¿Crisis erótica en Japón?

INFORME | ABSTINENCIA A LA JAPONESA
Crisis sexual en el país del sol naciente
Yasuyo, ama de casa, lleva ocho años sin practicar sexo. Ryotaro, comerciante, dos… Sólo el 34% de los japoneses lo hace una vez por semana, por un 72% de los españoles. La crisis sexual está hundiendo aún más la alicaída natalidad de los nipones
JUNKO TAKAHASHI desde Tokyo

Los japoneses son un pueblo orgulloso. Pero su vanidad se descoyunta cada vez que se publican encuestas sobre sexo. En la nación con menos huelgas del mundo, la gente sólo se abstiene del deber conyugal.

El síntoma más llamativo de esta crisis del sexo son los matrimonios asexuados. Ryotaro Kono, de 39 años, tiene varias empresas de alimentación en Tokio y todavía se acuerda de la última vez que se acostó con su mujer. Fue hace dos años. Ni siquiera le parece demasiado. “Antes de esa vez, esperé otros ocho años”, asegura Kono, casado desde hace tres lustros y con una hija pequeña de 10 años.

El alejamiento llegó al poco de haberse casado, debido al exceso de trabajo. Al principio, su mujer se quejaba de la falta de actividad en la cama, pero en cuanto tuvo el primer bebé, fue ella la que, siguiendo la tradición nipona, dejó de ver a su marido como un compañero de juegos. Así llegaron al acuerdo actual: no importa lo que se quieran, y aseguran que es mucho. En adelante, nada de sexo. “Me da pereza hacer el amor. Además, mi esposa es mi familia, y siento vergüenza de comunicarme sexualmente con ella” explica Kono a Crónica.

Por extraño que parezca, el caso de esta pareja no tiene nada de inusual en el Japón de hoy. “Entre nuestros clientes que quieren construir casas nuevas, la demanda de alcobas separadas está aumentando”, dice Shuichiro Takeshima, empleado de una firma constructora.

África, Occidente y la lucha contra el sida

From The Times Literary Supplement
March 5, 2008
AIDS and evangelists in Africa
There is no single answer to the problem of HIV/AIDS, but solutions cannot be imposed from the outside
Steven Epstein

Helen Epstein
THE INVISIBLE CURE
Africa, the West and the fight against AIDS
326pp. Viking. £16.99.

On one of her many trips to Africa in recent years to investigate the state of the AIDS epidemic, Helen Epstein (no relation) visited the main hospital in a district known for its tea plantations, about 200 miles from Uganda’s capital, Kampala. There was one doctor at the facility, and on occasion some nurses. The X-ray machine could be powered up for an hour a day at best. Those patients not sleeping on the floor were sharing beds. The bathrooms had been gutted and served “as aviaries for the finches that made their nests in the porcelain scraps on the floor”. Some patients had AIDS; others, suffering from onchocerciasis, or “river blindness”, had long parasitic worms that formed wriggly lumps beneath the skin.

To write about AIDS in Africa for a Western audience is to confront a sharp narrative dilemma. How do you tell stories – often painful, sometimes overwhelming – without re-inforcing a sense of awful inevitability about Africa’s many problems? How do you convey the startlingly different logic by which life operates there, without trafficking in myths and stereotypes, and without solidifying a perception of Africa as radically “other”, and thus unknowable and unreachable? Epstein, a scientist turned essayist, has been piecing this account together for more than a decade in a series of lucid articles published in the New York Review of Books. Collecting that material between the covers of a single volume is a tremendous service – even if, as so often is the case for books with such origins, she has failed to eliminate distracting repetition across chapters or solve some basic problems of exposition. (Why are elementary facts about AIDS treatment and testing in Africa relegated to an appendix?) But her keen eye for detail, suspicion of conventional wisdom, and compelling prose carry the reader along. She does not shy away from telling horror stories about East and Southern Africa, home to about 40 per cent of the world’s cases of HIV infection. There are stories not just of deplorable conditions, tragic missteps and profound institutional failures, and sometimes of the hideous things that people do to one another – like the case of the South African teenage boys who stoned to death their neighbour, an HIV-positive AIDS counsellor, because she had brought “shame on the community”. But Epstein also juxtaposes failures with impressive accomplishments. Though her portraits are vividly painted, her desire is not to describe but to explain. And if she succeeds better than most in avoiding the standard portrayal of Africa as unfathomable and unchangeable, it is because she interweaves her storytelling with careful analysis. She shows how human efforts to control disease often fail but sometimes succeed, and by placing outcomes and actions squarely in their historical and cultural context – including, not incidentally, the long historical ripple effects of Western colonialism that continue to promote the spread of disease while hindering its containment – she shows us why people believe what they believe or do what they do. Finally, by linking what happens in Kampala and Pretoria to what goes on in Geneva, Washington, DC, and elsewhere, Epstein shows how the intractable dilemmas that come to seem quintessentially “African” are often caused, or compounded, by forces and agendas that originate elsewhere and over which Africans themselves exercise limited control.

