Came across this on reddit this morning. After having studied "Spirituality and Japanese Design Practise" (via Ambidextrous or the AIGA), the notion of the Japanese intuiting much more than their Western counterparts has been of interest to me. A tidbit from this interesting LiveJournal entry:

Japanese social interaction is all about intuiting the other person’s wishes without discussing them openly, at the same time that they are intuiting your wishes without discussing them openly, so that although nothing is ever verbalised, the two of you will always exist in a compromise position of equilibrium. If you like someone, that intuitive part goes into overdrive, because you should be able to understand everything about that person without them ever telling you, and you should be able to please them without ever asking how, even more than you would with a normal person.

I also can’t emphasise enough just how passive the passive partner is. The way a woman kisses is by submissively opening her mouth, not moving her tongue unless she is cued to do so; if she’s really feminine she won’t open her mouth at all, until she’s told to. Sometimes women will move around a (very) little during sex, but mostly not at all. The slang term for a woman who lies completely still in bed is maguro (tuna). For me, with my western sensibilities and preconceptions, calling someone a ‘tuna’ in bed sounds like an insult, conjuring up images of cold dead fish, but in Japan that word has a very positive connotation. Tuna’s an expensive delicacy.

Part of what was so bamboozling the first time I had sex in Japan was that I didn’t know there was a Way of Sex, with strict gendered roles, and I just was happily doing my own thing, throwing my partner into total confusion. Seiji told me much later that dating me made him feel like he was gay, because I was active in bed, and he couldn’t connect that with anything except masculinity.

Don’t think of it as a piece on sex, think of the nature of the predefined roles and how they shape life and culture there. And, more interestingly, how rebellion would come to be directed 180° from the status quo — perhaps shedding light on Japan’s peculiar sexual fantasies and fetishes as glamorised in the West through their manga and stereotyped pop culture.