Quick preword before you commit: this is a deep, unhurried dive into kanji readings, not a 60-second explainer, and it does not get to the point quickly on purpose. Kanji fluency doesn't arrive in fifteen-second increments — so if you need a hook in the first three seconds, this is probably not for you.

For the past year or so I’ve been teaching Japanese online to students in Australia, and it’s been one of the more quietly rewarding things I do — enough that I keep thinking of the proverb 情けは人の為ならず.1 In my case it’s been fairly literal: answering a year of specific, sharp, occasionally unanswerable student questions has probably done more for my own Japanese than any studying I did alone.

The most recent one arrived looking simple. A student had noticed that most two-kanji words seem to read with 音読み (on’yomi) for both characters, but every so often a word clearly doesn’t, and she wanted to know why. I gave her the standard answer — the one I was taught, and the one most second-language learners get: 訓読み (kun’yomi) is for reading a kanji on its own or with hiragana attached, on’yomi is for when two kanji combine. 熟語 (jukugo), multi-kanji compounds like 学校 (gakkō), 電車 (densha), and 日本 (nihon), generally use on’yomi for both characters. Standalone words or words followed by hiragana tend to lean toward kun’yomi: 山 (yama), 食べる (taberu), 白い (shiroi).

Clean and simple answer, except it’s not, because even my own textbook example turned out not to be as clean as I’d claimed.

Even the safe example isn’t safe

学校 is on’yomi + on’yomi — 学 is ガク, 校 is コウ — but say ガクコウ out loud and it isn’t what comes out. What comes out is ガッコウ, with a small っ replacing the く entirely. That っ isn’t a third reading of 学 hiding somewhere in a dictionary. It’s the product of a sound change called 促音化 (sokuonka).2

None of which a fluent speaker thinks about while saying がっこう. But it’s worth noticing on the way in: the compound I was using as the uncomplicated example was already quietly doing something to its own sound. If that much is going on underneath the word every textbook uses to teach the rule, the actual exceptions were never going to be simple.

The counterexamples that started this

Once I actually started looking, they piled up fast: 場所 (basho). 手紙3 (tegami). 今日 (kyō). 大人 (otona). None of these are on’yomi-plus-on’yomi. Some aren’t cleanly on’yomi or kun’yomi in any simple sense at all.

“Compounds use on’yomi” isn’t wrong, exactly — it’s a real, strong tendency, because an enormous share of Japanese vocabulary was either borrowed wholesale from Chinese or coined in Japan using Chinese-style word formation (和製漢語, wasei kango), and two-character compounds built that way keep both characters’ on’yomi because the whole unit was conceived as Sino-Japanese from the start. It’s just not a law, and Japanese has several distinct, nameable ways of quietly ignoring it — plus, as I found later, several ways of quietly reshaping the sounds themselves even when the reading pattern is followed correctly.

Does knowing any of this actually matter? Probably not, and I got proof of that scrolling Instagram of all places: a street-interview clip of a Japanese teacher asking passersby to read the 魚偏 (fish-radical) kanji for common fish, and a surprising number couldn’t — 鰌 (どじょう, “loach”), 鱈 (たら, “cod”), 鯉 (こい, “carp”), 鰯 (いわし, “sardine”), 鰹 (かつお, “bonito”), 鯖 (さば, “mackerel”), 鰤 (ぶり, “yellowtail”), 鮭 (さけ, “salmon”), 鮪 (まぐろ, “tuna”), 鯛 (たい, “sea bream”). Fair enough, honestly — menus write most of these in hiragana or katakana anyway.

I mention it because everything below is, strictly speaking, unnecessary. Nobody needs to know how to read 担板漢4to speak Japanese perfectly well. I do this because I find it genuinely interesting (perhpas there’s something wrong with me), not because it’s useful, and that distinction matters for how to read the rest of this. When I’ve tried explaining some of this to Japanese friends, the reaction is usually a polite えー、知らなかった。すごいね。よく知ってるね — which, deployed at that particular pitch, is not quite the astonished revelation I was hoping for.

Regardless — here’s the over-explanation nobody asked for.

On’yomi and kun’yomi, properly this time

“On’yomi is the Chinese reading, kun’yomi is the Japanese reading” isn’t wrong, but it flattens something more interesting. On’yomi aren’t one borrowed layer — they’re several, absorbed at different points across more than a thousand years, each preserving a snapshot of Chinese pronunciation, as Japanese ears heard it, at a specific historical moment.

The earliest layer, 呉音 (go-on), arrived from roughly the 5th–6th century onward, largely via the Korean peninsula, and stuck hardest in Buddhist vocabulary — a lot of sutra terminology still uses go-on today. Later, during the Nara and Heian periods, Japanese envoys and students returning from Tang-dynasty China brought back 漢音 (kan-on), modeled on the prestige speech of the capital, Chang’an; this became the reading favored by scholars and government, and is usually the “default” on’yomi listed first in a dictionary.

Later still, from the Kamakura period on, Zen monks and merchants brought a smaller third layer, 唐音 (tō-on), sometimes 宋音 (sō-on), surviving in specific words like 椅子 (isu, “chair”) and 行灯 (andon, “paper lantern”). A single character can carry more than one — 明 is みょう in some words (go-on) and めい in others (kan-on), depending which historical layer a given compound was coined in.