Sobre los besos

January 31, 2008
Affairs of the Lips: Why We Kiss
Researchers are revealing hidden complexities behind the simple act of kissing, which relays powerful messages to your brain, body and partner

By Chip Walter

When passion takes a grip, a kiss locks two humans together in an exchange of scents, tastes, textures, secrets and emotions. We kiss furtively, lasciviously, gently, shyly, hungrily and exuberantly. We kiss in broad daylight and in the dead of night. We give ceremonial kisses, affectionate kisses, Hollywood air kisses, kisses of death and, at least in fairytales, pecks that revive princesses.

Lips may have evolved first for food and later applied themselves to speech, but in kissing they satisfy different kinds of hungers. In the body, a kiss triggers a cascade of neural messages and chemicals that transmit tactile sensations, sexual excitement, feelings of closeness, motivation and even euphoria.

Not all the messages are internal. After all, kissing is a communal affair. The fusion of two bodies dispatches communiqués to your partner as powerful as the data you stream to yourself. Kisses can convey important information about the status and future of a relationship. So much, in fact, that, according to recent research, if a first kiss goes bad, it can stop an otherwise promising relationship dead in its tracks.

Some scientists believe that the fusing of lips evolved because it facilitates mate selection. “Kissing,” said evolutionary psychologist Gordon G. Gallup of the University at Albany, State University of New York, last September in an interview with the BBC, “involves a very complicated exchange of information—olfactory information, tactile information and postural types of adjustments that may tap into underlying evolved and unconscious mechanisms that enable people to make determinations … about the degree to which they are genetically incompatible.” Kissing may even reveal the extent to which a partner is willing to commit to raising children, a central issue in long-term relationships and crucial to the survival of our species.

VIH, preservativos y abstinencia

Leyendo el nuevo artículo de Ana Belén Carmona en El Confidencial sobre los preservativos y las actitudes ante la prevención del VIH, me ha encocorado ver luego dos comentarios tipo de las huestes conservadoras. Uno, que el preservativo falla y que no hay nada mejor que una pareja monógama y fiel. Porque como la gente solo tiene una pareja en toda su vida, que a su vez no ha tenido ninguna otra pareja, y se mantienen siempre fieles, qué mejor alternativa, ¿verdad? Suena increíble, pero todavía se esgrimen estos argumentos.

El segundo comentario es más elaborado y ya lo he visto tergiversado varias veces: el caso de Uganda. Lo primero que habría que mencionar es que el contexto social de ese país es tan distinto del de España que no tiene mucho sentido calcar las propuestas de prevención que allí funcionaron. De hecho, es justamente esa ignorancia del contexto lo que les anima a defender impúdicamente la abstinencia como clave para el descenso notable de nuevas infecciones por VIH en Uganda. Lo cierto es que fue una mezcla del aumento del uso de condones, así como la restricción en el número de parejas (en Uganda abundan las relaciones concurrentes y eso multiplica las probabilidades de contagio) lo que llevó a ese descenso.

Para un recuento más elaborado de este planteamiento con cifras y por expertos que han trabajado en la zona, recomiendo especialmente el libro de Helen Epstein The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS o alguno de sus artículos en la New York Review of Books o el New York Times. Otra buena fuente a la que acudir son los informes del Instituto Guttmacher, como por ejemplo éste.

