Cosmetic Surgery for Children is Rising
December 1, 2008
“I’ll never forget how shocked I was when I discovered the age of a certain patient of mine. She was nine,” a plastic surgeon tells Shukan Shincho. That was eight years ago. Since then, the weekly finds, cosmetic surgery for elementary school children has become commonplace.
We are told what 90% of them are after: folded eyelids, to make their eyes look bigger and their faces more Western.
Sometimes it’s the mother who’s the enthusiastic one, and when I get the child alone she’ll burst into tears and say, ‘I don’t want folded eyelids; my mom made me come.”
Over the next two years, I did it over and over, but it was no use—the girl simply did not turn into Ayumi Hamasaki (singer).”
Then there’s the case of the fourth-grade boy whose mother ordered the doctor to remove all body hair so that it wouldn’t grow back. Why? “He has such white skin—I’m going to make a unisex celebrity out of him,” the mother said. “The boy himself was determined to proceed, so we went ahead,” the doctor tells the magazine. “Then the boy went berserk: ‘It hurts! Stop!’ Two of the office staffers had to hold him down.”
Read full article: Cosmetic surgery for children becoming commonplace (Japan Today)
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related? Possibly, I dunno. Interesting/weird/depressing though.
Thank you for the link, it is an interesting reportage. I do not like this Westernization trend though.
Absolutely nuts some people, that’s all there is too it.
It is easy to make the fundamental attribution error, but we have to keep in mind that usually multiple factors are involved in any given behavior.
In some cases, I believe there is good reason for it. I see some of my students with giant moles on their faces or the like and they are generally shunned by the other students for it. In these cases, it can be beneficial.
Also, you can do cosmetic surgery to get hair removed and never come back? That’s something I should look into…
Indeed, sometimes the surgery can be beneficial.