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.
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