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 . . .
“I once saw a guy posted a funny street sign,” volunteered Rinko, thirty-three. “I felt like I could tell a lot about the guy from looking at it.”
This kind of made sense to me. If you post a photo of something interesting, maybe it gives some sense of your personality? I showed a photo of a bowl of ramen I had taken earlier in the day and asked what she thought of that as a profile picture.
She just shook her head.
OH, I GUESS I CAN’T HOLD A CANDLE TO THAT STREET SIGN DUDE, HUH?
MACHIKON AND GOKON
So online dating is not taking off. What else? There is a traditional group date called a gokon, where a guy invites a few guy friends and a girl invites a few girlfriends, and the group goes out for dinner and drinks. But even at these gatherings women report that most guys are too shy to ask for their numbers. For an exchange to happen, the host would have to announce, “Okay, everyone, let’s all exchange numbers.” I actually participated in a gokon in Tokyo once as part of a travel piece for GQ magazine. Unfortunately, the women they selected did not speak English and I was armed only with the Japanese phrase for “Do you like pizza?” By the end of the evening, filled with delicious yakitori (grilled meats) and beer, most of the women thought I had a story arc as “Indian Chandler” on Friends, and I could confirm that two of them did indeed enjoy pizza.
For those men we met who said that they were too busy with work at the moment, gokon seemed like the most comfortable option for them to explore meeting women. But this presents challenges for men who don’t have any female friends to organize a gokon with.
A newer trend for meeting people is machikon. In machikon men and women pay to participate in a huge, roving party filled with hundreds and hundreds of singles who wander through a neighborhood’s bars and restaurants. At some machikon most people go solo; at others partygoers begin the event by sharing a meal with the one or two friends who come with them, as well as with a few strangers of the opposite sex; after that the organizers move people around, musical chairs style, and participants wind up mingling with lots of other singles. What’s amazing about these events is that both the private sector and the Japanese government are now subsidizing the establishments that host them. According to Kumiko Endo, the sociologist who showed us around Tokyo and studies machikon for her dissertation, bar and restaurant owners get twenty-five to thirty-five dollars per seat that they give to the parties.
In all the research I’ve done on dating, I haven’t heard of another place where the state is throwing money into the singles scene, effectively buying a few drinks for every young person willing to go on the prowl. Thus far the public investment in these events is modest, but it’s a signal of how seriously the government views the marriage drought and of how much it will take to reinvigorate the matchmaking market.