America is burning. Why isn’t Japan?

A voice actress has a very bad week.

You may not know her name, but you know her voice. Megumi Hayashibara played Rei Ayanami, the catatonic co-star of Evangelion, and Hello Kitty, the (non) cat star. Not to mention Ranma from Ranma 1/2 and Faye from Cowboy Bebop, among many, many others. She is one of the world’s most beloved anime voice actors.

On Sunday, she posted a cryptic screed on her official website claiming that the Japanese media was suppressing information about the recent Korean elections, which she linked to purported censorship about the ongoing scandal surrounding rice prices in Japan. She then veered into a series of talking points popular among the far right, comparing foreign visitors to invasive species, and decrying government subsidies for foreigners studying in the country. Because of poorly behaved tourists and freeloading students, she wailed through emoticon tears, “Japan’s unique qualities, even anime, could all be lost (＞人＜;)”

Anime! Politics! Scandal! Conspiracies! Emoticons! Be still, my heart: this has all the makings of a Pure Invention story. Let’s get the easy part out of the way. Only a minuscule percentage of foreign students are eligible for financial aid from the government. And the only way one might possibly believe the media is suppressing the very much ongoing rice crisis is if they never turn on a TV or open a newspaper. Which makes sense, because Hayashibara wrote that her preferred source of news is a pair of far-right YouTubers who think the Korean president impeached for declaring martial law was on to something. Hayashibara quickly amended her post, deleting the more inflammatory parts, but doubling down with a lament about “Japanese who don’t care about Japan anymore.”

“Anime lover whose sole source of news is YouTube” may well describe the average young American non-voter, but it isn’t something one instinctively associates with Japanese grown-ups. Or is it? We’ll get into that in a moment, but ask yourself this. America, or at least a patch of it about a mile on a side in Los Angeles, is burning right now. So why isn’t Japan?

Japan is facing many of the same existential crises as America. It is a post-industrial economy whose glory days, many citizens feel, are well and truly behind it. Young people “barely register” the mass media, they sit out elections because they overwhelmingly believe politicians only care about old people and are fundamentally corrupt. Increasing numbers of trolls and conspiracy theorists are running for (and sometimes winning) office, and there’s a growing sense of dread about the future. Sounds a lot like us. So why does everything feel so copacetic here? Why hasn’t Japan, as Hayashibara seems to want, voted in someone who will Make Japan Great Again?

One of the biggest reasons: a lack of performative anger. God, we Americans love getting riled up and making sure everyone knows it. I’m mad as hell, goes the the famous line from the 1976 film Network, and I’m not gonna take it anymore. Make a scene. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Everyone’s one step away from snapping and Falling Down or starting a Fight Club. This is great when it comes to addressing injustice and effecting social change, but in America, everyone’s a protest movement of one. You could say that outrage in its various forms is the lifeblood of the American experiment. Angry commentators, angry politicians, angry citizens – you name it, we’ve got it. Some have described this as an “outrage-industrial complex,” which makes it sound like some cutting-edge new development. But it isn’t. Did you think the Boston Tea Party of 1773 was really a party? It might have taken the internet to monetize outrage, but outrage has been with us all along.

Having lived in Japan for 20+ years, I can tell you that nobody scores points for popping off in public here. When Japanese get angry, they tend to get quiet. Sometimes they even disappear. In the 1996 book Hikikomori: Adolescence Without End, psychologist Tamaki Saito goes to great pains to explain that the phenomenon is by no means limited to Japanese. (In fact, the word hikikomori is nothing more than Saito’s translation of the English word “withdrawal.”) In England or America, he theorizes, these same sorts might run away, go homeless. It’s the Japanese socio-cultural system, Saito says, that makes it easier to channel anger inward, retreating from society, rather than casting it outward, and attacking it. Today, you can see what Saito’s talking about in a much broader generational sense. Young Japanese are “quiet quitting,” giving up on any pretensions of “social consciousness,” and devoting themselves to just “1% effort,” as a bestseller of the same name has it. This isn’t exactly a revolution. But it isn’t exactly not one, either.