Kun’yomi, meanwhile, aren’t translations so much as pre-existing native Japanese words (大和言葉, yamato kotoba) matched to whichever kanji best captured their meaning once Chinese characters arrived. Japan had no native script before that; 山 already meant “mountain” in spoken Japanese long before anyone attached 山 to it. So: on’yomi is borrowed sound, kun’yomi is native meaning wearing a borrowed costume — and the “compounds use on’yomi” heuristic exists because so much abstract or technical vocabulary is Sino-Japanese by construction. Here’s how it gets broken.

重箱読み and 湯桶読み

The first way is 重箱読み (jūbako-yomi): on’yomi followed by kun’yomi. You’ll see it in words like — 台所 (daidokoro, “kitchen”: 台 on + 所 kun), 職場 (shokuba, “workplace”: 職 on + 場 kun), 本屋 (hon’ya, “bookshop”), 額縁 (gakubuchi, “picture frame”).

The category takes its name from 重箱 (jūbako), the stacked lacquered boxes used for osechi, which happens to demonstrate its own pattern (重→じゅう on’yomi, 箱→はこ kun’yomi). It’s a slightly odd choice as a teaching example, since it’s not a word most people reach for daily. With that said, I do prefer that tradition named the category after a word that embodies it, rather than inventing something clinical like “mixed compound type A.”

Run the pattern backward — kun’yomi then on’yomi — and you get 湯桶読み (yutō-yomi), named the same way after 湯桶 (yutō), a wooden vessel for hot water. Examples being: 見本 (mihon, “sample”: 見 kun + 本 on), 豚肉5 (butaniku, “pork”), 雨具 (amagu, “rain gear”), 高台 (takadai, “elevated ground”).

This is where my student’s original example, 場所 (basho), lands. 場→ば is kun’yomi (場’s on’yomi is じょう, as in 会場, kaijō, “venue”); 所→しょ is on’yomi (所’s kun’yomi is ところ, tokoro, the standalone word for “place”). So 場所 isn’t a stray exception — it belongs to a named category most learners simply aren’t introduced to, which is exactly why it reads as chaos rather than pattern. Once you have the category, words that looked arbitrary turn out to belong to a shared, describable system, rather than something memorised one exhausting item at a time.

熟字訓

This is where the kanji stop owning individual sounds.

熟字訓 (jukujikun) covers compounds where the reading attaches to the whole written unit at once — you can’t point at one kanji and say “this part is pronounced this,” because that division doesn’t exist. 今日 (kyō, “today”) is the standard example: 今 doesn’t read きょ anywhere else, 日 doesn’t read う anywhere else. The pre-existing native word きょう was assigned to the two-character unit as a package.

大人 (otona, “adult”) works the same way — おとな doesn’t decompose into a reading for 大 plus a reading for 人. Neither does 明日 (asu or ashita). Other examples: 昨日 (kinō, “yesterday”), 今朝 (kesa, “this morning”), 眼鏡 (megane, “glasses”), 果物 (kudamono, “fruit”), 相撲 (sumō, “sumo”), 一人／二人 (hitori／futari), where 人 alone produces neither り nor たり under any standard reading.

These aren’t just scattered folk oddities — 文化庁’s official appendix to the 常用漢字表, called the 付表, formally lists a little over a hundred such readings as standardized exceptions that don’t reduce to ordinary on’yomi or kun’yomi. The idea underneath all of it: with jukujikun, “which part of the pronunciation belongs to which kanji” isn’t a hard question with a hidden answer — it’s the wrong question. The kanji are a name tag pinned to the whole group, not to any individual in it.

当て字 & 義訓

If jukujikun is “the compound gets one reading as a unit,” this next category is “the kanji were never really reading the word — they were decorating it.”

当て字 (ateji) covers kanji chosen for a word largely apart from their ordinary meaning. Several reference sources usefully split it into two subtypes: 借字 (shakuji), kanji chosen mainly for sound — 珈琲 (コーヒー, kōhī, “coffee”), 倶楽部 (クラブ, kurabu, “club”) — and 義訓 (gikun), in its broader sense, refers to kanji chosen primarily for their meaning and applied to a word whose pronunciation was already fixed — like 煙草 (tabako), literally “smoke” and “grass.”6

For example, 土産 (miyage, “souvenir”) is often casually classified as 当て字, but it is more accurately considered 熟字訓. みやげ was already a pre-existing native Japanese word, with the kanji 土産 — literally, “product of the land” — later assigned to it based on meaning. Its etymology is debated, with theories linking it to 見上げ (“carefully selecting and presenting”) or an older word relating to local produce or storehouses. Structurally, it works in much the same way as 今日 or 大人: the reading belongs to the compound as a whole, rather than being divided neatly between the individual kanji.

Which raises the obvious question: where does 熟字訓 stop and 当て字 begin? Broadly, 熟字訓 is reserved for kanji matched to an existing native (和語, wago) word for meaning. Loanwords get filed differently — 煙草 (tabako, “tobacco”) looks structurally identical to 土産, but たばこ is a 16th-century borrowing from Portuguese tabaco, not a native word, so it’s classified as 当て字 (the meaning-priority type) rather than 熟字訓, which is technically reserved for wago. In casual usage this line blurs constantly, and even linguists don’t fully agree on edge cases.

