Ah, the rescue scene! It tells you something about my reaction to the idea of James/Severus that I totally forgot it. :) I do suspect that a certain amount of "hazing" is considered more acceptable in Japanese fandom, although I don't have any proof for that--I can just fairly easily tilt my imagination and see what James is doing as a sort of "teaching you manners for your own good" kind of behavior, although it would fit the mold better if he were older than Snape.

My stumbling when studying has mostly been in issues of privacy--I have a couple of Japanese friends in fandom and they're fiercely, fiercely protective of their privacy and being "studied" at all from what I've seen. Despite the doujinshi market and the existence of semi-mainstream yaoi, there are still a lot of repercussions for people discovered as creating art for fandom. The culture here seems to be that you're free to do what you like in your private time as long as there is no hint of it in your public life at all. One of my friends recently took down her entire art gallery because it was linked to on metafandom, and she considered that a pretty serious violation. Japanese fans online tend to try and make themselves pretty hard to find unless you're "in the know," and academic analysis that gives them away at all would be kind of risky for my relationships with them. Studying doujinshi actually seems somewhat safer than studying online fandom in some ways...