Placer, procreación y selección natural

Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 51(2) 2006

Sexual Pleasure, Procreation
and Natural Selection
WITH PLEASURE: THOUGHTS ON THE NATURE OF HUMAN
SEXUALITY. Paul Abramson and Steven Pinkerton. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
The pulses of vigorous theorizing about sexuality that started up about
thirty-five years ago show no signs of abating. The first pulse came from
feminist writers, who insisted that sex be satisfying to women as well as
to men. Anne Koedt’s (1973) widely discussed essay, “The Myth of the
Vaginal Orgasm,” noted that penile-vaginal intercourse often failed to
give women orgasms. The essay valorized clitoral stimulation by a male
or female partner for this purpose, even when it takes forms that cannot
lead to conception. Soon after, gay liberation gave birth to “social
constructionism,” a perspective that theorized sexual orientation to be a
socio-cultural creation. More recently, evolutionary psychology has
sought to explain sexual behavior and interests as the product of natural
selection and sexual selection.
With Pleasure, by Paul Abramson and Steven Pinkerton (2002),
builds on the foundations laid by feminism, gay liberation and evolutionary
psychology, and thus gives us the opportunity of seeing the uses
to which these developments are being put in current theorizing about
sexuality.1 The volume is a chimera, partly an exposition of scientific
ideas, and partly an effort to persuade readers of the desirability of certain
social and cultural changes. Readers will find an abundance of material
on various aspects of human (and sometimes non-human) sexuality. The
authors not only summarize and sometimes criticize research and ideas of
others, but also develop provocative ideas of their own.
Central to the authors’ project is the goal of reconstituting theorizing
about sex so that its central organizing principle is not procreation, but
pleasure. This is a direction for theorizing that would have been unimaginable
fifty years ago. Social change of the last half-century, including
the widespread use and cultural acceptance of contraception, the more
controversial decriminalization of abortion, the large-scale entry of
women into the paid labor force and their consequent need to control
their fertility, and the flourishing of feminist and gay social movements
enabled this theoretical enterprise.

Hijos de homosexuales

A Helena, futura madre lesbiana

Estuve ayer dudando si colgar el artículo sobre los hijos de lesbianas. ¿No ha quedado ya claro que su adaptación es más que adecuada?¿Que no padecen “confusiones” de ningún tipo? ¿Que lo único que necesitan son figuras de apego estables y que les den cariño? ¿Que esto sucede tanto en parejas homosexuales como heterosexuales? ¿Realmente hace falta insistir en lo obvio? Sí, hace falta…
Después leer un extracto sobre las creencias (no llegan a pensamientos) del antiguo presidente del Gobierno, es evidente que queda una labor dura por delante. Veamos lo que dice Aznar en sus Cartas a un joven español (2007):

- Familia: hombre y mujer. Por mi parte yo creo, Santiago, en una familia compuesta de un hombre y una mujer, con hijos, y extendida a todos los miembros que por costumbre, por consanguinidad o integración, pertenecen a ella. Existen otras formas de convivencia, homosexuales o heterosexuales. Hay que respetarlo. Pero no estoy de acuerdo en que se considere cualquier situación equivalente a la familia de la que te hablo. Ni equivalente, ni alternativo.
- Hijos de homosexuales. No sé, y creo que nadie lo sabe, qué pasará cuando un niño o una niña no puedan llamar padre ni madre a quienes se dicen sus progenitores pero que en muchos casos no lo van a ser. ¿Qué idea del mundo y de la realidad van a tener unos niños así criados? ¿La de que todo es posible? ¿La de que las leyes pueden dar satisfacción a todos los deseos?

Canibalismo

Archives of Sexual Behavior, August 2007  10.1007/s10508-007-9227-7

Clinical Case Report Series
Good Enough To Eat

Friedemann Pfäfflin
Forensic Psychotherapy, Ulm University, Am Hochsträss 8, 89081 Ulm, Germany
Contact Information     Friedemann Pfäfflin
Email: friedemann.pfaefflin@uni-ulm.de

Abstract

In mythology, religion, and literature, there are many examples of cannibalism that have been passed down over the centuries and which do not strike us as shocking as long as they remain fixed in a symbolic context. Things only become problematic when cannibalistic impulses are taken literally and put into practice. Apart from situations of extreme emergency in which this rare phenomenon might enjoy a certain sympathy, it also occurs within the context of serious sexual offences. Recently, in Germany, there was the case of a man who used the internet to find a person who wanted to have himself eaten. The victim’s consent unsettled not only the public at large, but also the judiciary, which at first did not know how the case was legally to be appropriately assessed. In a first trial in January 2004, the man was sentenced to a comparatively short prison term of only a few years, a sentence that was lifted by the Federal Supreme Court. In a fresh trial in May 2006, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. In this essay, I discuss to what extent mythological, religious, and artistic models of cannibalism express something fundamentally anthropological and how concrete examples should be assessed against this background.