And then the sounds themselves start moving

Everything above is about which reading a kanji takes. There’s a separate layer of complexity in how those readings sound once combined — I’ve already gone pretty far but this is where I went further than I meant to.

We already saw 促音化 turn ガク+コウ into ガッコウ. There’s a parallel process, 連濁 (rendaku), where the first sound of the second element voices — か→が, さ→ざ, た→だ, は→ば — when two words combine. It’s textbook-associated with native kun’yomi compounds (手＋紙→てがみ, not てかみ), but it also happens to on’yomi morphemes, less predictably. 山 (さん) is a clean case: 火山 (kazan) and 登山 (tozan) both voice, and research on Sino-Japanese morphemes by 鈴木豊 finds roughly two-thirds of common-noun 山-compounds take the voiced form. Mountain proper names, though, mostly resist it — 富士山 stays ふじさん, never ふじざん.7

Japanese tends to resist packing two voiced obstruents into the same word. This tendency is known as ライマンの法則 (Lyman’s Law), named after Benjamin Smith Lyman, an American mining engineer who “rediscovered” the pattern in the 1870s while working in Meiji-era Japan. Japanese scholars, including Kamo no Mabuchi and Motoori Norinaga, had already described the same phenomenon in the 18th century. Like most rules in Japanese, however, Lyman’s Law has documented exceptions of its own. 縄梯子 (なわばしご, “rope ladder”) voices はしご to ばしご even though ばしご already contains a voiced sound via 梯子’s ご, which by the law should have blocked it. It’s the standard example cited whenever this comes up, and one of very few genuinely undisputed exceptions in the literature.

One more, because it shows how easy it is to mis-attribute a sound change once you’re primed to see rendaku everywhere. 舌鼓 is properly したつづみ (した, “tongue,” + つづみ, “hand drum” — the sound of smacking one’s lips over good food), but a widespread variant, したづつみ, also exists, and it’s tempting to explain that as some kind of voicing swap. It isn’t quite that. 精選版日本国語大辞典 attributes it to analogical leveling: by the early modern period, したつづみ and 腹鼓 (はらつづみ) both picked up づつみ-final variants by analogy with genuine rendaku ~づつみ (包, “wrapping”) compounds like 上包 (うわづつみ) — words where the voicing is doing real morphological work. したつづみ absorbed the shape of that pattern without actually being that pattern; some sources describe it more loosely as 音位転換 (metathesis), the same phenomenon behind the common mispronunciation of 雰囲気 as ふいんき instead of ふんいき. Either way, したつづみ remains the standard, dictionary-preferred reading, though the variant is old and common enough that recent dictionaries note it as an accepted secondary form.

Does anyone actually calculate any of this while reading?

Almost certainly not — and this is what answers my student’s original question honestly. Nobody looks at 学校 and thinks “on’yomi compound, therefore ガク+コウ, subject to 促音化.” Nobody sees 今日 and thinks “jukujikun, whole-unit reading independent of components.” They just see がっこう, きょう.

English does the identical thing. Though, through, cough, rough — four words sharing “ough,” pronounced four completely different ways, for reasons buried in centuries of pronunciation shift that no fluent adult reconstructs while reading a text message. You don’t run the Great Vowel Shift every time you read “though.” You just know the word.

On’yomi, kun’yomi, jūbako-yomi, yutō-yomi, jukujikun, ateji, gikun, sokuonka, rendaku, Lyman’s Law: enormously useful for understanding why Japanese looks the way it does, and none of it run in real time by a fluent reader. Is any of this actually useful to know? Probably not. But I still think there’s value in understanding this stuff — not because you’ll consciously apply it while reading at speed, but because it turns what initially feels like arbitrary chaos into chaos with a shape.

Which brings me to 漢検2級

Part of why this grabbed me is that I’m currently studying for 日本漢字能力検定2級 (通称 漢検2級), the kanji proficiency exam run by the 日本漢字能力検定協会. Not something to walk into casually: 2級 covers all 2,136 常用漢字 and expects accurate reading and writing, understanding of compound structure, antonym/synonym pairs — and, the official exam criteria requires explicit understanding of 熟字訓 and 当て字, with the board’s own published examples being 海女 (ama, “female pearl diver”) and 玄人 (kurōto, “expert”).

The passing line for 2級 sits around 80% (roughly 160/200 points). I won’t hang a single precise pass-rate figure on it, since the foundation’s own published data varies noticeably session to session — but it’s not a rubber stamp by any measure.

And then there’s 漢検1級

Will I eventually attempt 漢検1級, the test that only around 300 people pass per year? Kanken’s own data shows recent 1級 sittings passing anywhere from roughly 6% to 13% of test-takers.

Honestly... maybe. I’m aware that’s a slightly unhinged thing to commit to in writing, especially once you look at who’s actually cleared it as a non-native, non-kanji-background speaker. A small, enthusiast-maintained tracking list — not an official record, since 漢検 doesn’t publish results by nationality — currently counts six such people.

Where that leaves me

If one thing is clear from all this, it’s that linguistic knowledge doesn’t produce fluency. The deeper I dig into why Japanese reading feels chaotic to a learner, the more structure I find underneath — on’yomi has its own layered history, jūbako-yomi and yutō-yomi are named and teachable, jukujikun has an actual official list, even the phonological shifts turn out to be documented and mostly predictable.

