Modern Romance (18 page)

Today, however, that system is a relic. Arranged marriages are uncommon (down to 6.2 percent as of 2005).
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Like the United States, Japan has adopted a more individualistic culture based on personal choice and happiness. The Japanese economy has been sluggish since the 1990s, and the modern workplace has become a site for stressful competition. It’s no longer acting as a de facto singles bar for professionals.

So, if the old system is now broken, what has replaced it?

HERBIVORE MEN

After arriving in Tokyo, I knew I had a limited amount of time to do what I needed to get done: visit the five best ramen shops in the city.
After eating my fill of ramen, it was time to get down to business: visiting that robot restaurant, because, man, who could pass up an opportunity like that? Then duty called: I also had to visit that Bill Clinton mask/dog back-rub place. It was awesome. Then a quick nap, and finally I started doing some research for this book.

First we organized some focus groups to discuss dating in Tokyo. Dozens of young adults in their midtwenties and early thirties spoke to us (or, in most cases, spoke to Kumiko, who translated their Japanese).

Going in, one of the notions I was most curious about was the “herbivore man.” This is a term that has become ubiquitous in Japan over the past few years to describe Japanese men who are very shy and passive and show no interest in sex and romantic relationships. Surveys suggest that about 60 percent of male singles in their twenties and thirties in Japan identify themselves as herbivores.
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In the first group we held, one of the first to arrive was Akira. A good-looking young Japanese dude in a really sharp suit, Akira, thirty, looked like he was probably doing well for himself. He seemed like a successful, confident young man. This guy wasn’t an herbivore, right?

We did interviews and focus groups with singles on four continents, and in most of them we broke the ice by asking people to tell us how many people they’d asked out or flirted with on their smartphones in the past few weeks. When we asked Akira that question, he just shrugged. Pretty much all the guys shrugged.

Akira said he was working now and too busy to have a girlfriend. Several others we interviewed echoed this sentiment. “I just got a job in construction and there aren’t many girls my age, so there’s nowhere for me to meet them,” said Daisaku, twenty-one.

His friend Hiro nodded. “I’m busy with work and it’s not very urgent. I have to deal with work first, and that takes up my weekdays. I play video games when I go home. On the weekends I hang out with Daisaku and we go out drinking.”

“Can’t you meet women when you’re out drinking?” we asked. “No.” Hiro blushed. “It’s
charai
[kinda sleazy, in a playboy way] to try to pick up a woman you don’t know. But also, if a girl said yes to me, I wouldn’t want to go out with her. I don’t like girls who would want to be with a guy openly like that. Looking, smiling, winking. I want a girl who’s
seiso
[pure].”

“Pure?” Eric asked. “Like, a virgin?”

They laughed uncomfortably. “Not exactly,” Daisaku said. “But it has to be someone with the right background, with the right family. If it was someone I just met somewhere, I’d be too embarrassed to tell my parents. They’d be disappointed.”

“How did your parents meet?”

“At work,” Daisaku said.

“An arranged marriage,” Hiro offered.

“This situation seems really difficult,” Eric said. “You want a girlfriend, and the women we meet want boyfriends, but no one knows how to make it happen. Do you feel like it’s a problem?”

“I don’t really think anything about it,” Hiro replied matter-of-factly. “It’s not a problem and it’s not
not
a problem. It is what it is. Because everyone’s like that here. I don’t even think about it because it’s the norm.”

Akira said that he would only ask a woman out if it was clear without any doubt that she was interested. When asked why, he said, “She could reject me,” and every other guy in the room literally groaned in support. It was clear that the fear of rejection was huge, and much more so than I’d seen among men in America.

I asked the women about the herbivore men and whether they wished guys would take more initiative. It was a resounding yes. These women yearned for the men in Japan to step up and just ask them out. From their perspective, the men’s extreme need for assurance and comfort from the women was irritating. Their frustration was palpable. You could see that they were indeed becoming what the press called “the carnivorous woman.” Some of these women described how they would now take the role more commonly played by Western men and approach Japanese men and ask for phone numbers.
Wow, how
charai
of them
, I thought, remembering the word I had learned three minutes earlier.

However, they said it wasn’t always easy. They described how even if they did meet a guy and engage with him, it was like an even more nightmarish version of the American guy who just keeps texting and doesn’t ask a girl out. The texts would keep going and going.

“He will just be so shy and he just needs to feel
soooo
comfortable with you,” one woman said. “Unless men are really confident that the woman likes them back, they can’t make the move,” another lamented. As one man described it, “They’re waiting for the woman to be totally embracing of them before they make any kind of move.” The fear of rejection even manifests itself in the phone world.

I asked for an example of a back-and-forth text. A woman told me about one guy who had texted with her. The way she described it was that he was never really flirtatious. It would be very direct, impersonal things about movies he’d seen or his pets. One night he texted her and said, “I have this big head of cabbage. How should I cook this?”

I asked if this was maybe a very, very lame, roundabout dinner-date invitation—to ask her to come over for cabbage. “No, he was really asking me how to cook cabbage,” she moaned.

The same guy e-mailed her a few days later with this gem, and again, this is not a joke: “I recently got my futon wet and put it outside to dry, but it got caught in the rain, so now it’s wet again.”

Wow. Quite a suspenseful tale.

 • • • 

What begat
the rise of the herbivore man?
There seems to be
an almost perfect stew of social and economic ingredients that
has cultivated this stereotype.
Speaking of stew, while in Tokyo, I went to an
izakaya
called Kanemasu that had an amazing short-rib dish, one of the most succulent—okay, sorry, getting off track again.

