Boys vs Girls, Japan vs America

Japan doesn't have a "manosphere." The reasons why might surprise.

Many factors have played into the rise of authoritarianism in America, but one of the biggest, according to pundits, is the dramatic rightward political shift of young men who feel adrift in society. This is in turn widely ascribed to the “manosphere,” a loose network of misogynistic content creators and consumers who are united by a shared sense of disempowerment. Influencers assure legions of young fans that their struggles and insecurities aren’t their faults; rather, there is a crisis of masculinity, caused by diversity efforts that have displaced men from their rightful position at the top of society.

This zero-sum worldview is often traced to a toxic mix of truth and fantasy: very real economic precarity and imagined cultural emasculation. It is no coincidence that the various players in the manosphere – the incels and pick-up artists, the “men’s rights” activists and Gamergaters – began to coalesce online after the 2008 financial crisis, when large swaths of the young population began to find themselves trapped in the gig economy. Nor is it any surprise that it parallels the strides women and minorities made in the same timeframe, from the recognition of same-sex marriages to the #metoo and Black Lives Matter movements.

Japan’s experience blazed a trail for life in the post-industrial era. As a certain must-read book argues, the Western world has come to resemble Japan demographically, socially, and pop-culturally, over the last few generations. Outsiders love things from Japan because of this natural sense of cultural affininty. But the manosphere is one way in which the two cultures sharply diverge.

Misogyny is alive and well in Japan, and surveys show that there is no shortage of pessimism among young people here. There’s also a schism in perception between the sexes: according to a 2023 survey, 68% of young women feel that society is biased towards men, while only 37% of young men agree with that statement. These factors would seem to make Japan fertile ground for a manosphere. So why doesn’t it have one?

A while back, Hiroko, my wife and partner in so many ventures, published an essay called “How do you say ‘woke’ in Japanese?” The American backlash against “wokeness” might be called an expansion pack for the manosphere, adding gay, transgender, and minority groups to the shitlist alongside women. The overlap between manosphere and anti-woke influencers isn’t quite a flat circle, but it’s close.

Hiroko’s piece lays bare how difficult it is to translate “woke” to anyone whose brain hasn’t rotted from extensive exposure to American culture wars. Some Japanese media outlets have wrestled with the problem by using the Japanese slang-phrase ishiki takai kei, which means “people who present themselves as being highly socially conscious.” But it isn’t a good match. They aren’t crusaders so much as go-getters. They’re so devoted to playing the game of modern life, with all of its clout-striving, virtue-signaling, and online posturing, that they annoy the hell out of everyone around them.

Enter the ishiki hikui kei: “people who present themselves as having low social consciousness.” The “highly socially conscious” take great pains to make sure everyone knows how ambitious they are. Those with “low social consciousness” make sure everyone knows they don’t give a shit. Uninterested in working their way up career ladders, or in the traditional trappings of success, online or off, low-socially-conscious types echo similar trends abroad, such as the “laying flat” movement of China and the N-po generation of Korea. The ethos is captured by briskly-selling books with provocative titles, like 1% Effort, authored by Hiroyuki, 4chan operator turned self-help guru, and Those with Low Social Consciousness are Survivors on the Battlefield of Life, which was written by a former J.S.D.F. officer.

Low-consciousness types tend to be frustrated, disempowered young men, but they aren’t anti-woke in the American sense. They’re more about gaming the system: why bother with looking for work or hunting for a girlfriend, when you’re just another low-paid gig-economy contract hire? So there’s a war going on here, but it isn’t cultural so much as personal. Frustrated Japanese men aren’t blaming women for their problems, or even lashing out at the status quo. They’re removing themselves from it altogether.