But the better I understand that structure, the more obvious it becomes that fluent reading was never built on consciously applying it. A native speaker doesn’t need the term 重箱読み to correctly read 残高. They just know the word — the way you just know “though” without an etymology lecture running underneath. And the same holds in reverse for a learner: you don’t need the terminology first either. Enough exposure, and enough time spent looking things up one stubborn word at a time, gradually surfaces the same underlying shape on its own — consciously naming it just allow you to map it better.

If you’re a native Japanese speaker, or a non-native speaker, I’m genuinely curious whether any of this ever surfaces consciously for you. Do you ever catch yourself thinking “on’yomi” or “kun’yomi” mid-read, or does the sound just appear the instant your eyes land on the word?

This reflects my own understanding as a learner and teacher, checked as carefully as I could manage against dictionary, institutional, and academic sources — not a claim of scholarly authority on historical Japanese phonology. Corrections welcome.

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Vocabulary

• ぼんやり — vague, hazy, indistinct.

• 三角標（さんかくひょう） — a triangular survey marker; in this book, the glowing signposts that line the tracks through the sky.

• 濃い（こい） — deep or thick, used here for a rich color.

• 灼く（やく） — to scorch or forge — here, metal fresh from the fire.

• ～という工合（ぐあい） — “in such a way that,” used to describe a manner or state.

• 億万（おくまん） — hundreds of millions.

• 蛍烏賊（ほたるいか） — firefly squid, a real species known for glowing blue.

• 化石する（かせきする） — to fossilize, to turn to stone.

• 金剛石（こんごうせき） — an old-fashioned word for diamond.

• ばら撒く（ばらまく） — to scatter or strew about.

• 擦る（こする） — to rub.

• ごとごと — the clattering, rattling sound of a train.

• 軽便鉄道（けいべんてつどう） — a light or narrow-gauge railway.

Grammar Notes

• ～という工合に／という風に — “in a way that—,” used to describe something by comparison, often something strange or hard to picture directly. Miyazawa uses both in the same breath here, piling comparison on comparison. Example: 誰もいないという工合に、家中しんとしていた。(”The house was silent, as if no one were there at all.”)

• ～たと思うと — “no sooner had... than—,” describing two things happening in near-immediate succession. 云う声がしたと思うといきなり明るくなって captures how fast the light arrives, right on the heels of the voice. Example: ドアが閉まったと思うと、電気が消えた。(”The door had barely closed when the lights went out.”)

• ～てしまう — marks an action as completed, often with a note of helplessness or surprise. 眼を擦ってしまいました isn’t just “he rubbed his eyes” — it’s “he found himself rubbing his eyes,” almost against his will. Example: つい笑ってしまった。(”I couldn’t help but laugh.”)

• ～つづけていた — “had been continuing to—,” describing an action already in progress by the time it’s noticed. 走りつづけていたのでした tells us the train had been moving for a while before Jovanni realized it. Example: 気づかないうちに、雨が降りつづけていた。(”Without my noticing, it had been raining the whole time.”)

• ～のでした — a soft, reflective past-tense ending common in narrated fiction, gently confirming something the narrator has just realized or is explaining to the reader. It reads more like a storyteller’s aside than a plain statement of fact. Example: 彼はもう帰っていたのでした。(”He had, it turned out, already gone home.”)

From 大久保ゆう訳「あのときの王子くん」（サン゠テグジュペリ『星の王子さま』より）

Vocabulary

• いいつける（言いつける） — to order or instruct someone to do something.

• あきらめる（諦める） — to give up on a dream or hope.

• めげる — to be discouraged, to lose heart. A soft, slightly childish word.

• くたびれる — to grow tired or worn out — here, used metaphorically for the exhaustion of dealing with adults.

• しぶしぶ — reluctantly, unwillingly.

• そうじゅう（操縦） — to pilot or operate a vehicle, usually a plane.

• とびまわる（飛び回る） — to fly or dash around from place to place.

• やくに立つ（役に立つ） — to be useful, to come in handy.

• ひとめで（一目で） — at a glance, instantly.

• たすかる（助かる） — to be saved, to be a relief.

• ちゃんとした — proper, respectable, put-together.

• とっておき — something special kept in reserve, not shown to just anyone.

• お近づきになる（おちかづきになる） — a polite, formal way of saying “to become acquainted with someone.”

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Grammar Notes

• ～なんて — Adds a dismissive tone to a noun, roughly “a thing like X.” ボアの絵なんて echoes the adults’ own contempt — stronger and less neutral than など. Example: 漫画なんて時間の無駄だ。(”Manga? What a waste of time.”)

• ～ても～ても — “Whether or not,” built from two て-forms, one affirmative and one negative. 見えても見えなくても shows the outcome simply doesn’t matter to the adults. Example: 分かっても分からなくても、とりあえずやってみよう。(”Whether you understand it or not, just try.”)

• というわけで — A casual connector meaning “so, that’s why” — used to sum up a chain of small causes, like how you’d tell a story out loud. Example: 財布を忘れた。というわけで、今日はお昼を抜くことにした。(”I forgot my wallet. So I decided to skip lunch today.”)

