this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Ones that are so endemic to Japanese culture and so central to their cultural identity that I doubt they will actually address them.
It’s not that they’re not Japanese enough. It’s that they’re too Japanese for their own good.
What I mean by that is that Japan is a very conservative, stratified, traditional culture. If you are X, then you must Y. Always.
If you are a man, you must have a proper job, and if you are high-ranking you must have a wife as well to carry on the family name. If you are a woman, you must marry before 25, and become a homemaker, as having a job is ‘man’s work’ and caring for the house is ‘woman’s work’.
(The reverse, with the man staying home, or even more outlandish, the woman staying single and having a career, is just not done, as the English would say. The few who do so are treated much like oddities in a circus sideshow.)
If you are high-ranking, you must have this kind of job. You must have these interests (usually calligraphy for men and a properly traditional instrument for women). If you are lower rank, then you have this kind of job. And you are to always consider your family/clan and their interests above your own.
And so on and so forth.
They are a very old culture, and every action, every position, is steeped in centuries of tradition. It makes for a strong framework, which is both good and bad. The way they tend to see it, things have always been ‘this way’, and to have them be any other way is simply unthinkable. Many of them literally can’t get their heads around the idea that things might be better different.
And that creates enormous social pressure to conform. ‘The nail that stands tallest is the one pounded down.’ Often people are punished more for rocking the boat than for causing actual problems, hence things like the major issue with women being groped on public transport. Sure, the men are sexually harassing them. But the women inevitably are the ones that get in more trouble for speaking up.
And because of the pressure to conform, those who can’t—such as failing to get into the ‘proper school’—feel like they have transgressed so badly that there is no other option but to counter the shame they brought to their families by killing themselves.