Anomie, Racial Wage, and Critical Aesthetics: Understanding the Negative Externalities of Japanese and Thai Social Practices

This short paper concentrates on three powerful ideas introducedby three important theorists, namely, Merton’s interpretation of anomie in America, Fromm’s critical aesthetics regarding man’s consciousness in relation to nature, and finally Du Bois’ concept of the “racial wage” (Lemert, 2004, pp. 218-240). Those theories are then applied to the Japanese phenomenon of the “compensated date” and the Thai “sex industry”.