• ～わけでもなかった — A soft, partial negation: “it’s not exactly that—” rather than a flat denial. Gentler than わからなかった, and often pairs with でも or しかし for a shrugging tone. Example: 彼のことが嫌いなわけでもない。(”It’s not that I dislike him, exactly.”)

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Translation:

Grown-ups don’t care in the slightest whether you can see what’s inside a boa constrictor or not. What they wanted from me was geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar — so at six years old, I gave up on the idea of becoming a painter. My masterpieces No. 1 and No. 2 had both fallen flat, and that was enough to discourage me completely. Grown-ups never work anything out on their own, and it wears a child down, always having to spell everything out for them.

So, reluctantly, I settled on a different line of work and learned to fly a plane instead. I’ve flown a little bit all over the world since then. And geography, as it turns out, really did come in handy — I can tell China from Arizona at a glance, which is no small comfort when you’re lost somewhere over the dark at two in the morning.

I’ve lived my life this way, meeting plenty of perfectly respectable people along the road. I’ve spent my time among grown-ups. I’ve watched them up close. It hasn’t exactly raised my opinion of them.

Whenever I came across someone who seemed a little sharper than the rest, I’d try them with my prized Drawing No. 1, the one I always kept close at hand. I wanted to know if they were someone who could actually see what was really there. But the answer that came back was always the same — “It’s a hat.” So with people like that, I never mentioned boa constrictors, or jungles, or stars. I met them on their own ground instead: bridge, golf, politics, neckties. And the grown-ups, for their part, always seemed so pleased to have made the acquaintance of someone so sensible.

Closing Thoughts

星の王子さま (Hoshi no Ōjisama) was one of the first real books I read in Japanese, back when I was looking up every second word in the dictionary. I don’t think that was an accident. It’s simple without being simplistic, and its narrator, a downed pilot recalling his own childhood, has a voice that slips easily between plain and formal Japanese in a way that taught me more about tone than any textbook did.

It’s also a book with an unusually tangled translation history in Japan. For over fifty years there was really only one Japanese 星の王子さま: 内藤濯’s 1953 Iwanami translation, which sold millions of copies and is even where the now-famous title comes from — Le Petit Prince translates more literally as 「小さな王子」, but 内藤 chose 星の王子さま, and it stuck so completely that Iwanami still asks other translators not to reuse it. That monopoly held until the Japanese copyright expired in January 2005, which set off what scholars have called the third “Little Prince boom”: within a year or two, over a dozen new translations appeared from different publishers, each making its own choices about the narrator’s voice, the prince’s speech, even what to call him. The excerpt above comes from one of those newer translations, 大久保ゆう’s 『あのときの王子くん』, deliberately titled to distance itself from 内藤’s version and freely available on Aozora Bunko.

I chose this passage specifically because it’s the clearest statement of what the whole book is about, delivered before the prince himself ever shows up: the narrator tells us why he gave up drawing and started flying instead, and it’s because the adults around him could only ever see a hat.

Every morning she sits at the loom on the near bank of a great silver river, and every evening she is still there, and the cloth that comes off her hands is so fine that her father, who rules everything there is to rule, cannot bring himself to ask her to stop.

So she doesn’t stop.

She weaves the seasons into fabric while the rest of the sky goes on without her, and somewhere in the middle of all that competence she becomes, without really noticing it happen, very lonely.

Her father notices instead.

He is a god, but he is also, in this particular story, a parent watching his daughter disappear into her own diligence, and he decides to do something about it.

On the far bank of that same river lives a young man who tends cattle — steady and unremarkable in the way that turns out, on meeting, to be exactly what someone like her needed.

The introduction works almost too well.

They fall in love the way people do in stories that need to move quickly, and they marry, and for a little while everything is soft.

And then everything stops.

She sets down the loom. He lets the cattle wander.

The cloth that was once so fine that a god wouldn’t interrupt it goes unwoven, and the fields on the other side of the river go untended, and the father who arranged this whole thing in the first place watches his daughter’s talent and his son-in-law’s herd both quietly fall apart.

So he does what gods in these stories tend to do.

He doesn’t undo the marriage. He just puts a river between them that neither of them can cross, and tells them that’s how it will stay.

It’s their tears, not his second thoughts, that change anything.

She cries long enough and hard enough that he relents, on one condition: if she returns to her weaving, if she does the work, they may cross back to each other once a year, on the seventh night of the seventh month.

And that is, more or less, the deal that has held for over a thousand years.

Weave all year. Meet for one night. Go back to the loom.

Tonight is that night.

If you are anywhere in Japan today, July 7th, you are living inside the one evening of the year when Orihime the weaver and Hikoboshi the cowherd are permitted to close the distance between them — she as the star we call Vega, he as the star we call Altair, the river between them the pale band of the Milky Way.

There’s a complication baked into the story from its oldest tellings: the first time the lovers tried to cross, they found no bridge, and Orihime wept until a flock of magpies flew up and formed one out of their own wings so she could pass.

According to the legend, if it rains, the magpies can’t come because the river rises too high to bridge, and the two are forced to wait another year.

The rain on this particular night even has its own name in Japanese folk tradition — the tears of the lovers who couldn’t make it across, called 催涙雨 (sairui-u), literally “tear-inducing rain.”

