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.14
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.
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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.
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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 . . . ”