This article is a bit intense, but it does capture something real. And we do hope our generation can do better with sexism and gender norms. Yet somehow we still manage to find a lowkey kind of happiness in a place like this (maybe we’re just too adaptable?)
There has even been a long-running debate about whether Japan should be understood as premodern or postmodern. We sometimes say “Japan is peacefully hellish, or a hellishly peaceful place.” We tend to have a fairly critical view of our own society, but we honestly have no idea what to call it.
After the pandemic most young people just started drinking chu-hai from the convenience store and hanging out on the street, having fun in their own way. Maybe we really do look kind of unhinged from the outside. It’s just a little case of our everyday life in this quiet chaos 😇
Haha, not sure if convenience-store chu-hai counts as resistance, but since the pandemic it really does feel like social norms in Japan have been slowly shifting. Because our systems barely change, we don’t always feel a strong generation gap. But maybe what’s different about Gen Z is that the pandemic gave us space to refuse the same brutal work culture as before. That’s probably why we’re often called lazy lol. And honestly, karoshi is not something Japan should be exporting.
This piece’s point about sexism in the idol industry really hit. It’s awful, and MeToo-style accusations are finally coming out. That 2013 photo of Minegishi Minami is still pretty triggering for us, especially since we were teenagers back then, so we didn’t quite know how to comment.
That said, this piece was really well researched. It made us think about how Japan looks from the outside, and it was also helpful to learn more about what’s going on in the US. If there are signs of change here, we feel like they’re showing up in the work of women writers like Yuzuki Asako, and in manga by women that still haven’t been translated yet.
It absolutely is a form of resistance if you’re doing it instead of working very late/going on mandated team bonding &drinking evenings/cramming for yet another qualification that doesn’t really help you in achieving your personal goals.
Do you have any recommendations for untranslated manga written by women? I'm a girl who has been studying Japanese for a couple years and would love reading recommendations!
we actually have tons of manga recs lol. we’re just in the middle of a pretty massive piece right now, so would it be okay if we send you a proper, thought-through list once that’s done? same as ellie, our manga-enthusiast friends are already getting excited about this lol.
quick question though — when you say manga by women, are you specifically looking for works that deal with gender issues, or are you also open to contemporary stories by women creators that aren’t centered on that theme?
we’ll make sure not to overlap with ellie’s list (there were a few in hers that we love too lol).
Not only works that center on gender issues, overall, I would love to read works written by women. I've been learning music production for 3 years now as my passion and I just get excited and inspired by other women artists of all kinds. Its just so refreshing seeing things from a women's perspective rather than a mans which is pretty much most popular media I see out there. Immersion has been BY FAR the MOST effective method of me learning the language after I finished the first Genki textbook on my own because I pick up the vocabulary, grammar, and slang all in one and most importantly, if I enjoy the content, its fun! I study the language to primarily read and write it because I just love how the language works with meaning in kanji as well as how it looks. But I think I mainly continued learning because of how deep Japanese media can be, especially with topics such as mental illness. Of course American media has great pieces on those topics too. I think the Japanese media I've consumed has just resonated with me so much more as if someone has lived inside my head. So I think I'd prefer recommendations that resonate or open my mind more to a new perspective. If you have any Japanese literature recommendations too that would be great! But really I just love reading in general and a whole list of what you guys prefer would be great. I especially would love recommendations that haven't been translated yet, if there's any good ones you know. Thank you for your responses! I'm looking forward to your new piece!
Hi. Sorry this took so long. We finally made a short list of untranslated manga. We tried to pick a varied mix that might fit the “deep” vibe you mentioned. (Lit recs coming a bit later.) We shared these with images on our Notes too, if you want to check the art style🐈⬛
This story centers on a high school girl who loses her parents in an accident and the aunt who takes her in almost by chance. The girl feels she has to grow up overnight, while the aunt, still figuring out adulthood herself, chooses to respect her as an individual and allow her the space to remain a child. The story traces shifting identity and fragile human bonds with a lot of care.
The everyday details feel sharply contemporary, and the shifting perspectives of adult and child draw in readers across generations. The aunt is androgynous and striking, works as a fantasy novelist, and is depicted in a way that could be read as nonbinary, but is never explicitly framed that way, simply portrayed as she is. It opens with the girl’s monologue like this: “𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐝𝐚𝐲, 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐚 𝐠𝐚𝐳𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐚 𝐰𝐨𝐥𝐟 𝐜𝐮𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐤, 𝐬𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐦𝐲 𝐚𝐛𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞.”
ꕤ スルーロマンス (𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐑𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞) 𝐛𝐲 𝐔𝐦𝐞𝐤𝐨 𝐅𝐮𝐲𝐮𝐧𝐨
This work comes from a young artist who is still little known even in Japan. Her debut struggled to capture the subtle dynamics of human relationships and class in Japanese society, but this series succeeds beautifully. It offers a light, precise portrayal of what sisterhood looks like in the 2020s.
The art style is a bit unusual for mainstream manga, closer to illustration than to conventional manga drawing styles, which keeps the story from becoming overly heavy. We sense a city pop vibe. Situations that could easily turn serious are handled with a gentle touch.
This is more like an experimental art book than a standard manga, by one of the strongest contemporary women manga artists working right now. She’s great at capturing how funny women’s casual conversations can be, and her slightly sarcastic, oddly affectionate take on men who can be clueless or unreliable. Her work is critical, but it also makes you laugh. From around 2013 to 2017, she created very serious stories centered on sexual violence and toxic masculinity, and since then her work has moved in a clearly feminist direction. Just a coincidence, but the period spans from 𝐌𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐢 𝐌𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐢’𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐝-𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟑 𝐭𝐨 𝐒𝐡𝐢𝐨𝐫𝐢 𝐈𝐭𝐨’𝐬 #𝐌𝐞𝐓𝐨𝐨 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟕, later known through 𝘉𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘉𝘰𝘹 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴. This short story collection comes after that deliberate shift in 2018.
Her range is wide, so depending on what you want: for something more comedic and sisterhood-focused, try 地獄のガールフレンド (𝐉𝐢𝐠𝐨𝐤𝐮 𝐧𝐨 𝐆𝐢𝐫𝐥𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐝, “𝐇𝐞𝐥𝐥’𝐬 𝐆𝐢𝐫𝐥𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐝”). Among her heavier works, 先生の白い嘘 (𝐒𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐢 𝐧𝐨 𝐒𝐡𝐢𝐫𝐨𝐢 𝐔𝐬𝐨, “𝐀 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐫’𝐬 𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐋𝐢𝐞”) is especially recommended, though it can be genuinely triggering. Reader discretion is advised.
This is a coming-of-age series that has been getting big lately. It’s a high school story, but a lot of adults, us included, get fully pulled in. The protagonist is a slightly unusual girl who moves from the deep countryside of Japan to a high school in Tokyo. The way relationships are drawn is layered and delicate, and it can give you a very real sense of what people mean when they talk abou𝐭 “𝐚𝐭𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐩𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞” (空気) in Japan, that unspoken social pressure everyone reads. Sometimes it feels suffocating, but there’s also a gentle, open warmth running through it.
There are basically no true villains, so you can read it without bracing yourself. Older generations in Japan love to call Gen Z soft and easily hurt, and this series kind of shows where that vibe comes from. It’s not flashy, but it’s deeply peaceful.
The setting for her hometown is in Japan’s Hokuriku region, specifically the Noto Peninsula, and during the manga’s serialization it was hit by a major magnitude 7.6 earthquake in January 2024. That overlap, between a lovable everyday life and the sense it could end without warning, makes this series especially important to us.
If you’re old enough to drink, you might enjoy this one; even if you’re not, it can still work. Japan has a peculiar bar culture sometimes called an “authentic bar,” which is nothing like an izakaya. It’s more like hotel-style bartending and service, but packed into a tiny neighborhood spot. Set in Sapporo, Hokkaido, this story follows a man who ends up inheriting a long-running bar through a strange twist of fate, and the daughter of the former owner. Out of this list, it’s the least directly about gender issues.
Ikuemi debuted as a manga artist at fifteen, which is honestly wild, and she’s been drawing ever since. In a weird way, her work can feel like music. She has a long career with many works, but among her more recent hits, try あなたのことはそれほど (𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐧𝐨 𝐊𝐨𝐭𝐨 𝐰𝐚 𝐒𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐡𝐨𝐝𝐨, 𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐥𝐲 “𝐘𝐨𝐮’𝐫𝐞 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐒𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐭𝐨 𝐌𝐞”), which depicts intertwined lives through the lens of infidelity. Her masterpiece for us is 潔く柔く (𝐊𝐢𝐲𝐨𝐤𝐮 𝐘𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐤𝐮, 𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐥𝐲 “𝐏𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐥𝐞”), though it’s fairly long, so maybe sample it first and see if her vibe clicks.
Social ties outside school or work are pretty thin here. Since the pandemic, online connections are more common, but culture like music or manga is still the usual entry point. Shared aesthetics often becomes the bond.
There are cool groups of young people that meet up based on interests. The problem is once people start working. That is increasingly an issue in the US as well.
Japanese culture is wonderful. Outsiders are always overcritical and frequently incorrect. The culture will change, but the problem has been in the Ministry of Finance and MITI. They created all of the problems. They need to go, but there are too many benefitting from the existing system.
This is such a thoughtful, well-structured piece. The reality it describes is horrifying though. It feels… very bleak. Is there much movement and appetite for change in the wider society, do you think? Or do people just think it’s hopeless? Rebellion is hard within the confines of the rigid societal structures.
The bit about the pop star shaving her head feels medieval. And the most shocking thing for me is that she has acquiesced! Is she still active in the industry?
I will send this to my dad who lived in Japan in the 60s as a kid.
Minami Minegishi (the head-shaving popstar) actually continued to stay with the group for several years, becoming the longest serving member. It’s very strange — Japanese media seems to enable a unique cruelty that just couldn’t be legal here.
I recommend Hulu’s The Contestant and Japanalysis’ coverage of the Idol Industry to get a more direct idea of how punishing the entertainment industry has and can be.
I now live in the US and have for a while, and occasionally think about what my life quality would look like if I moved back. This essay was actually triggered by hearing about a friend who had recently left a Black Company and chose to move in with her partner. This caused a bit of panic for her parents, and the generational contrast inspired me to think very carefully about the material circumstances of the country. Personally if I had to speak on change-trends, I’d say that actually Japan’s Gen Z is ultra-promising in terms of rejecting the old status quo. But it’s still a much slower society than the US and the structural constraints seem more rigid.
It is very shocking. Makes me think of the early noughties US comedians and journalists making fun of any women who were above size 0. The cruelty and control were the point.
And if they aren't thin, they don't want to date in the first place. There's no point. All they will get is a quick three-second look and, "You need to lose weight." There's one big reason I don't date.
Or, thoughtfully, they long-game it and think about the potential to enter into a marriage, have a man's children, do everything in their power to stay fit and keep him interested, only to risk him leaving for a younger, fitter woman.
Trust me on this one: After running a pub on infidelity on Medium for five+ years, I can confidently say that the married male cheater never, ever, ever, EVER leaves his wife. He may screw someone else but he won't leave the marriage.
This is insane. I am fat. My wife is overweight. Usually that is comforting because you know that will not be an issue. I can understand women who do not want to date because they have no desire for marriage and children, but bizarre weight issues can be resolved in therapy.
I guess I should add that my wife is from another culture so she does not have the creepy weight delusion that plagues many white Americans. There is no reason for it.
Call it insane all you want but it’s the truth you sound older like you didn’t grow up with social media and what it does to the youth. It’s not specifically gaining weight there’s a tremendous amount of body changes women go through 🤣
So you think fear of gaining weight is why women stopped having children, instead of the collapse in marriage rates? I have never seen anything like this in surveys or data on the issue, and I look at a lot of it. Where are you getting this? Can you share a link? I have never seen it, but I would like to.
I never said it was the ONLY reason lol but just look at the girl with the list on TikTok. That is wildly viral and has influenced many. Hell it’s one of many reasons I personally don’t want children and I’m def not the only one. My point in typing this was to say it’s underrecognized.
Just providing some context as someone who grew up listening to the idol group she was apart of. The head shaving things was a complete anomaly to the normal dating scandal punishments idols would have, most of which would be going on hiatus until their fans rage and heartbrokenness dissipates. Sadly, this moment was a crash out reaction. She did it of her own accord, and even when she wanted to leave the groups management team pushed for her to stay in the group. She has now become one of the most respected former members of the group, has a successful career in japans entertainment industry, and just recently performed with AKB48 again for their 20th anniversary celebrations.
I can see the analogy OP was going for with Minami’s scandal and japan’s quirkiness and overall i do agree with the capitalist decay commentary, but it’s good to clarify that the ‘public humiliation ritual’ of this scale isn’t a typical ‘punishment’ for the idol industry, it was a young girls honest and scared reaction to the oncoming outrage from wota (their fans) and their parasocial relationships which most idol businesses capitalise off (as op mentioned).
Yes thank you for the needed clarification. The example in the essay isn't necessarily meant to indict the idol agencies or internal culture.
I meant that the severity of entitlement amongst (male) idol fans is an example of the parasociality in a climate where normal social behavior is disincentivized. There are a couple other cases of severe public abuse of idols over petty things like dating or having bad manners that go well beyond socially normal IMO.
