'Western cosplayers pack out miasmatic comic-con events.' VCG/VCG/Getty Images
“What is the image that pops into someone’s mind when they hear the name ‘Japan’?” It was 2006, and the Foreign Minister Taro Aso was trumpeting a new frontier in diplomacy. “Is it a bright and positive image? Warm? Cool? The more these kinds of positive images pop up in a person’s mind, the easier it becomes for Japan to get its views across over the long term.”
“Cool Japan”, the policy that resulted, was an attempt to mobilise the soft power of anime, manga and J-pop in the West. The country’s economy had been in the doldrums since the asset bubble burst in 1991; its geopolitical heft now seemed contingent on its role as the homeland of Sailor Moon, Naruto and Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved Studio Ghibli. Foreign policy aside, the finances of anime were not to be sniffed at either — the global industry will be worth more than $60 billion by 2032.
Western children and teens — particularly in France and Russia — were by now already hooked on the absurd, dreamlike aesthetics of anime and manga, with their narrative worlds so different from the rigid Christian morality of Disney. In this, they mirrored the Japanophiles of the 19th century who, after the country reopened to Western trade following two centuries of isolationism in 1853, fixated on Japan as a land of mystique, with its “charming, artistic, doll-like inhabitants”. Then, Van Gogh, Degas and others were among the European sophisticates who hoarded lacquered cabinets and ukiyo-e prints. This time, 4Chan christened the white Japanophiles calling each other senpai in school cafeterias “Wapanese”, then Weeaboo — and finally, Weebs.
Twee governmental efforts to push Cool Japan — including appointing a cartoon cat as an anime “ambassador” — belied the strangeness of the Western appetite it courted. Very soon, things would get very weird. By the time the initiative began, the scourge of offputting dorkiness had already taken root among Weebs, with young men embracing otaku culture — obsessive fandom — and feminists balking at the eroticised little girls of manga, notoriously printed onto dakimakura pillows to be embraced by undeodorised, undersexed disciples. From the 2010s, more and more Western cosplayers packed out miasmatic comic-con events, their bright pink and blue wigs, peace signs and puff-cheeked duck pouts becoming shorthand for a certain type of internet nerd — obsessive, horny and curiously alienated from the mainstream. For them, Japan represented a sort of aestheticised dreamland, a refuge from the blows of high-school jocks.
In 2025, the “manga accent”, with its accompanying hand gestures and bouncy body language, has become a staple of American dorkdom. Alongside this, the hikikomori lifestyle has taken hold: in 2022, there were about 1.46 million such people in Japan — recluses who have not left home for six months or more, wrapped up in virtual worlds and living from bed. Now, the nihilism of hikikomori seems to appeal to alienated Americans who might once have been goths, with anxiety-wracked bloggers emulating the lifestyle with their own videos of snack-strewn beds, figurines and drawn curtains.
At the same time, there is increasing alarm within Japan around the rise of soshoku-danshi, or “herbivore men”, who have little interest in sex or relationships. Their abstinence is often connected with the lure of hyperstimulating anime porn, or hentai, the supreme weirdness of which has done little for Japan’s global reputation. The subset of much-whispered-about “tentacle porn”, initially an Eighties ploy to circumvent censorship rules, crystallises the Western fixation on Japan as a land of paraphilias. In this strange sexual environment, around a third of Japanese men and women aged 18-34 show no interest in having a relationship — a figure borne out by a plummeting birth rate, a trend to which the West is rapidly catching up.
The Cool Japan initiative certainly didn’t intend to play up the nation’s reputation as a fantasyland of intense, intoxicating fandom and alienated, fantastical hypersexuality. But Weeb culture has latched upon this vision of Japan, making it synonymous with social disengagement, strangeness, sexlessness and aggressive introspection. Japan has always been a site of Western anxieties — think of Ridley Scott’s neon-lit Blade Runner vision of dystopian LA, based on the Shinjuku district of Tokyo — but what’s new is the heavy identification of homegrown anime fans with a lifestyle of imagination and isolation.
There is a curious irony in this. A progressive generation of Westerners raised with the hot breath of Edward Said forever on its neck has come to see rhapsodising over distant lands as a cardinal sin — but Japanophilia is a notable exception. Japan’s figurative power as an otherworldly site of eroticism is the textbook example of Orientalism — yet this blind spot is everywhere, perhaps owing to Weebism’s close associations with queer culture. Recently, a white trans X user pulled the pin on a grenade in announcing they would be adopting the name Saeko; this month, a TikToker made a viral appeal: “Just because you’re non-binary doesn’t mean you’re also Japanese.” The confluence between gender discourse and anime is not a coincidence; despite springing from a highly conservative country where even gay marriage is not yet legal, anime is replete with boyish sylph protagonists, as in Revolutionary Girl Utena and The Rose of Versailles. The iconography is all languorous androgyny, shaggy hair and slender bishōnen, or “beautiful boys” — modelled on the effeminate princeliness of Tadzio in Visconti’s 1971 adaptation of Death in Venice.