There’s also a lesser-known companion term for the night before: rain that falls on July 6th is called 洗車雨 (sensha-u), or “cart-washing rain” — said to be the water from Hikoboshi washing his ox-cart clean in preparation to go meet Orihime.

Which makes tonight’s forecast an uncomfortably personal question.

July in Japan sits inside tsuyu, the rainy season, and the version of this festival practised on the old lunar calendar used to fall in August, safely after the rains had cleared, when clear skies were the norm.

Move the date to July 7th on the modern solar calendar, though, and you land the festival squarely inside the wettest stretch of the year, when a clear Tanabata night is more the exception than the rule.

Somewhere between a tenth-century poem and a twenty-first-century calendar reform, Orihime and Hikoboshi lost their best odds of actually meeting.

It’s a strange thing to sit with — the idea that a country’s weather has quietly been assigned emotional stakes for over a thousand years.

But once you start pulling on that thread, you find the whole story is like that: layered, older than it looks, and carrying more freight than a tale about pebbles-into-boulders or a runaway couple who forgot how to work has any obvious right to carry.

To understand why so many people in Japan will glance up tonight half-hoping for clear skies, you have to go back to where the story actually came from — and it isn’t Japan.

A Chinese Love Story, Borrowed and Rebuilt

The version of Orihime and Hikoboshi that Japan tells today is a transplant.

Its roots run back through the Chinese legend of the Weaver Girl and the Cowherd, Zhinü and Niulang, a folk tale old enough that fragments of it appear in the Classic of Poetry, one of the oldest surviving collections of Chinese verse.

In that lineage, the Weaver Girl is a granddaughter of the Jade Emperor, gifted at her loom, married off to a cowherd on the far side of the Silver River, and separated from him by the same parental fury once the two of them stop working and start simply enjoying each other’s company.

The version that reached Japan travelled less as a story to be read for pleasure and more as a ritual to be performed.

In China, the festival attached to this legend was called Qǐqiǎo, “the Festival of Begging for Skills” — a night when women prayed to the Weaver Girl star for greater proficiency at needlework and textile craft, a fittingly on-the-nose request given who they were praying to.

Japanese sources render this as Kikkōden, and it’s this skill-petitioning ceremony, not the romance itself, that first crossed the water into Japan.

That crossing has a specific date attached to it.

According to the imperial court’s own records, the festival was formally introduced to Japan by Empress Kōken in the year 755, staged at the imperial palace during the Nara period.

It arrived, in other words, not as folklore whispered among farmers but as a piece of continental sophistication imported wholesale into the Japanese court — the same way so much of Nara-period culture, its Buddhism, its legal codes, its capital city itself, arrived by deliberately copying Tang China.

The five-coloured threads that Chinese women had traditionally offered to the stars while begging for weaving talent came along with the ceremony, hung as offerings in a practice that would, centuries later, quietly transform into the five-coloured paper strips still tied to bamboo today.

The Word Existed in Japan Before the Story Did

Here is the detail that trips almost everyone up: “Tanabata” isn’t actually a Chinese word, and it isn’t even, strictly, a reading of the characters 七夕 that make up its name.

Those characters are properly read “Shichiseki” in the Sino-Japanese reading brought over with the festival itself — seven, evening.

“Tanabata,” the word every Japanese person actually uses, comes from somewhere else entirely: a native Shinto purification custom that had nothing to do with China at all.

In that older Japanese practice, a young miko — a shrine maiden — would seclude herself and weave a sacred cloth on a loom called a tanabata (棚機), offering the finished textile to a god in exchange for protection of the rice harvest from storms and blight.

The weaver in this ritual carried the title tanabata-tsume, “the maiden of the tanabata loom.”

When the imported Chinese star-festival arrived and settled onto the same date on the calendar, the two traditions — one continental and newly arrived, one native and already old — folded into each other almost seamlessly.

The Chinese legend supplied the romance and the stars; the native rite supplied the name everyone would actually use, plus a weaving-maiden archetype so close to Orihime’s own role that scholars still debate how much the two figures shaped each other.

It’s a small piece of etymology, but it says something bigger about how this festival works: even at the level of its own name, Tanabata has never been purely one thing.

It has always been at least two traditions wearing a single set of clothes.

From Palace Poetry to Street Festival

For its first several centuries in Japan, Tanabata belonged almost entirely to the aristocracy.

Heian-period courtiers marked the night with poetry competitions, composing verses about the stars and the river between them while gazing up at the actual sky, treating the festival as an occasion for refined literary display rather than public celebration.

It’s the kind of scene that’s easy to picture: robed nobles in a palace garden, ink and paper close at hand, more interested in crafting an elegant line about longing than in actually experiencing it.

The festival didn’t reach the wider population until the Edo period, and when it did, it changed shape considerably.

It was sometime during this era that the practice of writing wishes on tanzaku — narrow strips of coloured paper — and tying them to bamboo branches took hold as a popular custom, spreading out from court ritual into something ordinary households could take part in.

The five-coloured threads that Nara-period courtiers had once hung as offerings to the stars had, by the Edo period, become the five-coloured paper strips still recognisable today, and the wish-writing itself traced its logic straight back to the festival’s origins: since Tanabata had always been about praying for skill at the loom and the brush, ordinary people began asking, quite literally, to get better at their handwriting and their craft, the same way palace weavers had once asked to get better at theirs.