It seems that agencies will have contractual obligations for the idols to avoid dating, and it's literally in response to the fan culture unfortunately. I think you're seeing the same thing develop in the US with how influencers and certain celebrities are treated. The fact that the culture was so severe she crashed out is a problem in and of itself. I think a lot of idol fans are aware of the severity of bullying/harrassment and dehumanization from certain segments of the fanbase — KPop also has this problem too.
Club Chalamet is an example — that strange middle aged woman who obsessed over Timothee Chalamet? Lol.
Control??? Most men prefer curvy women. The radical feminist imaginary oppressors do not exist. You do not need to listen to those comedians. I got rid of cable television in 2007. It was not worth watching. I believe David Chapelle was my last show that I watched. I do not miss it, but I do have Netflix and HBO max, along with Disney whenever starwars content comes out.
I strongly recommend that you look at insults to other groups and see if you think they are done for control (Hillary Clinton calling poor whites "deplorable," the use of negative language for the working class white population or the degrading labeling of Asians and Latinos as "white adjacent," and other disgusting behavior.
We can agree that such talk is vulgar, but not controlling. We should work to have a better public discourse, but imagining some secret control is part of the paranoid silliness both left and right need to stop feeding. No one is trying to control you. THere is no pizza gate. The aliens are not forcing you to shave all the hair off your lower body and bath in strawberry jello. They just are not, so lets go forward with positivity, and all hats lined with aluminum foil, just in case.
I wonder why it was necessary to go back 12 years to find this example of idol-industry cruelty.
Just recently, Cocona (Akiyama Kokona), of XG, the amazingly talented all-Japanese "KPop" idol group, also shaved her head. Apparently she did so as an expression of liberation. Months later she has come out as non-binary trans-masculine and has had "top surgery" to reinforce her self-image.
This is a more recent example of head-shaving in idol culture, no? Seems like it should have been worth a mention to balance this bog-standard "idol industry is cruel, sexist, exploitative" take.
Just the one from my childhood that resonated as significant I guess. There were other more recent examples, but I had to make choice cuts for brevity and wanted to keep the one that was most eye-opening for me.
The cruelty was a framing device for the actual point! The essay isn't really about the idol industry.
I don't understand how an idol choosing to shave their head and making choices about their body is comparable to an idol being forced to shave her head as punishment for being in a consensual relationship? The authors point with using Minami's story was to frame a culture of parasocial relationships and toxic work culture.
Yes, as evidence of “late-stage capitalism” and its effects on social life in Japan.
Presumably Japan in 2025 is still in “late-stage capitalism, and the idol industry is still in the business of promoting and maintaining parasocial relationships.
So I thought it should be of interest to balance the “punishment” head-shaving of 2013 with the “liberation” head-shaving of 2025.
It seems rather obvious to me that the 2013 “shave” was very Japanese. It also seems rather unlikely that “late-stage capitalism” in America will see famous teenagers being punished in this way for dating any time soon. Some things that seem uniquely “Japanese” may be just that.
In the Cocona case however I suspect we can detect a very clear case of “American-style” “late-stage capitalism” seeping into Japanese pop culture and its parasocial relationships.
Your framing of deliberate breast-chopping as “making choices about their body” is not very Japanese, but very much the American “late-stage capitalist” approach to the body being just another chunk of stuff that money can do things with.
Capitalism, at whatever stage, works through and with pre-existing “cultures”, and those cultures continue to differ significantly from one another. It’s no surprise that Chinese, Korean and Japanese music industries all share commonalities that are virtually impossible to imagine in the Anglo pop world.
Taylor Swift, the billionaire serial boyfriend-dumper, is nothing like AKB48 and AKB48 in 2025 has nothing like the impact or presence of AKB48 in 2013.
I commend the author for tackling as amorphous a subject as “late-stage capitalism”, but suggesting that one of its effects is going to be the “Japanification” of America just seems rather silly. I could imagine fentanyl and various opioids starting to kill Japanese people before karoshi takes over from drugs in America.
There is something disturbing about someone who thought a career as an ultra-feminine pop star was worth devoting one's life to suddenly decides on a course so radical.
I am trying to understand this. I am aware of the band, but I never got into this sort of thing (I am old, and my favorites were Pizzacato 5 and Cibo Matto in the 1990's). There were never any "butch" members of any Japanese group. Back in the 1990's I was surrounded by butch lebsians from East Asia. Even now that is a decent section of my friends.
I cannot see how anyone would call her "butch," unless that term means something different now. Back when dinosaurs powered our vehicles, Butch meant a decidedly masculine appearance with no makeup, no hair care products, comfortable shoes and loose-fitting clothing. Girly-girl lesbians would call themselves femme.
Is this different now? I look at this woman and I see girly. I have never seen a butch woman in any East Asian girl team-pop groups. My wife listens to far too many of them, but we can agree on Lisa from the big Korean group (I am bad with the names of these). Lisa is the one from Thailand. I believe the others are all Korean, with one named Ji-soo and the others were Jenny and some kind of flora name. There are four groups and they are rather popular here in the US as well as around East Asia. I studied Korean in school, but it is long gone from zero usage.
We are talking about two different people, two different "head-shavings" and two different "idol groups".
Cocona, who is the person that had the mastectomy etc, is a member of XG, an all-Japanese "K-Pop" group.
And if you think about what "butch" might mean in the context of young Japanese people, you'd realize that just as "masculine" reads differently for men from different cultures, so would 'butch'.
Re appetite for change, the US has a lot of cultural heterogeneity and a history of protest. I think this offers a great macroeconomic view of US challenges. And the commentary on convenience culture is spot on. Here in the US, on a more micro scale, we have farm-to-table and Slow Food movements, permaculture youtube, punk culture, gym culture, a thriving (but threatened) LGBTQ counter-culture, civil rights activists,
along with a diverse (church-based or otherwise) religious and spiritual landscape. The economic forces of low wages, long hours, and housing scarcity are very real, and there's also some very real push-back in the US against consumer culture and in favor of meaning, human connection, and self-determination.
The fact that these states had to fight back by passing laws against extreme shit like “gender affirming care” shows the staggering power and scope of LGBT political arm. Those laws wouldn’t have even been needed 20+ years ago.
Russia has higher female employment participation than the US. Where are you getting this info? Perhaps you should have said "Germany" or "Italy." Those places have fewer women in the workforce than the US.
Florida, really? Have you been there? I will give you AL and MS, and I will throw in SC purely based on their bad schools and worse local government, but not FL, MT and ID. UT is a toss-up. The Mormons will politely promote their views, but they are not a radical bunch (the LDS, not the polygamous cults). I imagine they release a press statement, but they are not going to hurt anyone or chase them out of town.
The commenter asserted that the US was run by the "pronoun police". Gov Desantis has explicitly governed in opposition to a range of "woke" policies. To suggest that FL is "unsafe" for traditional conservatives or "ruled" by a "liberal elite" is disingenuous at best.
I think we are arguing over who the "pronoun police" are. I assumed he meant corporate HR, university campus administrator Gestapo, and other organizational enforcers. I believe you thought he meant actual police.
I agree with you that in Florida law enforcement will not arrest anyone for misgendering someone, however rudely and inappropriately one engages in such behavior. I do think corporate HR might gleefully add him to the the next layoff list if they suspect he is not in line. If a woman engaged in such behavior they will engage in the most humiliating possible set of consequences then RIF her. For reasons I cannot understand, women are treated more harshly on this. Then again, treating women more harshly remains a stubborn cultural flaw we struggle as a culture to grow past.
More generally, the right, and painfully from the left from so-called "Progressives," the more left-leaning people increasingly rely on constantly changing social norms. They too often press for shaming people for being unaware of rapidly changing forbidden words and ideas. Rules are better for everyone because everyone knows what the taboos are now. A modern society cannot prosper on a taboo-based system.
So I agree with you that conservatives are not unsafe, frankly they are not unsafe any ware. Any conservative claiming language is a physical threat is not an American conservative (but could be in Europe where such beliefs thrive). That said, liberals and conservatives can be tortured by organizational grandstanding that does not help the people they are supposedly allies of. They can pay serious consequences, primarily in their employment, due to factors that many people are constitutionally unsuited to handle (following changing language and norms). Too often the people creating taboos have no sympathy, or even awareness, of those who are not so capable with language and writing skills (common among engineers, accountants, actuaries, quant analysts, software developers,...). I personally would require testing on calculus for every HR employee after they enforce these too-volatile taboos with consequences that are out of line. We would have cured racism decades ago if unending claims of good will had any efficacy.
But I will concede that no conservative will be arrested for silly language. Language cannot harm anyone. Conservatives complaining about it are no better than the fascists who claim language can make them "unsafe" anywhere. You are correct sir.
I don’t watch Fox News you fucking idiot, and I don’t need to in order to look around and see what happened to my actual friends in real life. It’s not that it’s not happening, it’s that it’s inconvenient for your narrative.
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Seeing since in America we are gladly handing over our money for shit we do not need to survive to people who have corrupted our government and who kidnap and rape children and we as a society haven’t done anything but complain online and write great think pieces… it’s over.
I had a similar conversation with my dad at Thanksgiving basically saying that if the US wanted more children, we were going to have to fundamentally change the way our society and economy works. He is doesn’t want to pay for maternity leave, that it’s too expensive and too hard on business. I shrugged my shoulders and said you can’t complain that there aren’t any children. He was not amused.
It's so stupid. We are supposed to consider it Our Patriotic Duty to have children, yet somehow they're supposed to raise themselves. Nobody is supposed to be home to cradle that tiny helpless baby in its first weeks of life. I guess they are supposed to drive themselves to all those practices and activities they're supposed to have To Prepare To Get Into A Good College, and when they're sick they're just supposed to fend for themselves.
No. It’s a fair assumption in this day and age. He has huge blind spots when it comes to systemic racism, partly I think from growing up in very white New England in the 40s and 50s. Racism is taught and it’s very hard to teach when there aren’t any POC around.
By children, he means the right kind, right? In my town, families with at least 6 kids are the norm. They work all of the angles they can, and that includes a lot of welfare fraud. The birth rate is actually as high or higher than African countries.
No actually. My dad has many flaws but overt racism isn’t one of them, systemic racism is a different thing. He also has no use for evangelicals.
He means future workers because he views everything through an economic lens. So for him, making sure all children get top notch educations is important because you need an educated workforce. This includes things like art and music, because ideas come from many places.
Well, an alternative for your dad to propose would be to ban women competing with men for jobs. Ideally in the Victorian sense rather than the full Taliban.
The issue is that you’re assuming one business should put itself at a huge competitive disadvantage for a hypothetical social benefit. Moreover, does maternity leave increase fertility meaningfully?
But it wouldn’t be just one business. It would be all of them because women make up a significant percentage of the workforce, more than half in some industries.
Fixing this, if that’s what people want, is going to take a great many levers, this is only one. Additional access to early childhood care, access to healthcare so our absolutely horrible infant and maternal deaths rates decrease.
Deal with concerns about the environment, the economy, and gun violence in schools, so yes, if we want to solve this problem, we need to solve all it.
Debating the pros and cons of maternity leave is beside the point.
It’s irrelevant whether it’s maternity leave for women, or fathers, or elder care leave or subsidized daycare. The heart of the matter is that there are few options for providing dependent care of any kind right now. If you have an illness or health issue of any type, forget it. You’re fucked.
Here’s the catch: if you are actually attempting the achieve the American dream, you will be punished severely financially and opportunity wise. You need to be independently and generationally wealthy or you need to go full crust punk and live in a commune.
I disagree. In fact government studies disagree that many couples want larger families than they have.
The pushes in Project 2025 have the unique effect of pushing women out of the public sphere and back into the home, where one assumes because reproductive health and birth control is now a thing of the past, that women will have more children but not because they want them.
Can you elaborate on the statement about institutions? Are you thinking of state institutions or the social/private/cultural institutions? -someone who is fascinated by and completely ignorant about Japan
Krugman, Reich and other American economists have been warning of this since the 90’s
Massive Income disparity, is another symptom
We are of course doing it American style
Going out in a blaze of authoritarianism glory and praying to the alter of corporate greed
Deregulation- destroying all that we have environmentally, killing our own people with lack of healthcare, food regulation, environmental poison- if it makes our corporations money we will do it
Killing and taking over other countries- instead of making up reasons or being on the sly now we will just straight up destroy or take your oil tanker, starve your people so our corporations can have that beach front resort of oil
We will end up in more than one conflict that will drain us financially and I wouldn’t be surprised if we get our asses handed to us ( China)
So yeah- Japan’s shaving a pop stars head and going quietly into oblivion sounds just a little nicer than the American version of let’s go down in a blaze of not so glory
Very good commentary here. You could probably dive deeper and expand this into a little book if you wanted. Nice to see a dose of fresh air about Japan's supposed quirkiness.
And, it would also be interesting to explore how the two intersect, influence and exchange with each other, thereby creating new dynamics that then alter them both.
This piece on Japan has been going viral, and like its author Ellie, we’ve felt a small concern about how it’s being received. So we wanted to personally write down our thoughts here. As Ellie mentioned in her follow-up note, this piece doesn’t try to capture the entirety of Japan’s reality. It’s a sharp, statistical snapshot of certain social phenomena rather than cultural stereotyping. 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐛𝐢𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐮𝐝 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐞, 𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐟𝐥𝐢𝐩𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐰𝐞 𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞, 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧.