Meanwhile, yaoi and yuri — “boys’ love” and “girls’ love” — are distinct anime genres beloved by women and men respectively; these are melodramatic, idealised homoerotic romances which typify “Japanese sexuality” as a category all its own. This is a sexual world unanchored from politics or even real-world lust, all playing out in two dimensions. Nowhere is anime sexuality’s fantastical remoteness demonstrated better and more disturbingly than in a viral video of a “VTuber” (virtual YouTuber, god help us all) concert from 2023, in which an audience of parasocial teen girls screams at the “face reveal” of an animated manga-style singer.
Boy and girl-love romances are excruciatingly slow-burning and structured around heterosexual formulae — seme, or dominant, characters emotionally wrestle with uke submissives. They are designed, in the case of “boys’ love”, for the titillation of shy young straight women who are more comfortable with the unthreatening, dreamlike symbolism of two boys exchanging whispers than the real prospect of sex with a man. The politics of the genre is complicated; upon the opening of a manga exhibition at the British Museum in 2019, the academic Susan Napier told the BBC that the medium “held up very progressive models”, and in Japan, yaoi and yuri might fairly be interpreted as inevitable sproutings of liberalism in an undersexed and highly formal culture. But as these genres bobbed over oceans to the West and became incorporated into mainstream queer movements, they have become Weebish totems of alternative gender identities, something you’ll notice if you spend five minutes auditing profile pictures on X — a curious departure from their culturally conservative provenance. Both the androgynous aesthetics of anime and its atmosphere as an outsiders’ club lie beneath the Weeb-gender overlap, one which has produced viral X accounts whose sole purpose is to post “a canon/implied trans person a day” — mainly plucked from anime.
All of this is important, because it situates the very real field of Western sexual politics in the realm of dreams and imagination, and explains in part the conceptual disconnect between Trump’s generation and the young trans people he is legislating against. The American Right and gender-critical feminists are in an uncomfortable alliance in their preoccupation with physicality; for the young, online Left, and particularly that sizeable Weeb-queer nexus, imaginative potential and identification with figurative avatars — I identify with, even worship, this character, therefore I am them — has unmoored them from the politics of the body. So it is that Japan’s soft power has weaned a generation of Americans which has, according to plan, grown-up enraptured by anime — but never grew out of it. So it is too that the generation most concerned about the diktats of Said is willing to project its dreams onto Japan, imagining it as the ultimate sexual utopia; the Japanese exception to Orientalism, it seems, relies on the green light of queer, nerdy and compulsive Weebery.
Japanese critics have long lamented the Orientalising gaze of Weebs, with Hiroki Azuma namechecking Said’s theory in 2005 and writing that “what is behind the image … [is] completely erased when they are exported overseas”. There are fascinating analogues of this deracination in all realms of media: in the world of house music, white Western DJs are using Japanese-coded avatars. The San Franciscan DJ Dr Gabba uses the image of an evil scientist from Sailor Moon, while the Georgian musician Osean World has created a vocaloid (a synthetised singer) called Yameii, a pink-bunned anime girl who layers accented, eerie vocals over the 2020 hit Baby My Phone, which has nearly 16 million views on YouTube. Last week, the singer FKA Twigs released a collaboration with Kanye-Kardashian royalty North West, in which the 11-year-old sings in Japanese (“My name is North-chan”) for no apparent reason. All very strange, and no doubt frustrating to Japanese observers — but wasn’t it the government’s aim to spread the aesthetics and catchphrases of anime worldwide? Is this power, in the end, a little too soft?
The critical characteristic of Weebism is its situation within fantasy — which the lead singer of The Vapors presciently captured in his song Turning Japanese, written from his Guildford bedroom in 1980. In it, the singer obsesses over a photograph of his lover — “I sit there staring and there’s nothing else to do” — and embraces the slow creep of isolation: “No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women”, maddened by his own private idol-worship. Though unconscious — David Fenton said he’d heard the phrase “turning Japanese” in a dream, and had even written a motif which “is more likely to be Chinese, so I got that completely wrong!” — the song captures the shut-in, engrossed individualism of Weebery decades before its time, the tentacles of which have spread into Western youth politics, conducted not from the streets but from a lonely bedroom.
