ronindave comments

If you like the pic, check out the vid that goes with this on youtube - just check my handle name - the same as it is here - and the title "Giant Gundam Gathers Gawking Geeks"

You apparently want to excuse them and say, that while its not acceptable in todays society, at one time it was, so that makes it somehow alright.

No you assume that. What I want to do is to seperate the perverted from the truly abhorrent. The reason I don't condemn a 27 year old man and 14 woman on face value as harshly as say a 27 year old and an 8 year old is because the former is a society moral - one that has changed in certain cultures but not all. The desire is not abnormal but the action is. However the later is considered abnormal pretty much in all cultures past and present. In this case the desire alone is abnormal.

Basically when it comes to dishing out punishment, IMHO the former should be sentenced to several years in prison and counseling. The latter though should just be taken out behind the wood shed and shot.

Calling me puritanical for simply expressing the view held by most of society is nonsense.

I call you puritanical for your indignant self-righteous tone and your argument which hinges more on emotion than logic

That its ok for a 27 year old man to hook up with a 14 year old girl? Is that what the point of your argument has been? Because if so, then I'll say it again, the one who is sick here, is you.

Folks used to do it all the time without batting an eye until relatively recently and in some countries, they still do. Will you be imposing your cultural timeset morality on them too?

Personally I don't think in today's modern western society a 27 and 14 year old should "hook up" because of the differences in maturity. In the past a 14 year was treated differently and they thought of themselves differently. Now they belong to that second childhood of teenage-hood and a vast gulf seperates them from someone who is even 5 years older than them. But it's not sick in the same sense of someone who lusts after a prepubscent youth which is far more abnormal as I mentioned before both psychologically and biologically.

likeitis is correct more so than puritanical by-the-book molenir. They use to marry girls off at 14 in the past in just about every society on the planet and thought nothing unnatural about. In medieval times, for the purposes of alliances even children could be married but the keypoint was that such marriages could not legally or morally be consummated until 13 - by which time they could biologically reproduce and by this time have feminine attributes.

In modern times, childhood has been legally and societally extended into "teenage-hood" a concept which until relatively recently in the history of human society did not exist before - and it started in the west.

In old Japan, 15 year old boys were expected to fight in their first battles. Tokugawa Ieyasu's mother was 14-15 when she had him.

But in all of this both in Japan and in the West in the past, nowhere was it acceptable to have sex with children - probably because physically such an attraction is abnormal. A child has no sexual attributes of any sort so to find attraction there is again abnormal.

This is why there IS a difference between someone lusting after a 14 year old and someone lusting after an 8 year old. It's simple biology.

The first is wrong both legally by today's laws and morally by today's standards in taking advantage of someone's naivity and presumed innocence. But we are dealing with an attraction that as some have said is with youth who can pass for older because they have attributes which can be considered attractive.

The second though is far more disturbing because it's an attraction that is pyscologically and biologically abnormal. It's an act that is against nature because you don't have animals trying to reproduce with it's young until it reaches the proper biological stage.

So trying to equate an attraction towards an underage girl to that of an attraction to that of a prepubscent one is fallible regardless of what some modern mindsetted law says. Laws and morality change - but there are certain truths about nature that do not.

Anyway, gents going after 14 year olds are perverted but gents going after 8 year olds are truly sick.

I think tmarie has it right more so than the "girls are innocent lambs" commentators. Sounds more like misplaced Victorian ideals of female purity. Sure these guys are predatorial but a number of girls do know the score. I knew of co-worker whose former host family's 17 year old daughter came to stay with her in Tokyo. she lost money so she went out and picked herself up some oyaji-san and came back with money to spare not too mention the odor of smoke, sake, and coffee. She didn't think a thing about and even had photos of her and the dude before they did the deed.

However she was 17 not 14. Only 3 years but at this time in life that is a big difference mentally and physically.

and all those office workers playing solitaire late into the night while waiting to go home - is that part of the work ethic?

the big ones at Tachi Neputa are 22 meters high. Nice photo!

great photo! I've been lucky to catch to a few times over the years.

check out my vid from last year - not as many acrobats then though http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo637rLM0n4&feature=channel_page

hey, this is the photographer here! I just wanted to chime in and say chestnutroastin and cliffworks are correct in that falconry in japan goes way back. Falconry was one of Tokugawa Ieyasu favorite sports and the earliest written account is in the Nihon Shoki (early 8th Century) which claims falconry goes back to the Fourth Century. while that might be debatable, it's obvious that by the 8th century at least, falconry was a well established custom in Japan.