Here’s an interesting story. For years, in Japan, some anti-capitalist critics have often warned that “𝐢𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐤𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐲, 𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚.” They usually back this up with very convincing statistics: precarious employment, a fragile insurance and safety-net system, gun violence, crime rates, drug abuse, and the Epstein case, framing the US in their words as “𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧’𝐬 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞” under runaway capitalism. The numbers or facts themselves aren’t fake.
𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐰𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐧’𝐭 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐬 𝐚 “𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧’𝐬 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞” (of course we don’t think it’s heaven either). Compared to Japan, the US can feel more dynamic to us. Things can get messy and extreme, but there’s also a grassroots capacity to push back and move change forward. We can grasp that kind of reality because there’s so much access to everyday American life through culture and media, and because our American friends tend to share these experiences openly. 𝐒𝐨 𝐰𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐩𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬: 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐣𝐨𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐬𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬, 𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐫𝐲 𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐧𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞, 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞, 𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐮𝐩𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐧.
People in Japan tend to be inward-facing and less open about their own lives, or are often only visible through anime and character-driven culture, which might make them harder to imagine as real people. But beneath those grim social indicators and the headlines, our lives look much the same: getting angry at injustice, finding joy in small things, and worrying about where our society is heading. 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐞’𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐚𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞: 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐲, 𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧, 𝐞𝐱𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐧, 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬.
What follows are just a few snapshots of how some of these tensions have been playing out in Japan, in real time.
𝐖𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐌𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐢 𝐌𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐢, that shocking image became a kind of shared trauma for us when we were teens. Japan has strong social pressure, so there still aren’t that many people who openly identify as feminists. But back then, many of us girls shared that feeling in silence, almost like making a quiet vow of revenge. In fact, twelve years after that photo, Japan’s entertainment industry went through several waves of #MeToo. More recently, some of the most powerful celebrities were effectively pushed out.
Minegishi herself survived the industry in her own tough way. Now she is married to a famous YouTuber who used to be a devoted fan of hers. She has had a child, continues her work with a sense of ease, and looks happy. Of course, we can’t actually know what a marriage is like from the outside.
Japanese people don’t tend to organize large-scale protests or demonstrations, so social change can be hard to see from the outside. 𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 “𝐚𝐭𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐩𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞” 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐬𝐮𝐛𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐟𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠. Manga, literature, and films by women creators have begun to reflect that change more clearly. The idol industry is now being viewed more critically. Many idol fans are women as well, which has made space for idols who are openly critical of the system to gain support. 𝐈𝐭’𝐬 𝐚 𝐦𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐲, 𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧. With Japan’s gender gap still among the worst, we can only hope this structure continues to change. In this regard, we’ve been looking to the US and Korea and trying to learn from them.
𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐢𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐜𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞, this piece points to something real. Yet the pandemic gave Gen Z some space to refuse the same brutal patterns as before. Many Gen Z workers tend to avoid traditional office jobs after getting used to remote work. Recently, “resignation services” have popped up, where someone handles the annoying quitting process for you for a low fee. Because of that, we get scolded by older generations for being “impolite” or “lazy,” but we don’t really care. 𝐊𝐚𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐡𝐢 is one thing we truly hope never gets exported to the US.
𝐀𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐬, honestly, we love them sometimes. Because in a society where “cooking is women’s work” still lingers, there’s a small element of resistance in that love too. They’re everywhere, open 24 hours, and even the bathrooms are clean. In recent years, convenience stores have increasingly come to be seen as a kind of small refuge for people, especially women, when the city doesn’t feel safe. After the pandemic, some young people even started buying drinks there and finding small fun hanging out on the street.
𝐖𝐫𝐚𝐩-𝐮𝐩: It just feels strange how often countries end up imagining each other as nightmare futures. 𝐘𝐞𝐭 𝐢𝐟 𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐒 𝐝𝐨 𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐮𝐩 𝐢𝐧 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞-𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐲, 𝐰𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐥. 𝐀𝐬 𝐓𝐨𝐥𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐲 𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐩𝐮𝐭 𝐢𝐭, “𝐇𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐲 𝐟𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞; 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐮𝐧𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐲 𝐟𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐮𝐧𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐰𝐚𝐲.” Seen that way, when we picture the future through someone else’s nightmare story, we often end up losing sight of both our own true problems and their lived experiences.
𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐚 𝐨𝐟 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐚 “𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐲” 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐲 𝐦𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐲 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞. Even if we never reach anything like heaven, we hope we can share a sense of what a better society should look like, and move gradually in that direction. It’s precisely in moments like this that reflecting on other cultures through lived experiences becomes most useful, not to picture some nightmare future, but to think carefully about how we should be heading.
We’re just a stupid, inward-looking, lazy art collective that only landed on Substack a month ago, and we’re not very used to writing tightly structured arguments. What we’ve written here is simply our own experience. It doesn’t represent Japan as a whole, nor does it represent all of Japanese Gen Z.
And of course, this isn’t meant to speak for Ellie either. Their piece sharply highlights real issues within Japanese society. This note is simply meant to add a small layer of context from our own lived reality, by looking at it from another angle (𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧, 𝐰𝐞’𝐫𝐞 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐜). We hope it helps, even in a modest way, to address some of the concerns Ellie raised.
After all, for us, the biggest takeaway is this: next time someone warns us, “𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐬 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚,” we might answer, “𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐲, 𝐰𝐞 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚 𝐢𝐬 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧.”
The opening of "Anna Karenina" is always so beautiful, no matter how many times I read it.
It reminds me of how, as a kid, I used to watch local shops close one by one and turn into convenience stores every month—and never imagined I’d grow up to visit them every single day.
Have you read "Convenience Store Woman" by Sayaka Murata? I think its theme seems some kind of "Japanese aesthetics."
We love Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman. We also feel that we sit slightly outside what’s considered “normal” in Japanese society, but in a very subtle, hard to explain way. We think Murata is incredibly good at capturing that kind of quiet oddness.
Reading this piece did remind us that convenience store food isn’t exactly good for the body. But it also made us realize how much strange affection, a bit of aversion, and a sense of comfort we still associate with convenience stores. We’re not very used to having Japanese everyday life analyzed from this kind of overseas perspective, so it surprised us at first. But we think it’s been a really good experience.
How did you feel after reading this piece? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
I hope this essay didn't make me seem like I dislike convenience stores haha. I just don't think it's a replacement for eating at home, in terms of psychological and nutritional value.
Sorry, one more thought after our earlier comment.
What we’re concerned with isn’t the critique itself, or who the piece was written by, I mean whether it comes from an insider or an outsider perspective. If anything, we think Japan’s structures could be critiqued even more lol.
As we mentioned in our long addendum, what we’ve been thinking about is the larger frame of the article, which can imply a reading of Japan as America’s future. It begins with “Is America next?” and closes with a sentence built around a set of stark, almost dystopian images. At first it felt a bit extreme, but we figured it was a deliberate choice and kept our first comment pretty light. We like poetic imagery too, and sometimes go for strong or dark language on purpose.
But now that the piece has started circulating on its own at this scale, we feel a bit uneasy. When a frame like this starts traveling across cultures, we wonder what kinds of effects that can have, especially since we don’t fully understand the tone of US discourse or the atmosphere within Substack.
Is that close to the kind of concern you were referring to in your Note? We weren’t really thinking about whether the piece was “too critical,” so that part earlier stuck with us a bit. We’re guessing you didn’t expect it to spread this far either, so we’d genuinely love to hear your honest take!
If I’m being honest, a lot of what I was pointing to in the essay is how certain aspects of contemporary Japanese social culture feel downstream of economic pressure rather than deep-rooted 文化. Japan simply hit prolonged stagnation earlier than the U.S., so I watched those social shifts play out there first. Now that I’m an adult in America, I’m seeing very similar dynamics emerge here — not because the cultures are identical, but because the material pressures are becoming similar.
So when I say "Is America Next?" I meant, will America start seeing more problems people thought were "Japanese culture?" For example, I feel like so many people probably live like hikikomori in America, but there is no language for it, and I'm certain it got worse over the pandemic. I don't think there's anything in traditional Japanese culture that normalizes that — I think it's a mix of economic anxiety, institutional rigidity, and stigma against disability/mental illness. I think the same is happening in the US in a unique way.
My concern in the Note wasn’t about being too critical of Japan. It was more that people were interpreting the essay as me saying Japan is “doomed,” or that America is “next” in some fatalistic way. I don’t feel that way, personally. Japan is, in many respects, a much more livable and comfortable country than the U.S., and the U.S. is in many ways more socially flexible and open than Japan. My point was about structural pressures, not civilizational judgment.
I also genuinely have no idea on the Substack atmosphere — I used it casually in 2021, stopped to focus on school, and only returned this year. I wrote this as a hobby piece and didn’t expect it to circulate beyond my small circle. So part of my anxiety was just not wanting people to project culture-war narratives onto something that wasn’t written with that frame in mind.
Among American Gen Z, there is a very strong pessimism about the current political and economic climate, with lots of division, which I think colors how the essay is being interpreted, too. Some readers are treating it as apocalyptic when that wasn’t my intention at all.
I don't think everything is all good or all bad, and I agree whole heartedly with the use of that great Tolstoy quote you mentioned earlier!
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Yeah, that really clicks for us. Your way of looking at structural issues feels very consistent, and it makes sense how that lens carries over beyond Japan. And knowing this comes from what you actually lived through there, and how you’re now noticing similar dynamics in the U.S., helps it come across very naturally.
We’d heard people mention this sense of fatalism in the U.S., but honestly we hadn’t really grasped it until your explanation. And we didn’t realize you’d only recently come back to Substack, so sorry if our question felt a bit off.
We’ve read some pieces about Gen Z pessimism in the U.S., and you’re right that this kind of mood really shapes how a text gets read. When it comes to where Japan sits in terms of capitalism, we’re a lot less certain and still kind of thinking it through in a fuzzy way. If it ever comes up naturally, or when you have the time, we’d be really interested to hear more of your thoughts.
In Japan, people tend to avoid political or social conversations altogether, so instead of optimism or pessimism, things often show up as sudden flare ups or the rapid spread of very simplified stereotypes. That was part of what we were a bit worried about. But hearing you talk about this makes it clearer to us that the American discourse space works a bit differently.
Honestly, we’re not very used to questions like this, so we were a little nervous. Thanks for responding so thoughtfully and openly.
We’ve always wanted to use that Tolstoy line in one of our own pieces, but it slipped out here lol. Yeah, let’s aim for happy, Takopi-style. Did you like it too?
Yeah, exactly. Our relationship with convenience store food is kind of a toxic love lol. We know it’s not great for us, but we still want it sometimes. Your essay felt like a fair take to us, and if some people misread it, that’s not really your fault. But when something gets this much attention, misreadings kind of come with it. We shared some of the concerns you mentioned in your Notes, so we ended up leaving a long comment like this lol. Hopefully this adds a bit of nuance.
And yes, I love Lawson too. I was always a FamilyMart person, but lately I’ve been getting into Lawson 🐈
I just came back from Japan, and the numbers are the numbers, but if you did not know the numbers, everything would seem great. We saw many groups of children in private school uniforms on the metro or at the museum, many young people hanging out Stabucks, clean streets with no trash or homeless, functional public toilets that clean your butt w/water and bullet trains that arrive and leave exactly on time. We visited two families we know, one w/two kids and one with three. Japan's decline does not look like ours.
I was recently back as an adult, after having grown up there. I can confirm, much of this as true. I observed the same. The collapse is in plain sight, but not as recognizable to us in the west, as it is so different.
I was in Aomori recently. Off-season I suppose, but I soon became at bit shocked at the amount of vacant stores and businesses even on their main shopping-street. It would be like 'one open, two closed, two closed, one open' etc.
I did a couple little walks into residential areas and several times I would see their local 'snack' and/or barber had shut-down.
It does not look like 'blight' to a lot of travelers so I don't think they notice it.
Agree to disagree on some points. I do think that at a very slow pace we are heading into a more Japanese style breakdown, but there are several important distinctions between the US and Japan.
US actually has a growing population and isn’t going to break down on demographics for a while, the US economy as a whole really never stagnated in a lost decade sense, collectivist vs individualist culture, etc.
I also disagree that something being pro-social means it is necessarily or more likely than not good.
Thanks for the healthy disagreement! Looking back, I agree that it does overprivilege economics over culture. If I were to rewrite it, I would instead organize it around the claim that economic precarity (and financialization) accelerates existing cultural quirks —sometimes to the society's detriment.
In a US context, the accelerated quirks may have some overlap, but would manifest differently than in Japan.
LOL the USA doesn’t have a “growing population” it’s just flooding the nation with foreigners against the will of most voters . That’s not population growth it’s human trafficking and it comes at the expense of the nations it takes people from.
I don’t get this take. Our nation is built on foreigners since its first settlers from the Mayflower. Our president is the child, husband, and grandchild of foreigners. And according to statistics they increase GDP, pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits, and fill 17-20% of the labor the average person doesn’t want to do
Over and over these statistics have been debunked, you have to look at the fine print. Americans were fine doing those jobs before they were replaced by low wage illegal immigrants. You have normie propaganda takes.