Social scientists argue that the herbivore man emerged with the decline of the Japanese economy. In Japanese culture, as in many cultures, men’s confidence and sense of self is tied to their professional success. Everyone we talked to in Tokyo seemed to recall the booming eighties as a different era for romance, with salarymen, flush with cash, who could confidently approach a pretty woman and ask for her number without fear. This too is probably an exaggeration, but a telling one. With career jobs now gone, it’s not only harder for men to meet a partner but also harder for them to support her financially. So it makes sense that insecurity might leave men feeling more scared of rejection.

Many single men also now live at home with their parents well into their twenties and thirties. The women in the focus groups felt that this situation only worsened a mothering complex already prevalent in Japanese culture. A man who lives at home can expect his mother to cook, clean, and do his laundry for him. The theory goes that guys are so used to being taken care of, they lose their manly instincts.

On top of that, men in Japan are probably not as comfortable around women in general because they didn’t grow up spending as much time with them. Much of the educational system in Japan is single sex, and there’s also sex segregation in co-ed schools. Physically, socially, and to some extent psychologically, boys and girls grow up on separate tracks until at least high school and often until college. Many people don’t date until their twenties. Nearly 50 percent of the single guys in Japan don’t even have friends of the opposite sex.
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When you combine the economic decline, men’s infantilization by their mothers, their fear of rejection, and the lack of contact with the opposite sex throughout their lives, the herbivore man starts making a lot of sense.

 • • • 

Now, I don’t want to paint the picture that every Japanese guy is a super shy dude who has no interest in sex.
There definitely seems to be a lot of that, but there are also plenty of Japanese men who are nonherbivores, who have dating lives that resemble those of the typical omnivorous American man. In our focus groups we met Koji, a young bartender, who seemed to be the most omnivorous of the bunch.

The thing is Koji wasn’t some super stud or anything. Compared with the other guys, he was a little shorter. He wasn’t dressed in a super sharp suit like Akira and the other professionals. He wore a gray vest and a brown fedora. What he had was a casualness and forthrightness to him that, though fairly normal by American standards, really stood out in Japan. Those in the focus groups who knew Koji spoke of his seemingly mythical love life in hushed tones and were in awe of his confidence. Again, Koji was not some Asian Ryan Gosling figure; he just seemed to be comfortable with himself and not particularly shy. Like most fedora wearers, he had a lot of inexplicable confidence.

He and another friend of his wanted to make sure we knew there were some Japanese men who weren’t herbivores and that maybe the media was blowing this out of proportion.

“Can I just speak for real? If I don’t have a girlfriend, I can go find someone to have sex with. I think those guys who say they’re not having sex for a long time? I think they’re bullshitting. They just don’t talk about it,” he said.

“If you’re single in New York, you get on your phone and text people late at night and try to meet up with someone. There’s a whole culture of a ‘booty call.’ What’s the process here?” I asked.

“My friends and I do the same thing. I call all of them and no one will pick up.”

“Well, the same thing happens in New York sometimes too,” I said.

 • • • 

At the same time Japanese men are undergoing a transformation, a new kind of Japanese woman is emerging as well.
Historically, educated women would get office jobs after university, meet men there, and then leave the job to become wives and mothers. Now women are pushing back, and more educated women want to work. They learn skills, like speaking English. They travel the world. They pursue careers of their own. These professional women don’t want to conform to the old norm of being the submissive woman who abandons her own career ambitions to be a housewife. However, being educated, speaking English, and having a good job seem to intimidate some men, with some women even describing their success as a “turnoff” for their would-be suitors. “Men here, they have high pride,” one woman told me. “They don’t want a successful woman who makes a pretty good salary. The minute they find out I’m bilingual, they’re like,
Oh no . . .
 ”

By the end of our focus groups, it was pretty clear that Japanese men and women are on different trajectories. Women are still far from equal, but they are beginning to establish themselves in the Japanese economy and they are gaining all sorts of rights and privileges in the culture as well.

Men are struggling to hold on to their status. Whether in the workplace or in the family, they’ve fallen from the heights of previous generations and are having trouble figuring out what to do next.

Some are clearly so confused that they have taken to wearing fedoras.

A difficult period indeed.

A RICE COOKER AS A PROFILE PIC: WELCOME TO ONLINE DATING IN JAPAN

Given the state of Japanese dating culture, you would think online dating would be a perfect solution.
Sending a message to a potential mate on a website is much less intimidating than asking someone for their number in a bar, right? What better way to mitigate your fear of rejection? The Japanese are also notorious early adopters. If one-third of U.S. marriages are now formed by people meeting online, you’d guess that even more Japanese marriages begin digitally. But although the rise of online dating could be very helpful in Japan, alas, it is not to be. The concerns about being perceived as
charai
(sleazy playboy type) extend into the social media world as well, and some of the necessary facets of online dating are frowned upon in Japan.

Consider profile pictures. Dating online requires self-promotion. A dating profile is a kind of advertisement, a way of marketing yourself to prospective partners. But this attitude doesn’t really fit well with Japanese culture.

In Japan, posting any pictures of yourself, especially selfie-style photos, comes off as really douchey. Kana, an attractive, single twenty-nine-year-old, remarked: “All the foreign people who use selfies on their profile pic? The Japanese feel like that’s so narcissistic.” In her experience, pictures on dating sites would generally include more than two people. Sometimes the person wouldn’t be in the photo at all.

I asked what they would post instead.

“A lot of Japanese use their cats,” she said.

“They’re not in the photo with the cat?” I asked.

“Nope. Just the cat. Or their rice cooker.”

Let’s do this, ladies . . .