Keywords  Cannibalism - Forensic sexology - Forensic psychiatry - Responsibility

Dificultades eróticas en Egipto

Truth or dare
Talking about it is one thing, telling the truth quite another: consulting the experts, Karim El-Khashab dares divulge the taboo of taboos. 

Targeting Egyptians, Arab satellite TV has been promoting aphrodisiacs like never before. In one recent advertisement, a middle-aged man comes home to find his young wife complaining that she tried his mobile phone “all night long” but found him “out of service”; sighing he replies that this is “normal”, but after she grudgingly turns away, the drug appears, promising inexhaustible “credit”. And advertisements are but one way in which sexual issues — a subject previously kept firmly out of the public sphere — have forced themselves on collective consciousness. This must have to do with the fact that people can no longer marry as young or as easily as they once could; harassment of women on the streets is but one sign of sexual frustration turning into a serious social problem. But to a far greater extent than the accessibility of sex — the legitimate availability of private space, for example — it is conditions like erectile dysfunction — an affliction, according to a National Research Centre report published three weeks ago, of some eight per cent of Egypt’s male population — that state- run and private television have concentrated on, with whole segments of their programmes, even a weekly show, dedicated to problems between married couples in the bedroom.

Tantra (II)

Journal of the History of Sexuality
Volume 15, Number 1, January 2006

Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion. By H UGH B. URBAN. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. pp. 388. $60.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
Of the many books on tantra flooding booksellers, this is the one that should be read first. Urban’s study is superbly written and well researched, and it represents a sophisticated understanding of the political and religious dynamics of cultural encounter. It goes well beyond the often facile Saidian and postcolonial narratives of the encounter of India with the “West” to present a nuanced exploration of the cultural and religious dialectics that
produced “Tantrism.” The book takes us from ancient texts to www.tantra.com, and historians will find here doors to rooms previously unimagined.
Readers with little background in South Asian studies will likely find
the introduction the most difficult part of the book. It is here that Urban
documents the various uses of the term tantra in premodern South Asian
religions. It helps to keep in mind a singular fact when beginning this book.
Before the nineteenth century we find texts called Tantras and practitioners
called tantrikas (though they are usually called this by others). Nonetheless,
Tantrism or tantra as a generic category designating a self-consciously
constructed religious tradition does not exist before the colonial encounter.
Tantrism comes into being as an imagined category (like the category Hinduism),
a category produced in the dialectical encounter between Indians
and Europeans (27).

Educación sexual en India

The great Indian sex debate
The Indian government’s recent attempt to introduce sex education for school children has provoked a vigorous debate. In the first of two articles, the BBC’s Jyotsna Singh considers the case in favour of a more open discussion of sex in schools.

“Who says discussing sex is against Indian culture? I don’t think this is a point worth debating any more,” Naina Kapoor, Director of the NGO, Sakshi, told the BBC.

“We are simply in denial when we say things like it is against our culture,” she says.

Sakshi is a leading Delhi-based NGO, trying to create sexuality awareness in India.

Needless to say their job has not been easy.

“Parents, teachers, students none of them are comfortable talking about the subject initially,” says Smita Bhartia, a programme co-ordinator at Sakshi.

“But we don’t just barge in and start talking about the subject. We organise seminars, workshops to try and get people talking about it.”

Taboo

India is world famous for its ancient manual on sex - the Kamasutra - and temples with erotic structures in Khajuraho in central India.

So, many ask, how come sex has become a taboo subject in modern India?