Also, the mayflower was NOT immigrants, they were pioneers. They didn’t show up to an already created society and get employed by natives. They built their own society from scratch while fighting the fierce natives for their land, then pioneered west over time doing the same.
Europeans who built America are NOT comparable to the post Hart Cellar Act immigrants showing up and reaping the benefits of an established nation. The frontier is closed, and most of the manufacturing jobs are gone now. These floods of migrants are adding supply to the labor pool to drive down wages even further, while morons like you cheer it on.
3. The pioneers were foreigners, entering land already occupied, with different institutions/religion/ language, and displaced natives violently. Calling them pioneers doesn’t change the fact that they were violent conquerors and I know you wouldn’t be defending them if they were anything but white.
4. Immigrants pay into Social Security and Medicare, often without collecting. They subsidize aging native populations. The uncomfortable truth is immigration increases national wealth but can redistribute costs downward if institutions don’t protect workers. That’s not the fault of the immigrants that’s the fault of our policy makers
All of that to say it’s very bold of you to claim I’m falling for “normie propaganda” while you offered not even a single number. Can you even give an actual source for your claims? Anything from something with .org or .gov at the end of it that goes against what I’m saying?
Yes, the mayflower Americans were conquerers, you are right. They still built a nation on top of anarchistic peoples who were very hard to conquer. It took centuries to do this, and it wasn’t done so that it could be handed off to foreigners after the fact. It was done for the progeny of the settlers/pioneers/conquerers themselves.
You are wrong that I wouldn’t “defend” anyone else. Early American conquerers don’t need “defense” any more than Ancient Rome, the Mongol hordes, or for that matter the Comanche empires etc need “defending.” European conquests are not uniquely evil, they’re par for the course for how nations are established, on the blood and bones of others. If we fail to defend our lands with violence, it will be taken from us.
I’m not going
To waste time debating neoliberal slime like you, you view a nation as nothing more than its gross domestic product, and humans as nothing more than interchangeable economic units. You are so spiritually rotted, no argument will save you from arguing for your own replacement if you can ek a little more “line to up “. The economists doing the numbers don’t care about the country (people) they care about self enrichment at the expense of everyone else. We’ve pulled apart their studies time and time again, to no avail. You pre reject “illegitimate” institutions because they don’t agree with your worldview. Your institutions are nothing more than a product of institutional takeover and control, making sure narratives don’t come out that undermine the interests of global billionaires desire to undermine nation states .
1. You’re bold face lying saying thise statistics are false. What source do you have proving it’s false that’s more credible than Economic Policy Institue or Cato?
2. Native-born Americans once dominated agriculture, meatpacking, textiles, and low-skill manufacturing but those jobs collapsed or transformed first because of automation, offshoring, and union busting, not immigration. For example, Meatpacking wages fell 40–50% after companies deliberately broke unions and relocated plants to rural areas. Sourcing to immigrants was quite literally because Americans wouldn’t take those jobs.
3. While low-skill native workers do experience modest wage suppression from immigration (usually range 0–5% depending on region and industry) higher-skill natives often see wage gains due to complementary labor effects. The biggest losers are usually prior immigrants and low-skill natives without high school degrees. What the real wage suppressors (that would be more productive to be mad at than your Latino neighbors) are declining unionization, trade liberalization, automation, employer monopsony power, and housing scarcity
You are right about unions, though. I’d like to see unions take over entirely and self manage industries without owners and see how that goes. Heavy reduction of privatization and nationalization are needed to fight globalization and atomization. Capitalism has utterly destroyed most of America since World War Two, it needs to be either reigned in heavily and downsized , or abolished entirely. What we do not need is some kind of international socialism, countries exist for a reason. Our massive military can be reconfigured for national infrastructure projects, instead of bullying the world into paying US Dollars for oil everywhere, all the time. Eventually return to gold standard, no more fiat currency.
this was a great piece that i agree with mostly. the only part that i think has more nuance/complexity beyond the late stage capitalism analysis is the part that implies people who want sex and relationships but arent getting thise things having a “social deficit”. while its very true that people are less likely to go on dates and inhabit third spaces where they can meet new people, i also think sexlessness is a symptom of a) the deconstruction/reconstruction of gender norms/roles due to feminism which allows women to be choosier and b) the rise of facism/incel ideologies which has caused more young men/boys to be hateful and antisocial towards women/girls. a lot of women are tired of having sex and getting into relationships with men who are stagnant (if not regressive) in their social ideologies. it cant be “women should cook clean, have sex, raise kids, be a good wife, etc” if we also work just as many hours and have just as many responsibilities outside the home. also, before now, there were so many women (and men) who were asexual, queer, or had aversions to cishet relationships for one reason or another but were still forced/coerced into them bc of their communities/social norms. sexlessness- especially since historically western women rarely experience orgasms/genuine pleasure as much as men do during penetrative sex-is not necessary bad, wrong, or deviant. its also an act of defiance/knowing and honoring of self.
I used "social deficit" not as an individual indictment, but a shorthand to describe the sexlessness and stalled relational milestones as a symptom of structural breakdown. I often view "incel" culture/discourse and spiking misogyny as less of an individual pathology and more of a broader collapse in social structures that ought to encourage partnerships. Economic incentives that should scaffold relational/social development have inverted.
Women are both more legally and financially autonomous than in the past — both in Japan and America — yet we're seeing a stagnation in partnerships. Perhaps there is an underexamined link between male social dysfunction and changing economic conditions. Conversely too with women, with how economic freedoms affect choice and gender dynamics. For some reason, in a matured capitalist structure, men stagnate and women achieve — and the disparity of outcome affects how we choose partners. This can be seen in educational outcomes — men in America are not graduating at the same rate women are.
From a behavioral economics lens, I don't think it's all surprising that (cishet) men and women react differently to the same incentive structures.
Sometimes I think the media tends to individualize problems by moralizing or focusing blame on men as individuals. This inadvertently misses the forest for the trees — it's not individual men who are bad, or men even as a broadstroke category, but a more abstract social sickness that's been left untreated. Red Pill and Incel discourse are just symptoms of existing misogynistic impulses made worse by the decentralization of media and economic stagnation.
That said, I had to make a lot of editorial choices that flattened the complexity of certain issues more than I would have liked. If I elaborated as I liked, this would have been a 10,000 word manifesto instead of a 10-minute casual read lol.
I certainly think this piece leaves a lot unsaid about the mechanical/logistical problems of modern partnership now. Perhaps sometime I'll expand more on it!!
I don’t think today’s incels hate women for sexually scolding them. I think that was more true of first wave incels who were brought up by parents to believe that if they followed the rules and achieved certain things, a woman would get into a relationship with them. Today’s incels know that’s not true. From what I’ve seen of “second wave” (gen z) incels, it’s more rage and resentment towards women’s passive aggressive power plays, weaponized pseudo empathy, language policing etc. in other words, relational warfare they are poorly equipped to deal with, and prevented by a police state from retaliating physically to.
This article might be a little overwrought. It does describe a reality of the ultra-expensive bicoastal metro areas and how absurd they've become, especially with regard to housing.
The crazy housing prices are a direct result of a quarter century of loosening to ultraloose monetary policy, first in the US and then globally. The wealthy are wealthy by virtue of having more assets to start with. By borrowing against those assets with ultracheap credit, the price of all assets continues to rise.
Relative to incomes (which are rising, just too slowly to keep up with asset prices), the next are medical care and higher education. The case of medicine is more complicated, but higher education I can speak to from direct experience: it's been a 35-year-long explosion in academic administration. Its ratio to faculty and students has galloped by a factor of 3 or 4 to 7 or 8, depending on the type and location of school. Health care was handed over by Obamacare to insurance companies (an industry that has become dramatically more concentrated and less competitive), and layers and layers of insurance and hospital administration are certainly a factor. These are systemic grifts upon the economy, with the those targeted for being fleeced are distracted by high-flown rhetoric about how someone in charge really cares about them.
I'm old enough to remember the 60s and 80s, and it was *not* like this then. We had other problems, like racial conflict (real conflict, not manufactured). But the middle-class life was viable until, I'd say, the 2008 crisis. A whole sea change has happened in American capitalism since the late 90s: the keys are financialization (made possible by that ultra-easy monetary policy); financial engineering in place of real engineering; exploiting and squeezing existing assets instead building new things; and change of focus from serving customers towards the obsession with "shareholder value," private equity, and share buybacks. The last phenomena are unambiguously parasitic.
The cost has been a degradation of the labor system, with the disappearance of a career ladder and training, for example. I saw that starting in the early 00s, during the first tech crash. The worries about AI are often misplaced. But it's been deployed in a certain way and in a certain context, with an obsessive (and strangely unprofitable) focus with massive scaling, and it is destroying much entry-level work. The fact that much of the AI bubble is unprofitable tells you that something other than simple greed and economic calculation is at work.
Feels familiar to the premise of the movie rental family that released this year. People paying actors to fulfill missing roles in their lives— family members, friends, boyfriend ect. Things are looking pretty bleek rn
I saw that over my Thanksgiving vacation and wondered how the frick Brenden Frasier and I got put in front-row seats for Japan's self-criticism over the extremity of its social norms.
Thanks for such a well-written and relevantly-resarched article, Ellie. I lived in Japan from 199-2002 and recognise some of what you describe but it didn't seem as sinister and disturbing then. Yes, Japan's freeters have now become more numerous and the social problems like hikkikomori are much more widespread. You're completely right, I agree that most of Japan's social problems come from the extreme's of capitalism in its end stages. We all live in times of the worst exploitation and greed.
I lived there in my childhood. Having been back more recently as an adult, I see the social issues with fresh eyes. Yet, I do yearn for some aspects of Japanese culture here - spatial awareness and the greater empasis on harmony. I reminded daily with the honking horns in traffic.
This was beautifully put and written and so thoughtful. I had never made these connections before. It’s clear you put so much time into it — thank you so much for sharing!
Interesting article! Thanks for the read! Would also be good to throw into the mix observations and research on hyper individualistic societies vs collectivist societies. Part of the problem lies there as well.
This article is a bit intense, but it does capture something real. And we do hope our generation can do better with sexism and gender norms. Yet somehow we still manage to find a lowkey kind of happiness in a place like this (maybe we’re just too adaptable?)
There has even been a long-running debate about whether Japan should be understood as premodern or postmodern. We sometimes say “Japan is peacefully hellish, or a hellishly peaceful place.” We tend to have a fairly critical view of our own society, but we honestly have no idea what to call it.
After the pandemic most young people just started drinking chu-hai from the convenience store and hanging out on the street, having fun in their own way. Maybe we really do look kind of unhinged from the outside. It’s just a little case of our everyday life in this quiet chaos 😇
It’s good to see! Having fun can be a form of resistance
Haha, not sure if convenience-store chu-hai counts as resistance, but since the pandemic it really does feel like social norms in Japan have been slowly shifting. Because our systems barely change, we don’t always feel a strong generation gap. But maybe what’s different about Gen Z is that the pandemic gave us space to refuse the same brutal work culture as before. That’s probably why we’re often called lazy lol. And honestly, karoshi is not something Japan should be exporting.
This piece’s point about sexism in the idol industry really hit. It’s awful, and MeToo-style accusations are finally coming out. That 2013 photo of Minegishi Minami is still pretty triggering for us, especially since we were teenagers back then, so we didn’t quite know how to comment.
That said, this piece was really well researched. It made us think about how Japan looks from the outside, and it was also helpful to learn more about what’s going on in the US. If there are signs of change here, we feel like they’re showing up in the work of women writers like Yuzuki Asako, and in manga by women that still haven’t been translated yet.
On resistance, yeah we’ll do our best 😇
It absolutely is a form of resistance if you’re doing it instead of working very late/going on mandated team bonding &drinking evenings/cramming for yet another qualification that doesn’t really help you in achieving your personal goals.
Do you have any recommendations for untranslated manga written by women? I'm a girl who has been studying Japanese for a couple years and would love reading recommendations!
😏 This is a GOATED question.
1) 鋼の錬金術師 (Full Metal Alchemist) - Arakawa Hiromu ‼️
2) 脂肪という名の服を着て (In Clothes Called Fat) - Anno Moyoco
3) 十一人いる！(There were eleven!) - Hagio Moto ‼️
4) ベルサイのバラ (Rose of Versailles) - Ikeda Riyoko
5) ナナ (Nana) - Yazawa Ai
4) 蟲師 (Mushishi) - Urushibara Yuki ‼️
5) 声の形 (A Silent Voice) - Oima Yoshitoki
6) Anything by CLAMP (all female artist group)
7) サザエさん (Sazae-san) - Hasegawa Machiko (This is a great series for understanding culture too)
8) あたしンち (Atashin’chi) - Kera Eiko (This is a newspaper comic - good for learning about day to day life) ‼️
I put exclamation marks by my personal favorites! I love manga and am glad you asked lmao.
hi. sorry for getting back to you a bit late 🐈
we actually have tons of manga recs lol. we’re just in the middle of a pretty massive piece right now, so would it be okay if we send you a proper, thought-through list once that’s done? same as ellie, our manga-enthusiast friends are already getting excited about this lol.
quick question though — when you say manga by women, are you specifically looking for works that deal with gender issues, or are you also open to contemporary stories by women creators that aren’t centered on that theme?
we’ll make sure not to overlap with ellie’s list (there were a few in hers that we love too lol).
