No Country for Young Men - The emasculated Japanese Man and the permissive society that castrated him.

Posted by iritimD@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 31 comments

Japan has a word, kodokushi, for the lonely death of a middle aged man whose body is found weeks after he died because the smell finally bothered the neighbours. There is also a job, tokushu seiso, for the cleaners who scrub the dried floor stains afterward. One of them is an artist who makes miniature dioramas of the rooms she has cleaned. You can buy the dioramas. People put them on shelves. The National Police Agency reported 37,227 such deaths in just the first half of 2024. Nearly 4,000 of the bodies had been there for over a month. One hundred and thirty for over a year.

The country with the most refined ocabulary for what is happening to it is also the country furthest along the curve. What thirty five years of suppressed asset prices and protected institutions does to a generation of men, and why none of this is going to stay in Japan.

Essay here:
No Country for Young Men

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Ill-Village-699@reddit

i'm so sick of hearing white mens' opinions on asian culture, or any culture for that matter. it's the colonialist mindset that's responsible for ruining the world and societies in the way the article describes, the colonial mindset that the west ultimately came out on top with, and that japan tried to impose at several points in their history

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It-s_Not_Important@reddit

Origin of knowledge and quality of knowledge are not the same thing. Just because someone is not part of the in group does not disqualify them from providing informed commentary on it. I don’t know the author’s background, but unless you do, then this inverse appeal to authority is not helpful.

If the author has devoted serious time to the study of an issue, then they’re probably more qualified to discuss it than most people from the in group. Just because someone is not American doesn’t mean I am more qualified as an American to talk about life in America.

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Ill-Village-699@reddit

right. it's just a bit exasperating to me that it overwhelmingly seems to be white men who are apparently the most qualified, or more probably most eager, to speak on the issues and concerns of seemingly all cultures. is it exasperating for you to read the words of an asian man commenting on the foibles of white men?

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Reasonable-Teach7155@reddit

I just ignore it. Like a normal person. Words from strangers on the internet shouldn't give you any feelings at all.

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Ill-Village-699@reddit

yet you were elicited by my words to feel enough of something to write a response. you are feeling something right now reading these words. i agree it's usually the best course of action to ignore and move on, but to deny any feeling would be psychopathic

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It-s_Not_Important@reddit

I probably wouldn’t notice or concern myself with the race or gender of the author, especially if it were a scholarly article rather than just social commentary.

But at the same time, I’ve tried reflecting on this to identify recent examples of such commentary and I’m not sure there is really much being said on the topic.

There’s the recent “loneliness epidemic” that I don’t identify with. I’m happily married to a minority.
There’s recurring commentary about ongoing emasculation of men. I don’t feel feminine even if my wife does things that most people would call “the man’s job.”
There’s “reverse discrimination” which is really just discrimination. And I can’t see that I’ve been a target. Most people I interact with are pleasant regardless of their race or gender.
There’s cultural invisibility, or the suggestion that white males are the only group who can’t celebrate their identity. And I’ve never felt the desire to celebrate that aspect of myself because maleness nor whiteness define me as an individual.

Perhaps the only thing I can identify with is anxiety over the future. But other than the ultra-wealthy who think they can ride out the apocalypse in bunkers, who doesn’t? And maybe that’s the point. I can see that many men are lonely, that many feel voiceless, that roles once dominated by white men are increasingly occupied by others. These are real phenomena. But I don’t feel misrepresented by the commentary because I don’t define myself by the traits being discussed. If someone wants to have a conversation about me, they’d better be ready to talk about my interests, not my skin color or genitalia.

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Ill-Village-699@reddit

i think the fact you are able to be unconcerned with race or gender speaks to the point i hope to make. the colonialist attitude empowers individuals and societies to lay claim to others, in every way, whether explicitly like taking ownership of their actual bodies and lives, or something more nuanced like assuming the authority to speak on behalf of the people and their culture. it's a huge difference but also not a large one at the same time. i would consider it completely remiss to speak authoritatively on any culture not my own, regardless of how much time i'd spend studying it, yet this seems not to even a be a consideration for the scholars of colonialism, that anything should be beyond their right to possess

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Few_Fish8771@reddit

Its the result of power competition. You want someone to blame? Look up the maximum power principle, the tragedy of the commons, game theory, the race to the bottom, the metaphorical moloch or meditations on moloch, fast life strategy vs slow life strategy, rules for rulers or how to be a dictator, and social entropy.

The truth is far more disturbing than blaming one faction or another. The truth is nobody is in charge, people are simply acting as avatars of different networks of different forces and different principles. Nobody is in power, everyone who has power is empowered, and when they refuse to fufill the roles of those who empowered them (or the forces that empowered them) they are removed.

