This page is not a list of trends. There are plenty of those, and they go stale in weeks.
What I am trying to do here is slower and, I think, more useful: take the things currently happening in Japan and explain what need each one is meeting.
Not what it looks like. Why it exists.
Everything below links out to a longer piece. This page is the map.
The problem with how Japan gets covered
Most English-language writing about Japanese trends does one of two things.
It reports the surface — here is a strange new thing, look how strange — and leaves it there. Or it explains everything by reaching for “Japanese culture,” which is not an explanation so much as a place to stop asking.
Both approaches share a failure. They describe a behaviour without ever establishing what problem the behaviour solves.
And so the reader comes away entertained but not informed, and slightly more convinced that Japan is a curiosity rather than a country where people are dealing with things.
I would like to do the other thing.
Who is writing this
I am Japanese. I have taught in Japanese schools and universities for decades and I have worked as a counsellor for around forty years.
That background is the reason this page exists, and it is worth being specific about what it does and does not give me.
What it gives me: I have spent a very long career listening to people describe, in private, why they do things.
Trends look different when you have heard the individual version several thousand times. I also lived through the Showa era, the bubble, and what came after — so when something is described as new, I can usually say whether it is.
What it does not give me: I am not a market analyst and I have no special access.
Where I am relying on survey data, I say whose data and when it was collected, and where the figures disagree with each other I say that too.
Pattern one: attachment that cannot hurt you
The first thing I found, once I started looking at several trends together, is that three of the largest ones in Japan right now have the same shape.
Each supplies a form of closeness that carries no risk of being wounded by it.
A character who fails, and does not ask you to try harder
Chiikawa is a small, frightened creature who works a dangerous job and failed a low-level qualification exam for eight years before passing. Readers do not admire it. They stand next to it. In China, fans have taken to calling it digital ibuprofen — a painkiller.
An object you hold, that lowers your stress without your noticing
Nui-katsu — carrying a stuffed toy with you everywhere — has spread from young people upward through the age brackets. There are cafés that seat them and a nursery that takes them for the day. Japanese research found that holding a soft object measurably lowered cortisol in people who did not report feeling any calmer.
Devotion to a person who does not know you exist
Oshi-katsu is roughly a ¥4.1 trillion market. Around half of participants say they have never once cut this spending, through several years of rising prices. The Ministry of Finance has published a column describing it as resembling charitable giving.
An object, a story, and a person. Three enormous markets, all selling the same thing: something you can care about that cannot turn around and cost you anything.
I do not think this is a Japanese peculiarity. I think Japan built the infrastructure for it early, which makes it easier to see here first. Labubu queues in New York suggest the demand was never confined to one country.
What this pattern does not explain
I want to be careful here, because a single explanatory idea that seems to fit everything is usually being stretched.
Attachment-without-risk accounts for those three trends well. It does not account for everything happening in Japan, and I would be doing the thing I criticised at the top of this page if I pretended otherwise.
Other things are going on that will need their own explanations — and their own articles:
- Nostalgia running backwards at speed.
Japanese teenagers are currently treating the 1990s and early 2000s as retro, and buying it not as memory but as novelty. The gap between an era ending and becoming collectable is getting shorter. I have views about why. - Work, and leaving it.
The Japanese version of quiet quitting does not look like the Western one, and the reasons are structural rather than generational. - The generation that graduated into nothing.
Japan’s employment ice age is barely known outside the country, and it explains more about the present than almost anything else on this list. - A country with more houses than people.
Empty homes, shrinking towns, and a sudden surge of foreign interest in buying them. - Being visited.
Record numbers of tourists arriving in a country that spent decades not being visited, and what that is doing to the places absorbing it.
Some of these will turn out to share a cause. Some will not. I will say which when I have worked it out, rather than in advance.
How to use this page
Each entry above links to a full article. I add to this page as I write, and I revise it when something I said earlier turns out to be wrong — which happens, and I would rather say so than quietly delete it.
If you want the historical side rather than the current one, the other half of this site covers the Showa era from the position of someone who was actually there.
The Showa Era Nobody Abroad Remembers — a first-hand account
One request, if you have read this far. If something here does not match what you have seen in Japan yourself, I would like to know.
I have one vantage point, and it is a narrow one — a classroom, a counselling room, and about sixty years of living in one country. That is enough to see some things clearly and to miss others entirely.
Read Next
Japan Has Hotels That Take Bookings for Stuffed Animals
Japan Spends $27 Billion a Year on People Who Don’t Know They Exist
This is part of a series on what’s currently happening in Japan, and why.
