A GLOMM Non-Booting
/I received an email from a source in Japan that made a serious allegation:
I unfortunately have another addition to the GLOMM ineligibility list. This time it's the former head of the JCMA (Japan Close-up Magic Association) who was arrested for touching up a guy who was sleeping, and recently paid off two other children in settlements after being accused of the same.
It's been an open secret in Japan that he likes housing young boys for sleepovers, and amazingly he'd been doing it for years before anyone thought to step in. Even more amazingly, he has set up a new magic group for children after getting booted out of the JCMA.
The name of this creep is Shigeru Tashiro.
For those who are new here, the GLOMM is the magic organization I started which everyone with an interest in magic is already a member of. But you get kicked out if you’re a convicted sex offender (or because I personally don’t like you.)
Now, I specifically chose to kick out “convicted” sex offenders because it gets messy if you have a less clear-cut standard. And I didn’t want to have to spend a minute of my life contemplating whether some specific accusation was serious enough to kick someone out of my made-up magic organization.
So, since Shigeru Tashiro apparently settled out of court, he will not be kicked out of The GLOMM.
In fact, if anyone actually bothers to do a little fucking research, they’d realize that Shigeru Tashiro actually has a really good excuse for molesting that guy while he was sleeping. According to this brief article from the Tokyo Reporter:
Tashiro, who has been accused of quasi-indecent assault, admits to the allegations. “I touched him out of curiosity,” the suspect was quoted by police.
See? Okay? Can we put the pitchforks away now? He wasn’t touching the sleeping man because he’s some weird creep. He did it out of curiosity. That’s all. Just an unrelenting inquisitiveness about the world around us that makes us ponder things like, “Why is the sky blue,” or, “I wonder what this guy’s beautiful cock feels like.”
The article goes on to say:
According to police, Tashiro got to know the victim through an unspecified hobby. At the time of the incident, the victim and another person were staying the night at the residence.
I applaud the Japanese police and media for not mentioning magic specifically—just leaving it as an “unspecified hobby.” Whether you’re the molestor or the molestee, you don’t need the additional shame that would be brought on to you and your family if it got out that you were into magic.
My Japan-insider also alleged in another email:
The really fucked up thing is that his organization was the main accredited FISM group in Japan, which meant that if young Japanese magicians wanted to compete they had to go through him (and I wish I just meant that figuratively).
He slowly removed people off the board who may create problems, so by the end was constantly organizing sleepovers for children with no oversight at all. Even worse, the sleepovers have apparently started up again.
I’ll admit this doesn’t sound great, but what he fails to mention is if Shigeru Tashiro still has unaddressed curiosities he’d like to explore, like, “Precisely how tight are that boy’s buttocks?” or, “How warm is a human rectum?”
Let me guess… you guys want me to kick out Stephen Hawking from the GLOMM too? That’s how ridiculous this anti-curiosity witch-hunt is getting.
If you want to take a deeper dive into this story, I recommend this article. It’s in Japanese, but from what I can tell, the Google translation of the page is 100% absolutely perfect.
The headline says:
“Shigeru Tashiro's face image and Facebook! Semi-forced obscene acts! Gay!?”
It’s just as you learn in journalism school: Who? What? Where? When? Why? Gay!?
Later in the article it said something that really got me thinking.
Shigeru Tashiro criminal action machine of the case caused by suspect
Did Shigeru Tashiro like men?
It's possible that gays are homosexuals.
I mean… I guess I always knew it was conceivable—in a theoretical sense, at least—that gays are homosexuals. But now I’m really considering it for the first time in my life and for some reason it truly does feel possible. In some cases, maybe even probable (as crazy as that is to say).
And finally, that page also compiles some Twitter and Facebook commentary on the case. Many interesting thoughts there. Although the comment below is probably my favorite. It’s a real fucking roller coaster ride. I had to send it through translate on its own to double-check what it said:
You can’t argue with that.