The downside of learning all of this is its much harder to have a clear villain. Upside your actual ability to control and shape the world grows.

You can see the forces that make the monsters and how those forces can be defeated.

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Ill-Village-699@reddit

it sounds like you are interpreting my comment as a personal attack. unless you have published articles positing an understanding of foreign cultures that those cultures are incapable of understanding and therefore solving themselves, i am not including you in my reference to white men except in the general sense that all white men, and all asian men, and all black women, and really all simians are capable of succumbing to such dark thoughts as colonising their neighbours on the basis of superiority

PM-me-youre-PMs@reddit

Interesting topic but fuck that masculinist borderline fascist bullshit. "A samurai who dies for his lord at age twenty-five has an internally coherent story. A salaryman who dies of a heart attack at forty-eight does not"

Get the hell out of here i am reporting this shit.

iritimD@reddit (OP)

Reporting what? I don’t even understand what you are mad about? Have you heard of analogy and prose?

Masculinist borderline fascist bullshit, how else do you want me to call it ? Longing for the good old days when men were warriors and women knew their place, you know ?

Its the old the rich the rent seekers consuming the futures of the young. Its not women vs men, but older wealthier established authority versus younger generations. You might note that whenever punishments for the perceived collective faults of men are dished out, its always to the middle aged or younger men, while older wealthier higher up men mostly avoid punishment, turning the anger and demands of minorities and women into a weapon older higher up in authority and more established men use as a weapon against their younger, poorer, less established competitors.

This in turn radicalizes men who are then weaponized against women. Divide et impera. Divide and rule or divide and conquer.

Cultural-Answer-321@reddit

This. Contrary to popular myth, relationships are expensive. Families even more so.

No money? No honey. For both men AND women.

And yet the rich complain about birth rates. Utter morons rule the world.

Pumpkin_Robber@reddit

Half agree. Most broke women would find it easy to find sexual partners and even husbands. The bar is so incredibly low for woman as long as she's not fat she's fuckable. Whereas something like 90% of men are not able to get sexual partners or relationships.

Imagine thinking "fuckable" is a standard.

Total myth.

Sandslinger_Eve@reddit

No statistically it holds true. Not 90% that's an exaggeration.

But that a large portion of men have lost access to partnerships and the joy of being father's is absolutely true.

Hypergamy is real, calling it a myth is just dishonest as heck.

Umbraine@reddit

90 PERCENT? Are you hearing yourself??

refusemouth@reddit

Some guys really like fat girls, though. Just saying. I have a neighbor who wouldn't think about dating a slender woman when he could have a fat one. He says the bigger girls are more of a pleasure to poke.

UnexpectedWings@reddit

This is a false dichotomy.

x880609@reddit

Not if you are in love with an anime character.

WonderingOctopus@reddit

When I was in Japan, there as an office over the road from where I stayed. There was a guy that worked from around 7.30am to around 11.00pm every day, 7 days a week.

That's just one example.

That level of work does not constitute a healthy individual nor society.

Comfortably-Numb2026@reddit

I don’t buy it.

What do you call the hundreds of thousands of young American men and women who have died of a drug overdose? What caused that? Emasculation?

Probably drugs

Lack of empowerment would be a better way to phrase it. When people feel helpless and hopeless, drugs are a way to escape those feelings. It transcends any kind of gender association, in my opinion. Maybe it's more difficult for men because of societal expectations of masculinity, but women have their own set of societal expectations to deal with, and I wouldn't assign any judgements on what set of cultural standards feel more oppressive to a given individual. All I can really say is that women seem more likely to reach out and form the kind of relationships and counceling that keep a person from going off the deep end, at least they seem to in my cultural framework.

96-62@reddit

Emasculation is just another word for "treating them terribly, but they're men and their suffering could never be compared to a women's"

afizzzz@reddit

Skill issue, grow up

This is why I have a 2 gallon automatic water dispenser for my dog and leave another 5-gallon bucket of water out, and I leave his food bin loose enough for him to get the lid off. My greatest fear is that I will die in the winter when nobody expects to see me anywhere and he starves to death or dies of dehydration before anyone thinks to come to my door.

Same_Bug5069@reddit

Hyper-capitalism. Long hours, obligatory nights with your boss, people sleeping on trains, others renting boxes just to exist between shifts. Loneliness is part of the system.

AlphaState@reddit

I thought it should be obvious to everyone who reads this sub that the failure of the endless growth paradigm of our current civilisation was inevitable. So if you need a high birth rate and constantly increasing asset prices to feel like a man, you are doomed to fail.

Japan may be leading the way on the downward slope, but it is surely a blessing that their young men are "emasculated" and turning away from the ideology of rapacious growth. Just compare the rate of violent crime in Japan with any other developed country.