Etnografía clínica y cultura sexual

Annual Review of Sex Research 1999

Clinical ethnography and sexual culture
Herdt, Gilbert

When speaking of a complex or a small-scale sexual society should we assume that the individual’s subjectivity is covered by the desires of the group? In the long tradition of the liberal Western democracies, ideologies about the role of sexuality in marriage and family, personhood, and personal subjectivity have been strongly inflected by Judeo-Christian beliefs in the direction of such an assumption. Through the emphasis upon heterosexual marriage and procreation as the prime prerogative of sexuality, sexual diversity as registered in social behavior and subjectivity is thus restricted. Historically, these ideas in the Western tradition have subjected “sexual difference” to theories of disease, subversion, deviance, and abnormality, as is well known (D’Emilio & Freedman, 1988; Foucault, 1980; Gagnon & Simon, 1973; Robinson, 1976). But we can also consider their implications for understanding the non-Western world. “It is assumed,” Sudhir Kakar (1995, p. 27 has warned, “that given the homogeneity of various groups in a traditional society where individual divergence within the group is minimal, the mask of desire crafted by the group’s culture will also fit a majority of its members.” In this article, I explore the implications of this idea and reconsider some aspects of the epistemology of current cross-cultural study of sexual cultures in a time of accelerating globalization (Herdt, 1999).

In this article, I will discuss the constructs of “sexual culture,” “clinical ethnography,” and “sexual subjectivity” in Western and nonWestern groups as reflected in the light of research over the past decade. If assumptions of homogeneous sexual subjectivity are problematic for Western communities, as noted below, how much more tenuous must the assertion of sameness be for the sexual cultures of non-Western peoples? Sociocultural studies of sexuality have made progress in theorizing how individual differences might be placed into the equation of cross-cultural interpretations (Connell & Dowsett, 1992; DiMauro, 1995; Suggs & Miracle, 1999; Tiefer, 1990). However, the constructs and understanding of this area remain in need of development. Over the past decade, the gap has been filled largely by postmodern theorists, and subsequently queer theorists, who have critically challenged aspects of these ideas through “difference” theories of sexuality (Butler, 1993). As in the past, these scholars have tended to empty individual subjectivity of its meaning and vitality, undermining the fact that sexuality is more of a shared project between culture and individual development (Hostetler & Herdt, 1998). One still routinely notices how recent accounts typify individual difference studies as “essentialist,” the province of psychology or biology; conversely, studies pertaining to social differences were typified as “social constructionist,” and thus belonging to anthropology or history, and so on (Robinson, 1976). It is timely to rethink the anachronistic character of such typifications in cross-cultural study.

Terapeuta sexual musulmán

Frank talk from Muslim sex therapist
Cairo-based Heba Kotb tackles sensitive issues within the framework of Islam.
By Jeffrey Fleishman
Times Staff Writer

July 29, 2007

CAIRO — In the delicate realm where the Koran meets human desire, Heba Kotb, a Muslim sex therapist in a ruffled gold head scarf, has strong opinions on vibrators, foreplay, premature you-know-what and why more men can’t seem to locate the G-spot.

An hour in her clinic, where some women wear black abayas that reveal only their eyes, is a liberating venture into a culture that has traditionally relegated talk of sex to a family whisper. Demure she may appear, but Kotb’s voice is strong and unapologetically public. The Koran, she said, forbids sex outside marriage, but within that union carnal satisfaction is a requisite for happiness.

“I deal with pleasure, desire, orgasms, masturbation, sexual frequency and erection problems,” said Kotb, whose TV show, “Big Talk,” is popular across the Arab world. “Neither the Koran nor the Sunna, however, address masturbation. My advice is that it’s OK to masturbate, but only if you need it badly. Masturbation has become more prevalent here because sex is forbidden outside marriage.”

In a society in which male clerics issue fatwas, or religious edicts or opinions, addressing all layers of family life, a feminine voice on something as intimate as sex has made Kotb a celebrity and a cultural revolutionary.

Esposas temporales

¿Esposas temporales o prostitutas?