Outside commentators often describe Japanese society as “conservative,” but in my experience, it’s better described as “cautious.” It is resistant to change — less out of politics than because there is an inherent antipathy to disruption. Tellingly, what we celebrate as “disruptive technologies” in English are called hakaiteki gijustu here: “destructive technologies.” An aversion to destruction might seem ironic, given that this is the nation that unleashed Godzilla on the world. But there’s a reason Japan loves the big G; it’s a fantasy based in painful reality. The seminal Gojira of 1954 was a kaiju flick, but it was also a visceral reaction to an American hydrogen bomb test that killed a Japanese sailor and sickened dozens more. Any Japanese adult watching Gojira during its initial run would have known about this scandal, and – this is crucial – personally seen their own city reduced to rubble by Allied bombers. There were still plenty of neighborhoods in cinders in 1954. Nobody watching that film was cheering Godzilla on – unless perhaps they were Americans watching it in translation, which carefully edited any reference to the U.S. nuclear testing out.

Americans have never really experienced this kind of thing, save on a very localized level: the Twin Towers falling, the Oklahoma City bombing. Which is by no means to downplay the trauma of these horrific events. But there is a difference in scale. Sure, the Brits torched the White House in 1814, but two centuries and one domestic insurrection later that feels almost quaint, more like something out of a game of Civ than it does lived history. I wonder if this societal naivete about destruction explains our incessant hunger to disrupt. Move fast and break things might as well be on the dollar bill at this point.

This aversion to destruction and disruption has had the side-effect of putting Japan behind the curve of technological developments in the West. Despite blazing a trail with mobile internet in the late Nineties, and being a leader in terms of the problems inherent to post-industrial economies, Japan never became a leader in smartphones, in social media, in the use of algorithms to curate content, or in AI.

On the other hand, consider the flip side of a functioning society without being at the cutting edge of all of these things. There’s no Disney or Pixar, but Japan labor-intensive, hand-drawn manga and anime stand out in a rapidly deepening sea of AI slop. There are no multinational infotaiment conglomerates, but you still have local reporting. There’s no Bitcoin, but then again, neither do you see Japanese leaders issuing pay-to-play memecoins. There are no real visionaries, but you don’t see tone-deaf techbros assuring us that while they certainly plan to eliminate humans from every sphere of art, commerce, and life, they’re going to be gentle about it. All of this makes Japan feel like an oasis from the churn of chaos abroad, which may be why so many of those invasive species — I mean, tourists — are coming here.

This doesn’t mean Japan is free of conspiracies. They just haven’t made the leap into becoming politics and policy. As I wrote for The New York Times a few years back, there’s been plenty of conspiratorial, racist thinking in Japan over the decades, some resulting in actual violence. What’s different is the media landscape, in that there’s a kind of “firewall” between life online and off, news online and off, in Japan. There are no partisan news outlets, no 24/7 news channels hungry for scoops to keep viewers addicted to the tube all day long. As a result social media and reality TV never emerged from screens into real life here as they did, in America, like Sadako from The Ring. (Which reminds me of how gentle Japanese reality TV is in comparison to the outrage/drama-driven American variety, but that’s another essay for another time.)

Inevitably, there’s a downside to this gatekeeping as well. It is catnip for trolls and conspiracy theorists, who can claim that their Truth-with-a-capital-T is being repressed. Hayashibara seems to have fallen under the spell of one or another of them. And she isn’t alone. Those same folks who are abandoning the mass media are getting their “news” online now. Their frustration is being channeled into the growing popularity of professional disruptors like 2channel founder turned self-help guru Hiroyuki and the frequency of political stunts. The “Do-it-yourself Party,” which emerged from anti-vaxxers and COVID deniers during pandemic, won a seat in the upper house of parliament in 2022; it makes heavy use of newsletters, YouTube, and social media in appealling to supporters. In 2024, the NHK Party trolled the Tokyo gubenetorial elections by “hijacking” the election boards posted throughout the city. Late that same year, the disgraced governor of Hyogo Prefecture, thrown from office for bullying a whistleblower, won re-election by convincing YouTubers the allegations against him were false (he was indicted again just this week.)

Will Japan’s aversion to disruption isolate it from the revolutions that have eroded democracies in the West? Or is it simply a matter of time? Looking out the window at a society that is far more placid than what I’m reading about in American headlines, I’d like to believe the former. But only time will tell. For the moment, I’m glad that Japan’s biggest problems center on the price of rice and the attitudes of anime voice actors.