Why? I have some theories. For one thing, Japan hasn’t made anywhere near the strides America has in gender equality. Hiroko and I met in America, where she’d fled the institutional sexism that prevented her from advancing beyond the tea-service phase of her career in Japan. I’ve met many talented Japanese women who chose to launch careers abroad for similar reasons. Things are little better today. Change comes slow when ninety percent of parliament is made up of men, and the ruling party has suggested female members “look, not talk” at its meetings. And women who speak out about sexism in society are often shunned: Shiori Ito’s documentary about her sexual assault by a Japanese politician got an Oscar nod in America, yet won’t be shown in Japan. The list goes on, and on, and on. Part of me wonders if the reason there’s no manosphere in Japan is because even the most fragile of males can take solace in the fact that women really do have it worse than them.

But there are broader cultural factors at play as well. The manosphere is all about the blame game: identifying those who are responsible for your suffering, and punishing them. There’s no need to change, because everything is someone else’s fault. And as a corollary if you do change for someone, they owe you recognition. This quid-pro-quo attitude doesn’t really fly in Japan, where the need to take personal responsibility is so ingrained that “I’m sorry” (sumimasen) is often used as a synonym for “thank you.” In 1946, the anthropologist Ruth Benedict famously (and controversially) described the difference between America and Japan as the difference between “guilt” and “shame” driven cultures. Westerners, she argued, controlled their societies through fear of punishment, whether legal or supernatural — a sense of guilt. Can I get away with it? In Japan, on the other hand, a fear of ostracism — shame — proved the prime motivator.What would others think?

But putting aside the issues with distilling entire societies down into one-word descriptions, I don’t think the West is so much a guilt culture as it is a blame culture. (A quarter-century ago South Park made “blame Canada” a punchline; now it’s official American policy.) I’ve noticed this tendency in myself — when I first started living and working in Japan, that reflexive, schoolyard need to declare “it wasn’t me!” when something went sideways caused me no end of problems. The Western and Eastern socio-cultural systems possess their own distinct strengths and weaknesses. But I wonder if the instinctual need to shift blame is one reason why America has its manosphere, and Japan has its “low-social consciousness” dropouts.

The entertainment landscape plays a role as well. In the West, manosphere and anti-woke influencers devote large amounts of effort to policing the presence of women, LGBTQ, and minorities in movies, games, shows, comics, and what have you. These skirmishes, which play out in podcasts and online spaces, represent the front lines of the culture wars. Gamergate was touched off by men who were outraged by the presence of women in what they saw as their space of video games. They used memes and trolling to flood the zone with hate speech and misinformation. Today, as Charlie Warzel put it, “Everything is Gamergate.”

In Japan, by contrast, women, queer and non-Japanese looking characters have long served as protagonists in youth-centric genres like video games, anime, and manga. One might argue that many female characters are drawn by men for the male gaze, or that there aren’t enough female creators in positions of power in the entertainment industry, and they’d get no argument from me. But it is a fact that there are plenty of well-developed, even beloved, female protagonists in Japanese pop culture, as seen in the films of Hayao Miyazaki, Satoshi Kon, and Makoto Shinkai, among many others. Even in the medium of shonen manga comics for boys, powerful female characters are ever-present. Many even feature female leads. Add to this the fact that shojo manga for girls have long been read by boys. Perhaps because the gender lines have always been more fluid in Japanese pop culture, young male consumers don’t seem to be as rattled by the sight of a female character in the same way that Western culture-warriors are.

The irony of it all is that Japanese entertainment represents one of the few things a fractured America can agree on. “The primary uniting force in this country is anime,” posted the pop star Grimes, Elon Musk’s ex, in February. “It's the only media through line that I can reliably observe regardless of political alignment.” In other words, Japanese fantasies are helping to hold American society together at the moment. Those fantasies naturally encode different values, different ways of looking at the world. They’re much-needed escapes, but also quiet beacons for diverse ways of thinking. Their continued popularity amidst the chaos of it all gives me hope that years from now, when America gets through this crazy time, we’ll be talking less about the manosphere that divided us than the Japanosphere that united us.