Not only works that center on gender issues, overall, I would love to read works written by women. I've been learning music production for 3 years now as my passion and I just get excited and inspired by other women artists of all kinds. Its just so refreshing seeing things from a women's perspective rather than a mans which is pretty much most popular media I see out there. Immersion has been BY FAR the MOST effective method of me learning the language after I finished the first Genki textbook on my own because I pick up the vocabulary, grammar, and slang all in one and most importantly, if I enjoy the content, its fun! I study the language to primarily read and write it because I just love how the language works with meaning in kanji as well as how it looks. But I think I mainly continued learning because of how deep Japanese media can be, especially with topics such as mental illness. Of course American media has great pieces on those topics too. I think the Japanese media I've consumed has just resonated with me so much more as if someone has lived inside my head. So I think I'd prefer recommendations that resonate or open my mind more to a new perspective. If you have any Japanese literature recommendations too that would be great! But really I just love reading in general and a whole list of what you guys prefer would be great. I especially would love recommendations that haven't been translated yet, if there's any good ones you know. Thank you for your responses! I'm looking forward to your new piece!
᛭ 𝐀 𝐆𝐮𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐔𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐖𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧’𝐬 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐚 𝐢𝐧 𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧 (𝐈𝐧 𝐇𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧) ᛭
Hi. Sorry this took so long. We finally made a short list of untranslated manga. We tried to pick a varied mix that might fit the “deep” vibe you mentioned. (Lit recs coming a bit later.) We shared these with images on our Notes too, if you want to check the art style🐈⬛
ꕤ 違国日記 (𝐈𝐤𝐨𝐤𝐮 𝐍𝐢𝐤𝐤𝐢, “𝐃𝐢𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐋𝐚𝐧𝐝”) 𝐛𝐲 𝐓𝐨𝐦𝐨𝐤𝐨 𝐘𝐚𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐭𝐚
This story centers on a high school girl who loses her parents in an accident and the aunt who takes her in almost by chance. The girl feels she has to grow up overnight, while the aunt, still figuring out adulthood herself, chooses to respect her as an individual and allow her the space to remain a child. The story traces shifting identity and fragile human bonds with a lot of care.
The everyday details feel sharply contemporary, and the shifting perspectives of adult and child draw in readers across generations. The aunt is androgynous and striking, works as a fantasy novelist, and is depicted in a way that could be read as nonbinary, but is never explicitly framed that way, simply portrayed as she is. It opens with the girl’s monologue like this: “𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐝𝐚𝐲, 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐚 𝐠𝐚𝐳𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐚 𝐰𝐨𝐥𝐟 𝐜𝐮𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐤, 𝐬𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐦𝐲 𝐚𝐛𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞.”
ꕤ スルーロマンス (𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐑𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞) 𝐛𝐲 𝐔𝐦𝐞𝐤𝐨 𝐅𝐮𝐲𝐮𝐧𝐨
This work comes from a young artist who is still little known even in Japan. Her debut struggled to capture the subtle dynamics of human relationships and class in Japanese society, but this series succeeds beautifully. It offers a light, precise portrayal of what sisterhood looks like in the 2020s.
The art style is a bit unusual for mainstream manga, closer to illustration than to conventional manga drawing styles, which keeps the story from becoming overly heavy. We sense a city pop vibe. Situations that could easily turn serious are handled with a gentle touch.
ꕤ 前略、前進の君 (𝐙𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐲𝐚𝐤𝐮, 𝐙𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐧 𝐧𝐨 𝐊𝐢𝐦𝐢, “𝐃𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐨𝐧 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐖𝐚𝐲 𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝”) 𝐛𝐲 𝐀𝐤𝐚𝐧𝐞 𝐓𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐤𝐚𝐢
This is more like an experimental art book than a standard manga, by one of the strongest contemporary women manga artists working right now. She’s great at capturing how funny women’s casual conversations can be, and her slightly sarcastic, oddly affectionate take on men who can be clueless or unreliable. Her work is critical, but it also makes you laugh. From around 2013 to 2017, she created very serious stories centered on sexual violence and toxic masculinity, and since then her work has moved in a clearly feminist direction. Just a coincidence, but the period spans from 𝐌𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐢 𝐌𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐢’𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐝-𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟑 𝐭𝐨 𝐒𝐡𝐢𝐨𝐫𝐢 𝐈𝐭𝐨’𝐬 #𝐌𝐞𝐓𝐨𝐨 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟕, later known through 𝘉𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘉𝘰𝘹 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴. This short story collection comes after that deliberate shift in 2018.
Her range is wide, so depending on what you want: for something more comedic and sisterhood-focused, try 地獄のガールフレンド (𝐉𝐢𝐠𝐨𝐤𝐮 𝐧𝐨 𝐆𝐢𝐫𝐥𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐝, “𝐇𝐞𝐥𝐥’𝐬 𝐆𝐢𝐫𝐥𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐝”). Among her heavier works, 先生の白い嘘 (𝐒𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐢 𝐧𝐨 𝐒𝐡𝐢𝐫𝐨𝐢 𝐔𝐬𝐨, “𝐀 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐫’𝐬 𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐋𝐢𝐞”) is especially recommended, though it can be genuinely triggering. Reader discretion is advised.
ꕤ スキップとローファー (𝐒𝐤𝐢𝐩 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐋𝐨𝐚𝐟𝐞𝐫) 𝐛𝐲 𝐌𝐢𝐬𝐚𝐤𝐢 𝐓𝐚𝐤𝐚𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐬𝐮
This is a coming-of-age series that has been getting big lately. It’s a high school story, but a lot of adults, us included, get fully pulled in. The protagonist is a slightly unusual girl who moves from the deep countryside of Japan to a high school in Tokyo. The way relationships are drawn is layered and delicate, and it can give you a very real sense of what people mean when they talk abou𝐭 “𝐚𝐭𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐩𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞” (空気) in Japan, that unspoken social pressure everyone reads. Sometimes it feels suffocating, but there’s also a gentle, open warmth running through it.
There are basically no true villains, so you can read it without bracing yourself. Older generations in Japan love to call Gen Z soft and easily hurt, and this series kind of shows where that vibe comes from. It’s not flashy, but it’s deeply peaceful.
The setting for her hometown is in Japan’s Hokuriku region, specifically the Noto Peninsula, and during the manga’s serialization it was hit by a major magnitude 7.6 earthquake in January 2024. That overlap, between a lovable everyday life and the sense it could end without warning, makes this series especially important to us.
ꕤ おやすみカラスまた来てね (𝐎𝐲𝐚𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐢 𝐊𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐬𝐮 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐊𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐧𝐞, 𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐥𝐲 “𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐍𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭, 𝐂𝐫𝐨𝐰, 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐀𝐠𝐚𝐢𝐧”) 𝐛𝐲 𝐑𝐲𝐨 𝐈𝐤𝐮𝐞𝐦𝐢
If you’re old enough to drink, you might enjoy this one; even if you’re not, it can still work. Japan has a peculiar bar culture sometimes called an “authentic bar,” which is nothing like an izakaya. It’s more like hotel-style bartending and service, but packed into a tiny neighborhood spot. Set in Sapporo, Hokkaido, this story follows a man who ends up inheriting a long-running bar through a strange twist of fate, and the daughter of the former owner. Out of this list, it’s the least directly about gender issues.
Ikuemi debuted as a manga artist at fifteen, which is honestly wild, and she’s been drawing ever since. In a weird way, her work can feel like music. She has a long career with many works, but among her more recent hits, try あなたのことはそれほど (𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐧𝐨 𝐊𝐨𝐭𝐨 𝐰𝐚 𝐒𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐡𝐨𝐝𝐨, 𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐥𝐲 “𝐘𝐨𝐮’𝐫𝐞 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐒𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐭𝐨 𝐌𝐞”), which depicts intertwined lives through the lens of infidelity. Her masterpiece for us is 潔く柔く (𝐊𝐢𝐲𝐨𝐤𝐮 𝐘𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐤𝐮, 𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐥𝐲 “𝐏𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐥𝐞”), though it’s fairly long, so maybe sample it first and see if her vibe clicks.
In Japan, do groups of young people become room mates and build social circles?
Social ties outside school or work are pretty thin here. Since the pandemic, online connections are more common, but culture like music or manga is still the usual entry point. Shared aesthetics often becomes the bond.
There are cool groups of young people that meet up based on interests. The problem is once people start working. That is increasingly an issue in the US as well.
Japanese culture is wonderful. Outsiders are always overcritical and frequently incorrect. The culture will change, but the problem has been in the Ministry of Finance and MITI. They created all of the problems. They need to go, but there are too many benefitting from the existing system.
This is such a thoughtful, well-structured piece. The reality it describes is horrifying though. It feels… very bleak. Is there much movement and appetite for change in the wider society, do you think? Or do people just think it’s hopeless? Rebellion is hard within the confines of the rigid societal structures.
The bit about the pop star shaving her head feels medieval. And the most shocking thing for me is that she has acquiesced! Is she still active in the industry?
I will send this to my dad who lived in Japan in the 60s as a kid.
Thank you so much for reading!
Minami Minegishi (the head-shaving popstar) actually continued to stay with the group for several years, becoming the longest serving member. It’s very strange — Japanese media seems to enable a unique cruelty that just couldn’t be legal here.
I recommend Hulu’s The Contestant and Japanalysis’ coverage of the Idol Industry to get a more direct idea of how punishing the entertainment industry has and can be.
I now live in the US and have for a while, and occasionally think about what my life quality would look like if I moved back. This essay was actually triggered by hearing about a friend who had recently left a Black Company and chose to move in with her partner. This caused a bit of panic for her parents, and the generational contrast inspired me to think very carefully about the material circumstances of the country. Personally if I had to speak on change-trends, I’d say that actually Japan’s Gen Z is ultra-promising in terms of rejecting the old status quo. But it’s still a much slower society than the US and the structural constraints seem more rigid.
It is very shocking. Makes me think of the early noughties US comedians and journalists making fun of any women who were above size 0. The cruelty and control were the point.
I don’t think people realize how much this has effected birth rate as well. Many women fear the social shun for body changes after pregnancy
And if they aren't thin, they don't want to date in the first place. There's no point. All they will get is a quick three-second look and, "You need to lose weight." There's one big reason I don't date.
Or, thoughtfully, they long-game it and think about the potential to enter into a marriage, have a man's children, do everything in their power to stay fit and keep him interested, only to risk him leaving for a younger, fitter woman.
Trust me on this one: After running a pub on infidelity on Medium for five+ years, I can confidently say that the married male cheater never, ever, ever, EVER leaves his wife. He may screw someone else but he won't leave the marriage.
This is insane. I am fat. My wife is overweight. Usually that is comforting because you know that will not be an issue. I can understand women who do not want to date because they have no desire for marriage and children, but bizarre weight issues can be resolved in therapy.
I guess I should add that my wife is from another culture so she does not have the creepy weight delusion that plagues many white Americans. There is no reason for it.
Call it insane all you want but it’s the truth you sound older like you didn’t grow up with social media and what it does to the youth. It’s not specifically gaining weight there’s a tremendous amount of body changes women go through 🤣
So you think fear of gaining weight is why women stopped having children, instead of the collapse in marriage rates? I have never seen anything like this in surveys or data on the issue, and I look at a lot of it. Where are you getting this? Can you share a link? I have never seen it, but I would like to.
I never said it was the ONLY reason lol but just look at the girl with the list on TikTok. That is wildly viral and has influenced many. Hell it’s one of many reasons I personally don’t want children and I’m def not the only one. My point in typing this was to say it’s underrecognized.
Just providing some context as someone who grew up listening to the idol group she was apart of. The head shaving things was a complete anomaly to the normal dating scandal punishments idols would have, most of which would be going on hiatus until their fans rage and heartbrokenness dissipates. Sadly, this moment was a crash out reaction. She did it of her own accord, and even when she wanted to leave the groups management team pushed for her to stay in the group. She has now become one of the most respected former members of the group, has a successful career in japans entertainment industry, and just recently performed with AKB48 again for their 20th anniversary celebrations.
I can see the analogy OP was going for with Minami’s scandal and japan’s quirkiness and overall i do agree with the capitalist decay commentary, but it’s good to clarify that the ‘public humiliation ritual’ of this scale isn’t a typical ‘punishment’ for the idol industry, it was a young girls honest and scared reaction to the oncoming outrage from wota (their fans) and their parasocial relationships which most idol businesses capitalise off (as op mentioned).
Yes thank you for the needed clarification. The example in the essay isn't necessarily meant to indict the idol agencies or internal culture.
I meant that the severity of entitlement amongst (male) idol fans is an example of the parasociality in a climate where normal social behavior is disincentivized. There are a couple other cases of severe public abuse of idols over petty things like dating or having bad manners that go well beyond socially normal IMO.
It seems that agencies will have contractual obligations for the idols to avoid dating, and it's literally in response to the fan culture unfortunately. I think you're seeing the same thing develop in the US with how influencers and certain celebrities are treated. The fact that the culture was so severe she crashed out is a problem in and of itself. I think a lot of idol fans are aware of the severity of bullying/harrassment and dehumanization from certain segments of the fanbase — KPop also has this problem too.
