girl who worked would take White Day.
@ayachan If you both worked outside the home (as a housefiancee you're still working), who would take White Day then?
@starbreaker Ugh... I'm not sure I have an answer. My fiancée and I spent a lot of time discussing how we wanted to handle the holiday in our situation, which was the only realistic solution to an otherwise gender-designated holiday that we both still desperately wanted to celebrate.
Traditionally, girls give in February and boys in March. We divided the holiday along traditional cultural roles where the husband works outside home and the wife inside.
Japanese lesbians lead complicated lives.
@ayachan I bet you had long talks about this and other things. I guess there aren't many cultures whose traditions are truly LGBT-friendly.
@starbreaker If you hit up Google (or your search engine of choice), you can track down some good articles about this. There's one in particular I was looking for, but I can't seem to find it. ^-^;;
Do look into it sometime, Matthew. The situation for homosexuals in Japan is far more complicated and culturally unique than it is in the West.
One positive aspect is that there is no villification of homosexuals in our cutlure. ^_^ That's one good thing going for us.
@starbreaker
Off the top of my head, most cultural repression against queer identity in most cultures in that area didn't really exist until western capitalism and cultural institutions were imported in
@CursedConfetti @starbreaker This is not the case for Japanese culture, which has always valued harmony and has always had pressures about men and women becoming husband and wife. The accepted cultural norm--which exists to this day--is for homosexual people to get married to someone of the opposite sex and have relations on the side with those of the same sex.
This is problematic for many, many reasons...but it has nothing to do with Western intervention, as it goes back centuries.
@ayachan
I get that
Mainly what I mean is that the same concepts don't necessarily have direct equivalents, at least how pervasive same sex attraction - antagonistic type sentiments are
But yeah religious and cultural trends that put focus on family often go along similar patterns through history
At no point am I claiming anything definitive, just as a trend
@starbreaker
@CursedConfetti @starbreaker Well, as I said to Matthew originally, Japan has no history of villifying homosexuals and to this day, there is no villification of then, which is wonderful.
Western religions and cultural trends are infamous for such bigotry, which also goes back centuries. :/ Really, I am glad Japan—unlike Korea—has deflected these heinous values that Christians tried to export there as early as the 1600s.