Julie and the Jungle Girl

Prologue

Being a jungle-dweller isn't easy. In real life, it's probably impossible.

Okay, let's not deny that wearing mascara and lipstick in the jungle is ridiculous, but that's not the only reason. The wild, especially a tropical rainforest, is not a very accommodating place. It doesn't care if you fall out of a tree and break your arm, or get a life-threatening infection from a measly little scratch. We are so used to, and take our modern life for granted so much, that when we think of living in the wild, we tend to forget just how harsh nature can be. It's pretty to look at, but let's face it; there's a reason it's called "survival of the fittest", a term which ONLY applies to nature, not civilization.

Then again, that's the reason the jungle fantasy genre is just that; fantasy.

Fantasy is not bad, but gets a bad rap. People who like fantasy are stereotyped as losers who can't or don't want to deal with reality, or are nerds. Right, and Vin Diesel doesn't play Dungeons & Dragons.

Look, life is hard, and reality sucks. And because of that, people want to escape. But it's always important to separate between fantasy and reality. Some folks can't distinguish between fantasy and reality, and that's where problems arise, especially when some mentally unstable dude can't tell the difference between a shooter and reality. Now, there is not link between violent video games and violent actions, and there likely never will be, so let's get that little disclaimer out of the way.

But the point is, fantasy is fantasy. Reality is reality. Most people get the distinction. Some, who through various and complex reasons, cannot distinguish. Sometimes it's their fault, sometimes it's not.

Our subject today is 16-going-on-17-year-old Kim Fujioka, a Japanese-Australian girl from Melbourne, Australia. Her parents are Kenji Fujioka, from Tokyo, and Aoi Nakajima, the daughter of Japanese immigrants to Melbourne, who met while at the University of Melbourne, fell in love, yada, yada, yada, Kenji became an Australian citizen, etc. And thus Kimi was born.

Things were actually well and good for Kim in her early childhood. Kenji and Aoi genuinely loved each other and Kim, and thus they were a happy family. Kenji also happened to like American Tarzan movies, if only for the camp factor—the whole idea of some dude living in the wild and becoming buff like Tarzan was utterly ridiculous and unrealistic.

It was when she was a little girl, that she first saw the Disney version of Tarzan. Being a little kid watching a Disney movie, of course she loved it. But something about the movie tapped into something deep within Kim. She didn't know it at the time, but it was the first step in the direction her life was going to take.

Now, the jungle adventure/opera genre is a pretty vanilla genre to begin with. It may have started with a little bit of unfortunate implications, but the real reason it appeals to westerners and by extension, Whities, is because it's possible that it taps into some old, pagan ideal about humans and nature, or perhaps our inner animal.

Western civilization has been removed from nature for centuries. Where it started, whether with the Greeks or Romans, is irrelevant. It's not even just a western thing; China has been a civilization for far longer than any European civilization has existed, and of course, Mesopotamians and Egyptians. And let's not get started on Judean civilization.

And speaking of Judean, Christianity, itself a spin-off of Judaism, may have had a factor it this.

Whatever. What matters is that humans have moved away from being well aware to their connection to nature to being pretty... not-so connected. Now, civilization isn't a bad thing, the author happens to like civilization.

Perhaps this deep-seeded desire to return to nature struck Kim like a bolt out of the blue (to paraphrase Disney). She dreamt of being like Jane or Tarzan, exploring the jungle wild and free. And when she heard there were people just like that who lived in the jungle.

It sounded easy, you know? Just two people roughing it out, living freely with no civilized troubles that they know about, like Tarzan and Jane. In fact, it sounds kinda fun. Makes someone want to give it a try.

Her interest only increased when she, by accident, acquired an issue of Cosmopolitan Australia. The featured article was about an American named Julie Vidic, who, at 23 years old, had already spent nearly two years as a jungle girl, the modern-day, real-life equivalent of Jane Porter. In the interview, Julie talked about her life story; she came to an island called Pōmaikaʻi because she was given an opportunity to do a semester in the field for her final semester at the University of California-Los Angeles. Once there, she met the Canadian-born Jungle Dude Kaitan, who'd been there since he was 16. They fell in love, and Julie decided to stay on Greystoke. 

Seeing Julie for the first time in that magazine staring back at her, Kim was smitten with admiration at how this jungle girl—no, jungle woman-proudly carried herself. The way she held herself in those photos, you'd think she WAS Queen of the Jungle, or at least had the attitude, if not the title. Her poses were sexy, that's for sure. But she never once posed in a way that would give the reader power over her, in fact the opposites. And the look on her face, with her fist on her hip, a coy, sly, sensual smile and a raised eyebrow, she looked at the camera as if to dare the reader to cross her.

She was sexy, not sexualized, and she knew it. She proudly displayed her body; fit, toned, lean and mean, tanned, freckled and clad in the bare essentials, a standard-issue jungle girl outfit of an animal skin bra and loincloth that emphasized her hybrid human-savage appearance and personality. She not only embraced her sexuality, she OWNED it. She radiated femininity, and she was beautiful, even without makeup. She was a sexy woman and damn proud of it.

Kim could see that Julie had proudly taken the jungle girl title away from perverts who wanted a savage woman, but one they could control. The primal pride and power emanated from those photos. Perhaps that's why from the words in the article, the camera crew perfectly understood that she was in command, and she would not be submissive to any perverted man. She may have a mate, but no one owned her. She was indeed a strong, powerful woman in control of her own body and sexuality. She could be naked (in fact the next page showed her without anything on, at least from the back) and still far more powerful than the other models.

When executed improperly, jungle characters are symbols of white/European colonialism. The always-white jungle ruler is feared by the natives just for existing as if to reinforce the superiority of all things White. That of course, did not appeal to the Nisei Kim. What about Julie and Karza that appealed to her, were how they represented a deep-seated human desire for freedom and to return to the wild after centuries of civilization separated man from beast. And yet, tribal and pagan societies embraced those aspects of humanity, recognizing the link between human and animal. Humans ARE animals, after all. Some people forgot that. Some people, like Julie, embraced it and gave civilization a massive Middle Finger.

She was no Aryan/White Supremacist wet dream. She wasn't even blonde, blue-eyed or German, but a brown-haired, brown-eyed Serbian/Irish/Spanish and Finnish vixen. Perhaps instead she was the wet dream of a follower of anarcho-primitivism, but this was not about ideology. It was a lifestyle she emphasized in the article, pointing out that she was happier than she'd ever been and her reason for doing so was out of love for both the jungle and for her Tarzan-like boyfriend Kaitan, who was featured in Men's Health.

And Kim wanted to be just like her.

And that's just what happened when Kim found herself washed up on the beach of a strange island somewhere in the Pacific, with Polynesian tribespeople examining her to see if she was still alive. She didn't know what the heck was going on, just that she was still alive, her parents were dead and that she was now an orphan.

And she had no idea who was waiting for her.