Club Chalamet is an example — that strange middle aged woman who obsessed over Timothee Chalamet? Lol.
Control??? Most men prefer curvy women. The radical feminist imaginary oppressors do not exist. You do not need to listen to those comedians. I got rid of cable television in 2007. It was not worth watching. I believe David Chapelle was my last show that I watched. I do not miss it, but I do have Netflix and HBO max, along with Disney whenever starwars content comes out.
I strongly recommend that you look at insults to other groups and see if you think they are done for control (Hillary Clinton calling poor whites "deplorable," the use of negative language for the working class white population or the degrading labeling of Asians and Latinos as "white adjacent," and other disgusting behavior.
We can agree that such talk is vulgar, but not controlling. We should work to have a better public discourse, but imagining some secret control is part of the paranoid silliness both left and right need to stop feeding. No one is trying to control you. THere is no pizza gate. The aliens are not forcing you to shave all the hair off your lower body and bath in strawberry jello. They just are not, so lets go forward with positivity, and all hats lined with aluminum foil, just in case.
I wonder why it was necessary to go back 12 years to find this example of idol-industry cruelty.
Just recently, Cocona (Akiyama Kokona), of XG, the amazingly talented all-Japanese "KPop" idol group, also shaved her head. Apparently she did so as an expression of liberation. Months later she has come out as non-binary trans-masculine and has had "top surgery" to reinforce her self-image.
This is a more recent example of head-shaving in idol culture, no? Seems like it should have been worth a mention to balance this bog-standard "idol industry is cruel, sexist, exploitative" take.
Just the one from my childhood that resonated as significant I guess. There were other more recent examples, but I had to make choice cuts for brevity and wanted to keep the one that was most eye-opening for me.
The cruelty was a framing device for the actual point! The essay isn't really about the idol industry.
I don't understand how an idol choosing to shave their head and making choices about their body is comparable to an idol being forced to shave her head as punishment for being in a consensual relationship? The authors point with using Minami's story was to frame a culture of parasocial relationships and toxic work culture.
Yes, as evidence of “late-stage capitalism” and its effects on social life in Japan.
Presumably Japan in 2025 is still in “late-stage capitalism, and the idol industry is still in the business of promoting and maintaining parasocial relationships.
So I thought it should be of interest to balance the “punishment” head-shaving of 2013 with the “liberation” head-shaving of 2025.
It seems rather obvious to me that the 2013 “shave” was very Japanese. It also seems rather unlikely that “late-stage capitalism” in America will see famous teenagers being punished in this way for dating any time soon. Some things that seem uniquely “Japanese” may be just that.
In the Cocona case however I suspect we can detect a very clear case of “American-style” “late-stage capitalism” seeping into Japanese pop culture and its parasocial relationships.
Your framing of deliberate breast-chopping as “making choices about their body” is not very Japanese, but very much the American “late-stage capitalist” approach to the body being just another chunk of stuff that money can do things with.
Capitalism, at whatever stage, works through and with pre-existing “cultures”, and those cultures continue to differ significantly from one another. It’s no surprise that Chinese, Korean and Japanese music industries all share commonalities that are virtually impossible to imagine in the Anglo pop world.
Taylor Swift, the billionaire serial boyfriend-dumper, is nothing like AKB48 and AKB48 in 2025 has nothing like the impact or presence of AKB48 in 2013.
I commend the author for tackling as amorphous a subject as “late-stage capitalism”, but suggesting that one of its effects is going to be the “Japanification” of America just seems rather silly. I could imagine fentanyl and various opioids starting to kill Japanese people before karoshi takes over from drugs in America.
Social pressure can be a force in itself. Don’t underestimate it.
There is something disturbing about someone who thought a career as an ultra-feminine pop star was worth devoting one's life to suddenly decides on a course so radical.
There is zero evidence that she ever thought about a career as an ultra-feminine pop star.
She was 'butch' from the get-go.
I am trying to understand this. I am aware of the band, but I never got into this sort of thing (I am old, and my favorites were Pizzacato 5 and Cibo Matto in the 1990's). There were never any "butch" members of any Japanese group. Back in the 1990's I was surrounded by butch lebsians from East Asia. Even now that is a decent section of my friends.
I cannot see how anyone would call her "butch," unless that term means something different now. Back when dinosaurs powered our vehicles, Butch meant a decidedly masculine appearance with no makeup, no hair care products, comfortable shoes and loose-fitting clothing. Girly-girl lesbians would call themselves femme.
Is this different now? I look at this woman and I see girly. I have never seen a butch woman in any East Asian girl team-pop groups. My wife listens to far too many of them, but we can agree on Lisa from the big Korean group (I am bad with the names of these). Lisa is the one from Thailand. I believe the others are all Korean, with one named Ji-soo and the others were Jenny and some kind of flora name. There are four groups and they are rather popular here in the US as well as around East Asia. I studied Korean in school, but it is long gone from zero usage.
To confirm, the article means this woman:
https://akb48.fandom.com/wiki/Minegishi_Minami
We are talking about two different people, two different "head-shavings" and two different "idol groups".
Cocona, who is the person that had the mastectomy etc, is a member of XG, an all-Japanese "K-Pop" group.
And if you think about what "butch" might mean in the context of young Japanese people, you'd realize that just as "masculine" reads differently for men from different cultures, so would 'butch'.
It seems like a direct parallel to Britney Spears' situation.
Re appetite for change, the US has a lot of cultural heterogeneity and a history of protest. I think this offers a great macroeconomic view of US challenges. And the commentary on convenience culture is spot on. Here in the US, on a more micro scale, we have farm-to-table and Slow Food movements, permaculture youtube, punk culture, gym culture, a thriving (but threatened) LGBTQ counter-culture, civil rights activists,
along with a diverse (church-based or otherwise) religious and spiritual landscape. The economic forces of low wages, long hours, and housing scarcity are very real, and there's also some very real push-back in the US against consumer culture and in favor of meaning, human connection, and self-determination.
LMFAO LGBT is not a counter culture in 2025, it IS the culture. One bad step with them and the pronoun police make you unhirable forever.
Sounds like you haven't been to Texas lately. Or FL, AL, MS, SC, GA, TN, KY, WV, ID, MT, or UT, to name a few.
The fact that these states had to fight back by passing laws against extreme shit like “gender affirming care” shows the staggering power and scope of LGBT political arm. Those laws wouldn’t have even been needed 20+ years ago.
Let me guess... Russia is the promised land, where women stay in the home and queer people go to prison?
No, Russia is not a promised land, and your non sequitor is irrelevant. This isn’t bluesky , learn to comment.
Russia has higher female employment participation than the US. Where are you getting this info? Perhaps you should have said "Germany" or "Italy." Those places have fewer women in the workforce than the US.
There’s many gay people who oppose trans. It’s the cultural elites and the pharma industry that have all the power.
Yes. This is why I said “LGBT” not “gay people.”
Florida, really? Have you been there? I will give you AL and MS, and I will throw in SC purely based on their bad schools and worse local government, but not FL, MT and ID. UT is a toss-up. The Mormons will politely promote their views, but they are not a radical bunch (the LDS, not the polygamous cults). I imagine they release a press statement, but they are not going to hurt anyone or chase them out of town.
The commenter asserted that the US was run by the "pronoun police". Gov Desantis has explicitly governed in opposition to a range of "woke" policies. To suggest that FL is "unsafe" for traditional conservatives or "ruled" by a "liberal elite" is disingenuous at best.
I think we are arguing over who the "pronoun police" are. I assumed he meant corporate HR, university campus administrator Gestapo, and other organizational enforcers. I believe you thought he meant actual police.
I agree with you that in Florida law enforcement will not arrest anyone for misgendering someone, however rudely and inappropriately one engages in such behavior. I do think corporate HR might gleefully add him to the the next layoff list if they suspect he is not in line. If a woman engaged in such behavior they will engage in the most humiliating possible set of consequences then RIF her. For reasons I cannot understand, women are treated more harshly on this. Then again, treating women more harshly remains a stubborn cultural flaw we struggle as a culture to grow past.
More generally, the right, and painfully from the left from so-called "Progressives," the more left-leaning people increasingly rely on constantly changing social norms. They too often press for shaming people for being unaware of rapidly changing forbidden words and ideas. Rules are better for everyone because everyone knows what the taboos are now. A modern society cannot prosper on a taboo-based system.
So I agree with you that conservatives are not unsafe, frankly they are not unsafe any ware. Any conservative claiming language is a physical threat is not an American conservative (but could be in Europe where such beliefs thrive). That said, liberals and conservatives can be tortured by organizational grandstanding that does not help the people they are supposedly allies of. They can pay serious consequences, primarily in their employment, due to factors that many people are constitutionally unsuited to handle (following changing language and norms). Too often the people creating taboos have no sympathy, or even awareness, of those who are not so capable with language and writing skills (common among engineers, accountants, actuaries, quant analysts, software developers,...). I personally would require testing on calculus for every HR employee after they enforce these too-volatile taboos with consequences that are out of line. We would have cured racism decades ago if unending claims of good will had any efficacy.
But I will concede that no conservative will be arrested for silly language. Language cannot harm anyone. Conservatives complaining about it are no better than the fascists who claim language can make them "unsafe" anywhere. You are correct sir.
That's stupid. I don't know anyplace around here where anything like that has happened. Stop watching Faux Newz.
I don’t watch Fox News you fucking idiot, and I don’t need to in order to look around and see what happened to my actual friends in real life. It’s not that it’s not happening, it’s that it’s inconvenient for your narrative.
Check out my history newsletter all free, over 400 articles, already 1480 subscribers, Making History Come Alive. Also, averaging over 3600 daily viewers.
https://makinghistorycomealive.substack.com/
Seeing since in America we are gladly handing over our money for shit we do not need to survive to people who have corrupted our government and who kidnap and rape children and we as a society haven’t done anything but complain online and write great think pieces… it’s over.
I had a similar conversation with my dad at Thanksgiving basically saying that if the US wanted more children, we were going to have to fundamentally change the way our society and economy works. He is doesn’t want to pay for maternity leave, that it’s too expensive and too hard on business. I shrugged my shoulders and said you can’t complain that there aren’t any children. He was not amused.
It's so stupid. We are supposed to consider it Our Patriotic Duty to have children, yet somehow they're supposed to raise themselves. Nobody is supposed to be home to cradle that tiny helpless baby in its first weeks of life. I guess they are supposed to drive themselves to all those practices and activities they're supposed to have To Prepare To Get Into A Good College, and when they're sick they're just supposed to fend for themselves.
No. It’s a fair assumption in this day and age. He has huge blind spots when it comes to systemic racism, partly I think from growing up in very white New England in the 40s and 50s. Racism is taught and it’s very hard to teach when there aren’t any POC around.
By children, he means the right kind, right? In my town, families with at least 6 kids are the norm. They work all of the angles they can, and that includes a lot of welfare fraud. The birth rate is actually as high or higher than African countries.
No actually. My dad has many flaws but overt racism isn’t one of them, systemic racism is a different thing. He also has no use for evangelicals.
He means future workers because he views everything through an economic lens. So for him, making sure all children get top notch educations is important because you need an educated workforce. This includes things like art and music, because ideas come from many places.
Oh OK, sorry I must be projecting what my father thinks about demographic changes.
Well, we're going to get rid of all that lazy welfare and that should make you people happy.
Well, an alternative for your dad to propose would be to ban women competing with men for jobs. Ideally in the Victorian sense rather than the full Taliban.
The issue is that you’re assuming one business should put itself at a huge competitive disadvantage for a hypothetical social benefit. Moreover, does maternity leave increase fertility meaningfully?
But it wouldn’t be just one business. It would be all of them because women make up a significant percentage of the workforce, more than half in some industries.
Fixing this, if that’s what people want, is going to take a great many levers, this is only one. Additional access to early childhood care, access to healthcare so our absolutely horrible infant and maternal deaths rates decrease.
Deal with concerns about the environment, the economy, and gun violence in schools, so yes, if we want to solve this problem, we need to solve all it.
Debating the pros and cons of maternity leave is beside the point.
It’s irrelevant whether it’s maternity leave for women, or fathers, or elder care leave or subsidized daycare. The heart of the matter is that there are few options for providing dependent care of any kind right now. If you have an illness or health issue of any type, forget it. You’re fucked.
Here’s the catch: if you are actually attempting the achieve the American dream, you will be punished severely financially and opportunity wise. You need to be independently and generationally wealthy or you need to go full crust punk and live in a commune.
Let's assume, for sake of argument, all of that were solved. Would fertility actually increase?
Frankly I think as long as parenthood is lower status than non-parenthood, none of this matters.
I disagree. In fact government studies disagree that many couples want larger families than they have.
The pushes in Project 2025 have the unique effect of pushing women out of the public sphere and back into the home, where one assumes because reproductive health and birth control is now a thing of the past, that women will have more children but not because they want them.
Japan isn’t a preview of inevitable collapse so much as an early case of coordination freeze.
When institutions stop updating together, social pathologies accumulate even without crisis.
Decline isn’t about loss, it’s about systems that can no longer re-experiment.
I like this perspective.
