“Anime, Manga & Games are Killing Japan”

A BBC journalist opining on why Japan is a doomed nation has suggested that Japanese men who retreat from the real world into anime and game fantasies are the reason the nation faces a demographic death spiral.

His screed runs along these lines:

Imagine a country that knows it is shrinking. A country that knows it is ageing more rapidly than any other major industrialised nation on earth. Which has the highest proportion in the world of people over the age of 65, and the lowest ratio of under 15s. That country is Japan.

As I reported on Wednesday, on current trends, the population of Japan will have halved by the end of the century.

It is, literally, a country that is slowly dying.

According to one United Nations estimate, it’ll need to import 17 million foreign workers over the next 40 years, just to keep its economy afloat and provide enough carers to look after the elderly. (By 2050, there will be more than a million Japanese over the age of 100.)

I’m no social psychologist, so I wouldn’t dare to come up with an explanation for why Japanese couples aren’t having enough babies.

But one theory is that Japanese women are increasingly reluctant to marry, because they think Japanese men have shown themselves unable to adapt to the needs of a new, more flexible society – and have retreated into a fantasy world of comics, video games and animated pornography where they feel less threatened.

Of course, anyone capable of actually reading what the Japanese are saying and not merely what people are saying about the Japanese might come to very different conclusions about the causes of the schism between the sexes in Japan.

2ch’s commentary provides the usual scathing insights:

“If everyone retreats into a fantasy of games and anime a new era of peace will dawn.”

“If reality was so appealing all that manga would soon end up in the bin.”

“’Japanese women are increasingly reluctant to marry… Because men have retreated into anime and games’

Don’t you mean men have retreated into anime and games because they don’t want to marry these women?”

“What would happen if we had even more people in such a cramped country, with no natural resources?”

“Love Plus is reality.”

“But real women won’t marry you if your income is less than $100,000 a year?”

“Manga and games are part of reality too.”

“Basically this is all the fault of men isn’t it?”

“This is just another trick by the ones who want to have eroge banned.”

“And for some reason being engrossed in films, novels and soap operas is OK?”

“Anime and manga can do this? We should export them to enemy countries…”

“This guy is just like the ones who think there are still samurai in Japan…”

“How can anyone in their thirties with an income of $35,000 ever get married?”

“They are desperate to ignore what is going on in the UK, so they fixate on other countries…”

“There is no way anime or games have anything to do with low birth rates.”

“After struggling with reality I gave in and got Love Plus.”

“What about all the single men who have no interest in anime?”

“The problem is onanism feels so good.”

“As expected of the world’s most declined developed country, Britain…”

“I wonder if blaming everything on Japanese men will really help solve the problem?”

“I don’t know about the UK, but in Japan the social and economic hurdles to getting married have increased enormously in the past 20 years.”

“There’s no way a guy spending $600 on the DVDs of a single anime series can afford marriage.”

“The charms of women are all but gone. You can do the laundry at the press of a button and get dinner 24/7 at a conbini. If the need for cleaning disappears there’ll be no need to nurture the world’s most haughty money grubbing parasite at all.”

“Probably the real reason is that a lot of guys now realise that once married your life is over.”

“There are only a few tens of thousands of otaku like this at worst. Just look at the sales figures for eroge or anime and you can tell in an instant.”

“The guy probably never even visited Japan, it looks like the kind of article a middle schooler could write using Wikipedia.”

“This is probably just due to low incomes, otaku are a tiny minority.”

“(Quoting a column in the Nikkei BP:)

Why can’t young men wed anymore? I think it is because men can no longer say to women, ‘I can always protect you,’ in this dog-eat-dog world of restructurings and layoffs – such words are now unreal.

Women as a result now target two groups of men: “ikemen” (handsome, cool men), and rich men, the so-called ‘Hills tribe’ (referring to the ultra-prestigious Roppongi Hills residential tower).

But most men have neither money nor good looks, and as a result women will no longer consider them. Surprisingly, I’ve heard of cases where a chosen man will end up dating dozens or hundreds of women.

Since the ikemen and the rich monopolise the women, all that remains is a sterile desert, where normal men can no longer find a partner, so they flee to Akihabara and find love in the arms of an anime character.”