It’s also around this period that Tanabata quietly absorbed pieces of Obon, the midsummer festival for honouring ancestral spirits, since the two events fell close together on the old lunar calendar.

Practices like floating decorated objects on rivers, or burning them as offerings once the festival ended, likely owe something to that overlap — a way of sending wishes off to the heavens borrowed from a tradition of sending spirits home.

There’s a smaller, stranger story tucked into this period too, about the food most associated with the festival.

Somen, the thin wheat noodles served cold with dipping sauce every July 7th, trace back to a twisted dough confection called sakubei that arrived from Tang-dynasty China during the Nara period.

According to one version of its origin, a child died on the seventh day of the seventh month, and a plague of fevers swept through afterward; people began offering sakubei, the child’s favourite food, as a ward against illness, and the custom of eating it on that date outlived the plague story that supposedly started it.

By the time it evolved into somen, the noodles had also picked up a second, gentler symbolism — their thin white strands were said to resemble both the Milky Way overhead and the threads on Orihime’s loom, a food that manages to reference the festival’s astronomy and its heroine’s occupation in a single bowl.

What the Bamboo, the Colours, and the Decorations Are Actually For

Almost everything hung on a Tanabata display is doing symbolic work, even the parts that look purely decorative.

Bamboo itself was chosen deliberately. It grows fast, tall, and straight, and its upward-reaching shape was read as a natural conduit for carrying wishes skyward on the wind; it was also believed to ward off insects, which made it doubly appropriate for a festival with roots in praying for a good harvest.

The five colours of the tanzaku paper — green, red, yellow, white, and either black or purple — aren’t an arbitrary palette.

They map directly onto the Chinese Five Elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, respectively, the same cosmological system that shaped so much of premodern East Asian medicine, architecture, and calendar-keeping.

Black, water’s original colour in that system, was quietly swapped for purple in Japan, since black carried unlucky associations there that it didn’t carry on the mainland.

Layered onto those five elements is a second, Confucian scheme: the five cardinal virtues of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and sincerity, each assigned to the same five colours, so that choosing a tanzaku shade traditionally meant choosing which virtue you were quietly invoking alongside your wish.

The other ornaments that hang alongside the tanzaku each carry their own specific hope.

A folded paper kimono is meant to protect against illness and misfortune. Paper cranes, worked in tribute to the belief that the bird lives a thousand years, stand in for wishes of longevity.

A drawstring purse asks for prosperity, a woven net asks for a good catch for anyone who fishes, a small paper trash bag asks for tidiness and frugality, and long paper streamers called fukinagashi represent the threads on Orihime’s loom itself, carrying wishes for improved skill at weaving, sewing, and needlework more broadly.

None of this is incidental.

The whole display is essentially a physical wish-list rendered in folk symbolism — item by item, each shape doing a specific piece of petitioning.

Once the festival ends, the decorations traditionally aren’t simply thrown away.

Bamboo branches heavy with tanzaku were set adrift on rivers or burned, a way of physically dispatching the wishes toward the heavens rather than letting them linger as clutter — though in recent decades, growing environmental concern has made this particular custom far less common than it once was.

Two Stars That Were Never Actually Close

It’s worth pausing on the astronomy, because it makes the myth sadder in a way the storytellers who first told it couldn’t have known.

Orihime corresponds to Vega, in the constellation Lyra; Hikoboshi corresponds to Altair, in Aquila.

Both are genuinely bright, easy-to-spot stars that anchor the “Summer Triangle” alongside Deneb, which is part of why they were singled out for a myth in the first place — bright enough to notice, positioned on either side of the Milky Way’s pale band, close enough in appearance to look like they belong to the same story.

They are not, however, close in any way that matters physically.

Vega sits roughly 25 light-years from Earth; Altair sits roughly 17 light-years away, on a different line of sight entirely.

The two stars are separated from each other by something in the neighbourhood of 14 to 16 light-years of actual space — far enough that even light, the fastest thing there is, would take over a decade to cross the gap between them.

Whatever bridge of magpies the story imagines, the real distance involved makes “once a year” almost a kindness by comparison.

Vega and Altair have never touched and never will; the entire romance is something that happens only in the shared imagination of everyone looking up at the same night sky, which might be the most quietly moving detail in the whole legend.

The meeting was never physically possible.

People kept believing in it anyway, for over a thousand years, because the story was never really about the stars in the first place.

A Festival Still Being Celebrated, Region by Region

Modern Tanabata plays out at wildly different scales depending on where in Japan you happen to be standing.

The most famous large-scale version is Sendai’s Tanabata Matsuri, held annually in early August on the older lunar-calendar date, its origins traced back to Date Masamune, the first warlord to rule the Sendai domain in the early 1600s.

The festival’s popularity ebbed for decades afterward, nearly vanishing during the economic depression that followed the First World War, before a group of local volunteers revived it in 1928 and fixed its modern August dates.

It disappeared again, unavoidably, during the Second World War — almost no decorations were put up in the city between 1943 and 1945 — before returning in 1946 with 52 decorations strung through the streets, and then, remarkably, ballooning to 5,000 decorations by the time the Shōwa Emperor visited the following year.