Can you elaborate on the statement about institutions? Are you thinking of state institutions or the social/private/cultural institutions? -someone who is fascinated by and completely ignorant about Japan
Krugman, Reich and other American economists have been warning of this since the 90’s
Massive Income disparity, is another symptom
We are of course doing it American style
Going out in a blaze of authoritarianism glory and praying to the alter of corporate greed
Deregulation- destroying all that we have environmentally, killing our own people with lack of healthcare, food regulation, environmental poison- if it makes our corporations money we will do it
Killing and taking over other countries- instead of making up reasons or being on the sly now we will just straight up destroy or take your oil tanker, starve your people so our corporations can have that beach front resort of oil
We will end up in more than one conflict that will drain us financially and I wouldn’t be surprised if we get our asses handed to us ( China)
So yeah- Japan’s shaving a pop stars head and going quietly into oblivion sounds just a little nicer than the American version of let’s go down in a blaze of not so glory
Make it a manga to be really “on the nose”! Seriously. Great essay!
Very good commentary here. You could probably dive deeper and expand this into a little book if you wanted. Nice to see a dose of fresh air about Japan's supposed quirkiness.
Yes! I've been thinking that a short little book musing on what is culture and what is economic pressure would be really fun to write!
I really appreciate your comment!
And, it would also be interesting to explore how the two intersect, influence and exchange with each other, thereby creating new dynamics that then alter them both.
🐈⬛ 𝐀 𝐯𝐨𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧 𝐨𝐧 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚’𝐬 𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 (𝐚𝐝𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐮𝐦) 🐈⬛
This piece on Japan has been going viral, and like its author Ellie, we’ve felt a small concern about how it’s being received. So we wanted to personally write down our thoughts here. As Ellie mentioned in her follow-up note, this piece doesn’t try to capture the entirety of Japan’s reality. It’s a sharp, statistical snapshot of certain social phenomena rather than cultural stereotyping. 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐛𝐢𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐮𝐝 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐞, 𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐟𝐥𝐢𝐩𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐰𝐞 𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞, 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧.
Here’s an interesting story. For years, in Japan, some anti-capitalist critics have often warned that “𝐢𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐤𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐲, 𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚.” They usually back this up with very convincing statistics: precarious employment, a fragile insurance and safety-net system, gun violence, crime rates, drug abuse, and the Epstein case, framing the US in their words as “𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧’𝐬 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞” under runaway capitalism. The numbers or facts themselves aren’t fake.
𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐰𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐧’𝐭 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐬 𝐚 “𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧’𝐬 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞” (of course we don’t think it’s heaven either). Compared to Japan, the US can feel more dynamic to us. Things can get messy and extreme, but there’s also a grassroots capacity to push back and move change forward. We can grasp that kind of reality because there’s so much access to everyday American life through culture and media, and because our American friends tend to share these experiences openly. 𝐒𝐨 𝐰𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐩𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬: 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐣𝐨𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐬𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬, 𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐫𝐲 𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐧𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞, 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞, 𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐮𝐩𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐧.
People in Japan tend to be inward-facing and less open about their own lives, or are often only visible through anime and character-driven culture, which might make them harder to imagine as real people. But beneath those grim social indicators and the headlines, our lives look much the same: getting angry at injustice, finding joy in small things, and worrying about where our society is heading. 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐞’𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐚𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞: 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐲, 𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧, 𝐞𝐱𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐧, 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬.
What follows are just a few snapshots of how some of these tensions have been playing out in Japan, in real time.
𝐖𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐌𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐢 𝐌𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐢, that shocking image became a kind of shared trauma for us when we were teens. Japan has strong social pressure, so there still aren’t that many people who openly identify as feminists. But back then, many of us girls shared that feeling in silence, almost like making a quiet vow of revenge. In fact, twelve years after that photo, Japan’s entertainment industry went through several waves of #MeToo. More recently, some of the most powerful celebrities were effectively pushed out.
Minegishi herself survived the industry in her own tough way. Now she is married to a famous YouTuber who used to be a devoted fan of hers. She has had a child, continues her work with a sense of ease, and looks happy. Of course, we can’t actually know what a marriage is like from the outside.
Japanese people don’t tend to organize large-scale protests or demonstrations, so social change can be hard to see from the outside. 𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 “𝐚𝐭𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐩𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞” 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐬𝐮𝐛𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐟𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠. Manga, literature, and films by women creators have begun to reflect that change more clearly. The idol industry is now being viewed more critically. Many idol fans are women as well, which has made space for idols who are openly critical of the system to gain support. 𝐈𝐭’𝐬 𝐚 𝐦𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐲, 𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧. With Japan’s gender gap still among the worst, we can only hope this structure continues to change. In this regard, we’ve been looking to the US and Korea and trying to learn from them.
𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐢𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐜𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞, this piece points to something real. Yet the pandemic gave Gen Z some space to refuse the same brutal patterns as before. Many Gen Z workers tend to avoid traditional office jobs after getting used to remote work. Recently, “resignation services” have popped up, where someone handles the annoying quitting process for you for a low fee. Because of that, we get scolded by older generations for being “impolite” or “lazy,” but we don’t really care. 𝐊𝐚𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐡𝐢 is one thing we truly hope never gets exported to the US.
𝐀𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐬, honestly, we love them sometimes. Because in a society where “cooking is women’s work” still lingers, there’s a small element of resistance in that love too. They’re everywhere, open 24 hours, and even the bathrooms are clean. In recent years, convenience stores have increasingly come to be seen as a kind of small refuge for people, especially women, when the city doesn’t feel safe. After the pandemic, some young people even started buying drinks there and finding small fun hanging out on the street.
𝐖𝐫𝐚𝐩-𝐮𝐩: It just feels strange how often countries end up imagining each other as nightmare futures. 𝐘𝐞𝐭 𝐢𝐟 𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐒 𝐝𝐨 𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐮𝐩 𝐢𝐧 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞-𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐲, 𝐰𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐥. 𝐀𝐬 𝐓𝐨𝐥𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐲 𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐩𝐮𝐭 𝐢𝐭, “𝐇𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐲 𝐟𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞; 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐮𝐧𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐲 𝐟𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐮𝐧𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐰𝐚𝐲.” Seen that way, when we picture the future through someone else’s nightmare story, we often end up losing sight of both our own true problems and their lived experiences.
𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐚 𝐨𝐟 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐚 “𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐲” 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐲 𝐦𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐲 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞. Even if we never reach anything like heaven, we hope we can share a sense of what a better society should look like, and move gradually in that direction. It’s precisely in moments like this that reflecting on other cultures through lived experiences becomes most useful, not to picture some nightmare future, but to think carefully about how we should be heading.
We’re just a stupid, inward-looking, lazy art collective that only landed on Substack a month ago, and we’re not very used to writing tightly structured arguments. What we’ve written here is simply our own experience. It doesn’t represent Japan as a whole, nor does it represent all of Japanese Gen Z.
And of course, this isn’t meant to speak for Ellie either. Their piece sharply highlights real issues within Japanese society. This note is simply meant to add a small layer of context from our own lived reality, by looking at it from another angle (𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧, 𝐰𝐞’𝐫𝐞 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐜). We hope it helps, even in a modest way, to address some of the concerns Ellie raised.
After all, for us, the biggest takeaway is this: next time someone warns us, “𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐬 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚,” we might answer, “𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐲, 𝐰𝐞 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚 𝐢𝐬 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧.”
🐈⬛ 𝐑𝐉𝐀 🐈⬛
The opening of "Anna Karenina" is always so beautiful, no matter how many times I read it.
It reminds me of how, as a kid, I used to watch local shops close one by one and turn into convenience stores every month—and never imagined I’d grow up to visit them every single day.
Have you read "Convenience Store Woman" by Sayaka Murata? I think its theme seems some kind of "Japanese aesthetics."
We love Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman. We also feel that we sit slightly outside what’s considered “normal” in Japanese society, but in a very subtle, hard to explain way. We think Murata is incredibly good at capturing that kind of quiet oddness.
Reading this piece did remind us that convenience store food isn’t exactly good for the body. But it also made us realize how much strange affection, a bit of aversion, and a sense of comfort we still associate with convenience stores. We’re not very used to having Japanese everyday life analyzed from this kind of overseas perspective, so it surprised us at first. But we think it’s been a really good experience.
How did you feel after reading this piece? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
I love Sayaka Murata...I also love Lawson...
I hope this essay didn't make me seem like I dislike convenience stores haha. I just don't think it's a replacement for eating at home, in terms of psychological and nutritional value.
何年も帰国せずに海外で暮らしているせいか、私の意見は少しクリティークに寄りすぎて聞こえるかもしれません。にしても、ハーフなので、意見が海外のパースペクティブになりがちです。
村田沙耶香先生の『コンビニ人間』は日本語でも英語でも読みましたが、言語によって受け取られる意味がかなり変わる作品だと感じました!
Sorry, one more thought after our earlier comment.
What we’re concerned with isn’t the critique itself, or who the piece was written by, I mean whether it comes from an insider or an outsider perspective. If anything, we think Japan’s structures could be critiqued even more lol.
As we mentioned in our long addendum, what we’ve been thinking about is the larger frame of the article, which can imply a reading of Japan as America’s future. It begins with “Is America next?” and closes with a sentence built around a set of stark, almost dystopian images. At first it felt a bit extreme, but we figured it was a deliberate choice and kept our first comment pretty light. We like poetic imagery too, and sometimes go for strong or dark language on purpose.
But now that the piece has started circulating on its own at this scale, we feel a bit uneasy. When a frame like this starts traveling across cultures, we wonder what kinds of effects that can have, especially since we don’t fully understand the tone of US discourse or the atmosphere within Substack.
Is that close to the kind of concern you were referring to in your Note? We weren’t really thinking about whether the piece was “too critical,” so that part earlier stuck with us a bit. We’re guessing you didn’t expect it to spread this far either, so we’d genuinely love to hear your honest take!
If I’m being honest, a lot of what I was pointing to in the essay is how certain aspects of contemporary Japanese social culture feel downstream of economic pressure rather than deep-rooted 文化. Japan simply hit prolonged stagnation earlier than the U.S., so I watched those social shifts play out there first. Now that I’m an adult in America, I’m seeing very similar dynamics emerge here — not because the cultures are identical, but because the material pressures are becoming similar.
So when I say "Is America Next?" I meant, will America start seeing more problems people thought were "Japanese culture?" For example, I feel like so many people probably live like hikikomori in America, but there is no language for it, and I'm certain it got worse over the pandemic. I don't think there's anything in traditional Japanese culture that normalizes that — I think it's a mix of economic anxiety, institutional rigidity, and stigma against disability/mental illness. I think the same is happening in the US in a unique way.
My concern in the Note wasn’t about being too critical of Japan. It was more that people were interpreting the essay as me saying Japan is “doomed,” or that America is “next” in some fatalistic way. I don’t feel that way, personally. Japan is, in many respects, a much more livable and comfortable country than the U.S., and the U.S. is in many ways more socially flexible and open than Japan. My point was about structural pressures, not civilizational judgment.
I also genuinely have no idea on the Substack atmosphere — I used it casually in 2021, stopped to focus on school, and only returned this year. I wrote this as a hobby piece and didn’t expect it to circulate beyond my small circle. So part of my anxiety was just not wanting people to project culture-war narratives onto something that wasn’t written with that frame in mind.
Among American Gen Z, there is a very strong pessimism about the current political and economic climate, with lots of division, which I think colors how the essay is being interpreted, too. Some readers are treating it as apocalyptic when that wasn’t my intention at all.
I don't think everything is all good or all bad, and I agree whole heartedly with the use of that great Tolstoy quote you mentioned earlier!
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Just replace the word family with country lol!
Thanks so much for explaining so clearly.
Yeah, that really clicks for us. Your way of looking at structural issues feels very consistent, and it makes sense how that lens carries over beyond Japan. And knowing this comes from what you actually lived through there, and how you’re now noticing similar dynamics in the U.S., helps it come across very naturally.
We’d heard people mention this sense of fatalism in the U.S., but honestly we hadn’t really grasped it until your explanation. And we didn’t realize you’d only recently come back to Substack, so sorry if our question felt a bit off.
We’ve read some pieces about Gen Z pessimism in the U.S., and you’re right that this kind of mood really shapes how a text gets read. When it comes to where Japan sits in terms of capitalism, we’re a lot less certain and still kind of thinking it through in a fuzzy way. If it ever comes up naturally, or when you have the time, we’d be really interested to hear more of your thoughts.
In Japan, people tend to avoid political or social conversations altogether, so instead of optimism or pessimism, things often show up as sudden flare ups or the rapid spread of very simplified stereotypes. That was part of what we were a bit worried about. But hearing you talk about this makes it clearer to us that the American discourse space works a bit differently.
Honestly, we’re not very used to questions like this, so we were a little nervous. Thanks for responding so thoughtfully and openly.
We’ve always wanted to use that Tolstoy line in one of our own pieces, but it slipped out here lol. Yeah, let’s aim for happy, Takopi-style. Did you like it too?
Yeah, exactly. Our relationship with convenience store food is kind of a toxic love lol. We know it’s not great for us, but we still want it sometimes. Your essay felt like a fair take to us, and if some people misread it, that’s not really your fault. But when something gets this much attention, misreadings kind of come with it. We shared some of the concerns you mentioned in your Notes, so we ended up leaving a long comment like this lol. Hopefully this adds a bit of nuance.