Los iraníes debaten si los matrimonios de un mes para poder tener relaciones sexuales encubren la prostitución

ÁNGELES ESPINOSA - Teherán
EL PAÍS - Sociedad - 01-07-2007

Mehdieh y Siavosh se han prometido amor… por un mes. Así se lo permite el matrimonio temporal (sigheh) que contempla el islam chií. Pero ni siquiera su incorporación a la ley tras la Revolución Islámica ha logrado vencer los recelos que suscita en la sociedad iraní, tal como ha probado la polémica desatada por las recientes declaraciones de un ministro partidario de promoverlo. Dado que en Irán las relaciones sexuales fuera del matrimonio están prohibidas y penadas, el sigheh ofrece una cobertura legal a jóvenes como Mehdieh y Siavosh que no pueden afrontar una boda. Sin embargo, muchos iraníes temen que sirva para promocionar la prostitución.
Maryam hace un gesto de desconfianza cuando la periodista le menciona el matrimonio temporal. “Sí, en el islam existe esa posibilidad, pero en nuestros días las mujeres lo rechazan”, explica. Más allá de cuestiones religiosas, el énfasis que la sociedad iraní pone en la virginidad de las novias (con chequeo ginecológico incluido) convierte la opción en una hipoteca de su futuro. Aunque nadie hace alarde de ello, el sigheh es aceptado para viudas y divorciadas, pero una virgen necesita el permiso de su padre, algo altamente improbable.

Reconstrucción del himen en mujeres islámicas

Desperate to hide taboo sex
Unmarried Islamic women have surgery to fake their virginity

Hugh Naylor, Chronicle Foreign Service

Sunday, May 20, 2007

(05-20) 04:00 PDT Damascus, Syria — It began as a summer fling.

Ahmad, 23, a smooth-talking student from Damascus, was instantly taken with the 20-year-old beauty with flowing black hair from the coastal town of Lattakia. “I thought she looked so beautiful, so nice,” said Ahmad, who asked that only his first named be used.

He recalled their first encounter: Casual conversation quickly led to kissing. And then one afternoon, kissing led to sex, turning the love-struck couple’s story into a nightmare. Premarital sex is a sin in Islam.

They spent the following weeks desperately searching for a physician who would secretly perform an illegal operation: the surgical reattachment of her hymen. Known as hymenoplasty, or takhit in Arabic, the surgery involves the suturing of the hymen, a mucous membrane that covers the vagina and symbolizes virginity.

No country tracks the number of hymen reconstruction procedures, but anecdotal evidence suggests the surgery is becoming increasingly popular among unmarried women in the Middle East. In Egypt, for example, it has become so widespread that in February Egypt’s top cleric, Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, publicly condoned a religious edict allowing reconstructive hymen surgery.

Ciencia y ficción de la vagina

BMJ 2005;330:970 (23 April), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7497.970
reviews
Book
Origin of the World: Science and the Fiction of the Vagina. Jelto Trenth

The vagina—and here I follow the title of the book by using this term as lay shorthand for women’s genitalia—is a paradoxical part of women’s bodies. Reviled but also revered, it has been received in different historical and cultural contexts with revulsion, awe, fascination, denial, violence, and even entrepreneurialism.

In recent years in the West the academy and popular culture have focused attention on the vagina. This fascinating and lively account of the “science and fiction of the vagina,” which takes its main title from Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting, is part of this shift in interest. It covers an incredibly diverse range of issues, from historical, anthropological, sociological, psychological, sexological, physiological, and other perspectives. In so doing Drenth urges us to think beyond the idea of flesh as just flesh and describes the enormous—and changing—influence of culture and context on how we understand, perceive, and experience anatomy and physiology. Even our “parts” are (much) more than the sum of their parts.

Erotismo en Japón

Japan’s love affairs with sex

By MICHAEL HOFFMAN

Special to The Japan Times

Michael Hoffman delves deep into the carnal history of these islands from the Age of the Gods to the lovelands and soaplands of today
In the beginning, there was sex.

This is true of Japan, though not of Judaeo-Christian and Islamic cultures, whose one God, the Creator of all that exists, is asexual.

Japan’s myriad gods did not create heaven and earth. Rather, it was the sexual congress of heaven and earth that produced the first gods, among them Izanagi and Izanami, “the male who invites” and “the female who invites.” The eighth-century “Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan)” tells us what happened next:

“Izanagi and Izanami stood on the floating bridge of Heaven, and held counsel together, saying: ‘Is there not a country beneath?’ Thereupon they thrust down the jewel-spear of Heaven, and, groping about, therewith found the ocean. The brine which dripped from the point of the spear coagulated and became an island which received the name Ono-goro-jima.”

The creation of Japan had begun.