Given all this, has the experiment of Cool Japan failed? Of modern-day manga creators, Miyazaki Hayao said in 2014 that “some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people.” In this, Weebs are the perfect cognate. A decades-old Japanese government initiative around soft power has instead produced a sort of soft Orientalism, one which reduces the nation to an eroticised cartoon fantasy. This is how Cool Japan was transfigured from the real-world politics of diplomacy to the splintered, bedroom-bound dreamworlds which now characterise the young Western Left. Progressive youth movements, weaned on screens and taught morality by the internet, are beginning to creak in the face of a nastier, more robust camp intent on dashing every trace of Weebish woke. The heirs of Cool Japan are a generation those ministers in Noughties Tokyo would hardly recognise. And the Weebs themselves? They are culturally at sea, now that the jocks are back in charge.
I’m increasingly enjoying Poppy’s postcards from youth culture.
Harder to know what to make of it though. Our culture has leaned youthful, if not infantile, since the 60s – but increasingly people seem unable to make the transition from child to adult at all.
It would be easy to pretend things have only turned odd recently, but these young (and not so young) people are our creation – they didn’t just appear out of nothing. What did we do, or not do, that they should find simply growing up into adult men and women so difficult?
The housing crisis certainly isn’t helping in that regard. Whereas you used to be able to get a basic job which would allow you to move out of home and onto the property ladder fairly quickly, now even decent jobs will only get you into a grotty house share with 4 other people so many end up living at home until much later in life
Excellent and very interesting. Is the Japanese phenomenon of hikomori a retreat from competition and effort and a retreat to comfort?
Typically one-sided. The anime fandom contains multitudes and certainly isn’t monopolised by trans-adjacent progressives. The right wing centred on 4chan has always been a force in the fandom. Black anime fans are another major strand with their own community and culture. In the end, it’s not that serious. Another form of television and pornography, but the western world lacks for neither.
A really interesting article by the cultural ambassador for the 21st century.
Poppy, you are my waifu.
Great; a different strain of mental illness to join the other varieties.
The welfare state, that the West has become, feeds this self indulgence.
‘welfarism is destroying our economies and our values’
Maybe if work paid enough so that full time workers didn’t need government assistance to pay the extortionate rent then it wouldn’t be an issue
The welfare state in the West has encouraged self indulgence, and in so many ways we are accordingly unaccountable for our behaviour.
‘welfarism is destroying our economies and our values’
Welfarism and withdrawal are inevitable consequences of thug-conservatism.
Conservatives deploring self-indulgence are often the most self-indulgent of all.
It is in any case, Capitalist affluence that has destroyed our values and personal dignity – just as it did in the Gilded Age, the Belle Epoque, of 1870-1914.
And before that, in Ancient Rome.
Almost a throwaway remark in the piece, but isn’t this odd.
Second wave feminists for whom physical embodiment, male or female, was scarcely meant to matter – best described as biological minimalists; and American conservatives, playing down the importance of sexual physicality and often anti Darwin; suddenly cuddling up to each other under a banner of biological realism!
Wow! That was so boring I mean who really cares? Weebs are the least of our cultural problems. It’s the isolated young men in their bedrooms who are obsessed with death and violence we need to be concerned about according to two tier….
I’m with you on that – also, too many words required to get each little Japanese concept/conceit dropped in front of us, like a spaniel pup dropping a dead mouse at your feet. Or should that be dayid-ddoh mousii-ka?
The allure of Japanese culture for those of us in the West comes in part from the fact that Japan is essentially the only non-Western country to modernize on its own terms, rather than having modernity thrust upon it by either colonial occupation (cf. Africa, India, the Americas, Australia,..) or a Communist take-over (cf. Russia, China). The Japanese reaction against the imposition of unequal treaties, in the Meiji Restoration (or Meiji Revolution), manged to integrate Western ways, picked and chosen based on what the Japanese thought best — British-style education, Prussian-style military organization,… — into traditional Japanese culture. They consciously thought of themselves as somehow Western in comparison to the rest of Asia — the propaganda manga from the Russo-Japanese War make the Russians look more Asiatic than the Japanese. And down to the present day, many manga and anime seem to be set in a fictional Japan inhabited by a population with European-like variations in hair and eye color extended to unnatural shades for both (hence the pastel pink and blue hair on cosplayers) and eyes as round or rounder than Europeans. So, in a way Japan being an exception to Orientalism is something the Japanese chose for themselves.
It’s all about technology. Technology allows our fantasies to come true (houses instead of caves, fast cars instead of shanks pony, cosmetic surgery etc. etc. etc. …).
Where does it end? Only at the limits of our desires, & the limitations of physics. Whatever they are.
Does this explain in some indirect way why so many GenZers and whatever they’re calling the next one won’t drive or leave home?
Please go outside and do some reporting from the real world.