Eh.
>Certainly, the audience for yuri is not as overwhelmingly male as the yaoi audience is female, and obviously, there are yuri manga that cater to lesbian women specifically, most yuri manga that have been translated into English are male-targeted.
Again wrong.
> It's possible that I might be wrong about the overall consumer demographics in Japan, having a skewed perception from only the Western Internet manga community, but even if that's the case, it would be irrelevant, as Useless Princesses is a Seinen manga, and this is, in fact, the Western Internet manga community.
Precisely. Guess who reads GL mostly in the west.
>As to homophobia, of course there are many places where it is vastly worse than in Japan, which has seen some legal progress to more equal rights, and much as in Western countries there are differences in acceptance by age groups, regions, rural-urban divides, etc. You can even elaborate further, if you want, about the different forms that homophobia has taken in different cultures, and whether or not you can directly compare them as "better" or "worse" rather than different, etc.
Dude, fuck off. You yourself had proposed those 'ratings', and offered to 'prove' that it is indeed 'worse' there.
>In referring to the West, I was thinking mainly of the experience of most young Westerners living in urban areas, so it was my mistake to overgeneralize in my desire to keep my comment short, as experiences will vary across regions and individuals.
Yes, again you prove your ignorance. Id had maybe been inclined to agree that theres lower tolerance for people not adhering to the norm in the rural areas of Japan, but as far as urban settings are concerned? No dice.
>With all that said, it is clear that the practical state of social acceptance of LGBT people in Japan is pretty bad, especially in regards to being in the closet. The person you were responding to may have been overgeneralizing, but the basic ideas--hiding, repressing, staying in the closet, the intense pressure to conform-- are essentially correct. For example, from a 2013 poll cited in this 2017 article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1550428X.2017.1338172 , "only 5% of Japanese... said that they have a colleague, close friend, or relative who is lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender" (compared to an average 46% across Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Norway, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and the United States). 5% of Japanese knowing an LGBT person is implausibly low, considering that studies have found around 7-9% of Japanese people are LGBT, indicating widespread pressure to remain in the closet. This matched the 2017 article's data gathered from Japanese LGBT people on the great difficulty of coming out. I would recommend reading through it, as it provides a more informed and statistically grounded approach to the topic than random Internet commenters can provide.
1) Yeah, its clear that youd panicked and had to procure something on the fly. That in turn makes remarks like the one on which youd closed on mildly infuriating.
2) Percentages you mention are most certainly wrong. LGBTw(hatever) population is estimated to be at best at the size of 3 to 5% (and that statistics include Bs ; without Bs its less than, or at most 1%). Next there is a 5% figure of Japans population acquainted in some way with people from the community, which is contrasted with whooping 46% for other nations. That number is plain wrong ; forget the math, which makes the realization of such kind of network downright impossible - I know for a fact that for at least two of the mentioned countries the cited 'average' is bullshit. Extrapolating from that, I can safely assume that 'researchers' didnt do their due diligence as far as checking the data is concerned. How did this shit got through peer review?
But hey, lets assume that they are correct. What exactly are you trying to 'prove' with this? How do social clustering and average contact network look like quantity-, and structural-wise in Japan? How do they change when you adjust for big five personality traits? Or population density of an area that subjects lives in? Or cultural customs? Or for degree of intimacy that would warrant 'coming out'. None of these (arbitrarily chosen ; I could easily invent other criteria for meaningful data interpretation) things were factored in there, or even alluded to. Raw numbers themselves mean very little, and alone theyre certainly not enough a proof to draw the kind of conclusion that had been presented in the 'paper'. So, allegedly 5% is socially aware of (at most, but not really) the other 7% in their environment, so what? Thats the worst kind of 'homophobia' you could come up with? Not being able to disclose your sexual orientation to a casual acquaintance?