And yes, I love Lawson too. I was always a FamilyMart person, but lately I’ve been getting into Lawson 🐈
そうなんだね！あなたが日本にとても詳しい謎が解けた。私たちは日本に住んでいるけど、日本社会をとてもクリティカルに見ているので、この記事がクリティークであることを、あなたが気にする必要はないと思います。私たちにはミックスルーツの友人や日本国籍ではない友達もたくさんいます。どこに住んでいようと、どんなルーツであろうと、ひとつの物事について言葉にすることは、とても愛のある行為だと思う。同時にそれはとても難しいことなので、私たちは時々失敗する。タコピーの言うように「お話がハッピーを生む」と信じています。
『コンビニ人間』を英語で読んでみます。ところでわたしはあなたの記事でChipotleを初めて知って、とても興味があります笑 いつか食べてみたいです!
I just came back from Japan, and the numbers are the numbers, but if you did not know the numbers, everything would seem great. We saw many groups of children in private school uniforms on the metro or at the museum, many young people hanging out Stabucks, clean streets with no trash or homeless, functional public toilets that clean your butt w/water and bullet trains that arrive and leave exactly on time. We visited two families we know, one w/two kids and one with three. Japan's decline does not look like ours.
I was recently back as an adult, after having grown up there. I can confirm, much of this as true. I observed the same. The collapse is in plain sight, but not as recognizable to us in the west, as it is so different.
I was in Aomori recently. Off-season I suppose, but I soon became at bit shocked at the amount of vacant stores and businesses even on their main shopping-street. It would be like 'one open, two closed, two closed, one open' etc.
I did a couple little walks into residential areas and several times I would see their local 'snack' and/or barber had shut-down.
It does not look like 'blight' to a lot of travelers so I don't think they notice it.
They will soon have to rename Stockholm Syndrome, Tokyo Syndrome
Agree to disagree on some points. I do think that at a very slow pace we are heading into a more Japanese style breakdown, but there are several important distinctions between the US and Japan.
US actually has a growing population and isn’t going to break down on demographics for a while, the US economy as a whole really never stagnated in a lost decade sense, collectivist vs individualist culture, etc.
I also disagree that something being pro-social means it is necessarily or more likely than not good.
This was thought provoking, though.
Thanks for the healthy disagreement! Looking back, I agree that it does overprivilege economics over culture. If I were to rewrite it, I would instead organize it around the claim that economic precarity (and financialization) accelerates existing cultural quirks —sometimes to the society's detriment.
In a US context, the accelerated quirks may have some overlap, but would manifest differently than in Japan.
LOL the USA doesn’t have a “growing population” it’s just flooding the nation with foreigners against the will of most voters . That’s not population growth it’s human trafficking and it comes at the expense of the nations it takes people from.
I don’t get this take. Our nation is built on foreigners since its first settlers from the Mayflower. Our president is the child, husband, and grandchild of foreigners. And according to statistics they increase GDP, pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits, and fill 17-20% of the labor the average person doesn’t want to do
Over and over these statistics have been debunked, you have to look at the fine print. Americans were fine doing those jobs before they were replaced by low wage illegal immigrants. You have normie propaganda takes.
Also, the mayflower was NOT immigrants, they were pioneers. They didn’t show up to an already created society and get employed by natives. They built their own society from scratch while fighting the fierce natives for their land, then pioneered west over time doing the same.
Europeans who built America are NOT comparable to the post Hart Cellar Act immigrants showing up and reaping the benefits of an established nation. The frontier is closed, and most of the manufacturing jobs are gone now. These floods of migrants are adding supply to the labor pool to drive down wages even further, while morons like you cheer it on.
3. The pioneers were foreigners, entering land already occupied, with different institutions/religion/ language, and displaced natives violently. Calling them pioneers doesn’t change the fact that they were violent conquerors and I know you wouldn’t be defending them if they were anything but white.
4. Immigrants pay into Social Security and Medicare, often without collecting. They subsidize aging native populations. The uncomfortable truth is immigration increases national wealth but can redistribute costs downward if institutions don’t protect workers. That’s not the fault of the immigrants that’s the fault of our policy makers
All of that to say it’s very bold of you to claim I’m falling for “normie propaganda” while you offered not even a single number. Can you even give an actual source for your claims? Anything from something with .org or .gov at the end of it that goes against what I’m saying?
Yes, the mayflower Americans were conquerers, you are right. They still built a nation on top of anarchistic peoples who were very hard to conquer. It took centuries to do this, and it wasn’t done so that it could be handed off to foreigners after the fact. It was done for the progeny of the settlers/pioneers/conquerers themselves.
You are wrong that I wouldn’t “defend” anyone else. Early American conquerers don’t need “defense” any more than Ancient Rome, the Mongol hordes, or for that matter the Comanche empires etc need “defending.” European conquests are not uniquely evil, they’re par for the course for how nations are established, on the blood and bones of others. If we fail to defend our lands with violence, it will be taken from us.
I’m not going
To waste time debating neoliberal slime like you, you view a nation as nothing more than its gross domestic product, and humans as nothing more than interchangeable economic units. You are so spiritually rotted, no argument will save you from arguing for your own replacement if you can ek a little more “line to up “. The economists doing the numbers don’t care about the country (people) they care about self enrichment at the expense of everyone else. We’ve pulled apart their studies time and time again, to no avail. You pre reject “illegitimate” institutions because they don’t agree with your worldview. Your institutions are nothing more than a product of institutional takeover and control, making sure narratives don’t come out that undermine the interests of global billionaires desire to undermine nation states .
I’ll go down your points one by one
1. You’re bold face lying saying thise statistics are false. What source do you have proving it’s false that’s more credible than Economic Policy Institue or Cato?
2. Native-born Americans once dominated agriculture, meatpacking, textiles, and low-skill manufacturing but those jobs collapsed or transformed first because of automation, offshoring, and union busting, not immigration. For example, Meatpacking wages fell 40–50% after companies deliberately broke unions and relocated plants to rural areas. Sourcing to immigrants was quite literally because Americans wouldn’t take those jobs.
3. While low-skill native workers do experience modest wage suppression from immigration (usually range 0–5% depending on region and industry) higher-skill natives often see wage gains due to complementary labor effects. The biggest losers are usually prior immigrants and low-skill natives without high school degrees. What the real wage suppressors (that would be more productive to be mad at than your Latino neighbors) are declining unionization, trade liberalization, automation, employer monopsony power, and housing scarcity
You are right about unions, though. I’d like to see unions take over entirely and self manage industries without owners and see how that goes. Heavy reduction of privatization and nationalization are needed to fight globalization and atomization. Capitalism has utterly destroyed most of America since World War Two, it needs to be either reigned in heavily and downsized , or abolished entirely. What we do not need is some kind of international socialism, countries exist for a reason. Our massive military can be reconfigured for national infrastructure projects, instead of bullying the world into paying US Dollars for oil everywhere, all the time. Eventually return to gold standard, no more fiat currency.
this was a great piece that i agree with mostly. the only part that i think has more nuance/complexity beyond the late stage capitalism analysis is the part that implies people who want sex and relationships but arent getting thise things having a “social deficit”. while its very true that people are less likely to go on dates and inhabit third spaces where they can meet new people, i also think sexlessness is a symptom of a) the deconstruction/reconstruction of gender norms/roles due to feminism which allows women to be choosier and b) the rise of facism/incel ideologies which has caused more young men/boys to be hateful and antisocial towards women/girls. a lot of women are tired of having sex and getting into relationships with men who are stagnant (if not regressive) in their social ideologies. it cant be “women should cook clean, have sex, raise kids, be a good wife, etc” if we also work just as many hours and have just as many responsibilities outside the home. also, before now, there were so many women (and men) who were asexual, queer, or had aversions to cishet relationships for one reason or another but were still forced/coerced into them bc of their communities/social norms. sexlessness- especially since historically western women rarely experience orgasms/genuine pleasure as much as men do during penetrative sex-is not necessary bad, wrong, or deviant. its also an act of defiance/knowing and honoring of self.
Oh I agree completely.
I used "social deficit" not as an individual indictment, but a shorthand to describe the sexlessness and stalled relational milestones as a symptom of structural breakdown. I often view "incel" culture/discourse and spiking misogyny as less of an individual pathology and more of a broader collapse in social structures that ought to encourage partnerships. Economic incentives that should scaffold relational/social development have inverted.
Women are both more legally and financially autonomous than in the past — both in Japan and America — yet we're seeing a stagnation in partnerships. Perhaps there is an underexamined link between male social dysfunction and changing economic conditions. Conversely too with women, with how economic freedoms affect choice and gender dynamics. For some reason, in a matured capitalist structure, men stagnate and women achieve — and the disparity of outcome affects how we choose partners. This can be seen in educational outcomes — men in America are not graduating at the same rate women are.
From a behavioral economics lens, I don't think it's all surprising that (cishet) men and women react differently to the same incentive structures.
Sometimes I think the media tends to individualize problems by moralizing or focusing blame on men as individuals. This inadvertently misses the forest for the trees — it's not individual men who are bad, or men even as a broadstroke category, but a more abstract social sickness that's been left untreated. Red Pill and Incel discourse are just symptoms of existing misogynistic impulses made worse by the decentralization of media and economic stagnation.
That said, I had to make a lot of editorial choices that flattened the complexity of certain issues more than I would have liked. If I elaborated as I liked, this would have been a 10,000 word manifesto instead of a 10-minute casual read lol.
I certainly think this piece leaves a lot unsaid about the mechanical/logistical problems of modern partnership now. Perhaps sometime I'll expand more on it!!
I don’t think today’s incels hate women for sexually scolding them. I think that was more true of first wave incels who were brought up by parents to believe that if they followed the rules and achieved certain things, a woman would get into a relationship with them. Today’s incels know that’s not true. From what I’ve seen of “second wave” (gen z) incels, it’s more rage and resentment towards women’s passive aggressive power plays, weaponized pseudo empathy, language policing etc. in other words, relational warfare they are poorly equipped to deal with, and prevented by a police state from retaliating physically to.
This article might be a little overwrought. It does describe a reality of the ultra-expensive bicoastal metro areas and how absurd they've become, especially with regard to housing.
The crazy housing prices are a direct result of a quarter century of loosening to ultraloose monetary policy, first in the US and then globally. The wealthy are wealthy by virtue of having more assets to start with. By borrowing against those assets with ultracheap credit, the price of all assets continues to rise.
Relative to incomes (which are rising, just too slowly to keep up with asset prices), the next are medical care and higher education. The case of medicine is more complicated, but higher education I can speak to from direct experience: it's been a 35-year-long explosion in academic administration. Its ratio to faculty and students has galloped by a factor of 3 or 4 to 7 or 8, depending on the type and location of school. Health care was handed over by Obamacare to insurance companies (an industry that has become dramatically more concentrated and less competitive), and layers and layers of insurance and hospital administration are certainly a factor. These are systemic grifts upon the economy, with the those targeted for being fleeced are distracted by high-flown rhetoric about how someone in charge really cares about them.
I'm old enough to remember the 60s and 80s, and it was *not* like this then. We had other problems, like racial conflict (real conflict, not manufactured). But the middle-class life was viable until, I'd say, the 2008 crisis. A whole sea change has happened in American capitalism since the late 90s: the keys are financialization (made possible by that ultra-easy monetary policy); financial engineering in place of real engineering; exploiting and squeezing existing assets instead building new things; and change of focus from serving customers towards the obsession with "shareholder value," private equity, and share buybacks. The last phenomena are unambiguously parasitic.
The cost has been a degradation of the labor system, with the disappearance of a career ladder and training, for example. I saw that starting in the early 00s, during the first tech crash. The worries about AI are often misplaced. But it's been deployed in a certain way and in a certain context, with an obsessive (and strangely unprofitable) focus with massive scaling, and it is destroying much entry-level work. The fact that much of the AI bubble is unprofitable tells you that something other than simple greed and economic calculation is at work.
Well said. Seems like we've deregulated ourselves into a corner.
Feels familiar to the premise of the movie rental family that released this year. People paying actors to fulfill missing roles in their lives— family members, friends, boyfriend ect. Things are looking pretty bleek rn
I saw that over my Thanksgiving vacation and wondered how the frick Brenden Frasier and I got put in front-row seats for Japan's self-criticism over the extremity of its social norms.
Thanks for such a well-written and relevantly-resarched article, Ellie. I lived in Japan from 199-2002 and recognise some of what you describe but it didn't seem as sinister and disturbing then. Yes, Japan's freeters have now become more numerous and the social problems like hikkikomori are much more widespread. You're completely right, I agree that most of Japan's social problems come from the extreme's of capitalism in its end stages. We all live in times of the worst exploitation and greed.
I lived there in my childhood. Having been back more recently as an adult, I see the social issues with fresh eyes. Yet, I do yearn for some aspects of Japanese culture here - spatial awareness and the greater empasis on harmony. I reminded daily with the honking horns in traffic.
The mediated girlfriend because people can’t afford them. Yikes, that’s too much for me, can’t handle the truth
This was beautifully put and written and so thoughtful. I had never made these connections before. It’s clear you put so much time into it — thank you so much for sharing!
And thank you for reading!!
Interesting article! Thanks for the read! Would also be good to throw into the mix observations and research on hyper individualistic societies vs collectivist societies. Part of the problem lies there as well.