Today Sendai’s version includes seven traditional types of decoration, each carrying one of the wish-meanings described earlier, alongside a large ornamental ball first designed in 1946 by a local shopkeeper as a stand-in for a dahlia flower.

Elsewhere, the festival keeps its own local flavour.

Hiratsuka’s Shōnan Tanabata Matsuri, near Tokyo, is one of the largest celebrations held on the July 7th date rather than August’s, and Tokyo’s own Asagaya neighbourhood hosts a smaller, similarly colourful version timed just before the Obon holiday.

In Kyushu, Dazaifu Tenmangu shrine holds a “Tanabata no En,” a poetry-and-culture banquet whose roots reach back to 1046, when it was staged by officials of the old Dazaifu government office and continued in some form through the medieval period, before being formally revived in 1957 after a long interruption, and still held every July 7th to petition for the flourishing of scholarship and the arts.

Between Sendai’s centuries-old civic pageantry and a shrine ceremony with medieval roots, the same festival ends up expressing itself as both a tourist spectacle and a quiet, localised ritual, sometimes within the same country on the same night.

Why a Story About Weather Has Lasted a Thousand Years

Strip away the bamboo and the tanzaku and the noodles, and what’s actually left is a story about two people who were good at their jobs, fell in love, got worse at their jobs because of it, and were punished not by losing each other completely but by being allowed exactly one night a year together — a punishment generous enough to keep hope alive and cruel enough to make sure it never fully resolves.

That specific shape of longing, patience stretched taut across a year at a time, is probably why the story has survived as long as it has: it isn’t really asking anyone to believe two stars can physically cross a hundred trillion miles of space.

It’s asking them to recognise something more ordinary — the particular ache of being close to someone you can only see rarely, and the private math everyone in that position runs without meaning to, where one good meeting somehow has to be worth the eleven empty months that came before it.

Layered onto that is the specific vulnerability of the date itself.

Almost no other major festival on the Japanese calendar has its emotional payoff held hostage to the actual weather the way Tanabata does. Christmas happens whether it snows or not. A cherry blossom festival can be moved a little if the blooms come early or late.

But Tanabata’s entire narrative climax — will they or won’t they meet — collapses into something as mundane and as uncontrollable as whether it rains on a given Tuesday night in the middle of Japan’s rainy season.

That’s an unusually honest thing for a festival to admit about hope: that it can be built up all year and still lose to something as indifferent as a low-pressure system.

Rather than undermining the story, that vulnerability seems to be exactly what’s kept people invested in it for so long.

A wish that’s guaranteed to come true isn’t really a wish. A reunion that depends on the sky cooperating is one that people have reason to actually hope for, year after year, instead of simply expecting.

So — What’s the Sky Doing Tonight?

Which brings the story back to right now, this evening, wherever in Japan you happen to be reading this.

Tonight sits at the tail end of tsuyu, the exact stretch of the calendar this piece opened by blaming for Orihime and Hikoboshi’s bad luck, and this year is proving the point without much need for exaggeration: as of this morning, most of the country was sitting under a mix of cloud with occasional breaks of sun, western Japan pushing into real midsummer heat, and only scattered pockets — a thunderstorm here, a soaked stretch of coastline there — carrying any serious rain risk through the evening.

Tokyo’s own forecast for the night was leaning toward the drier side of that mix, with meteorologists rating the umbrella largely unnecessary, though a stray evening shower over the Kantō region was never fully off the table.

Somewhere else in Japan tonight, that coin will land the other way; it usually does, for at least a few of the country’s prefectures, every single July 7th.

None of this changes anything, practically speaking.

The wish will get written on the tanzaku either way, the bamboo will go up in shopping streets whether or not anyone can actually see the Milky Way through it, and the somen will taste the same over ice whether the sky cooperates or not.

But somewhere in Japan tonight, someone is going to step outside, tilt their head back, and check.

Not for any real reason, since nobody involved actually needs the weather to go their way tonight in any way that affects their own life.

They’ll check anyway — the same private, slightly irrational habit that’s apparently been passed down for well over a thousand years: looking up on this one date, hoping, on behalf of two stars that were never really going to meet in the first place, that tonight the sky stays clear.

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Men in blue replica jerseys moved slowly through the empty rows, plastic bags in hand, picking up cups, wrappers, and the odd forgotten scarf.

FIFA posted photos of the cleanup on X, praising the supporters’ manners and noting, almost as an aside, that they had done it again.

That word did a lot of work.

Japan’s fans have been cleaning up after themselves at major tournaments for years now, long enough that international broadcasters no longer treat it as a surprise so much as a confirmation of something they already believed about the country.

To viewers outside Japan, the image fit neatly into a broader reputation: a country of spotless train platforms, orderly queues, and city streets that stay clean despite a near-total absence of public trash cans. Within days, fans from other countries, including Portugal, were filmed doing the same thing in their own sections, with many online crediting the Japanese supporters for starting the trend.

Inside Japan, though, the same photographs set off a very different conversation. It didn’t ask whether the fans should keep cleaning stadiums. It asked a sharper question: why is it easier for these men to clean up after a football match on another continent than it apparently is to clean up after themselves at home?

A Habit With Deep Roots

Japan’s reputation for public tidiness didn’t start with football. Much of it traces back to something more mundane: most Japanese public schools don’t employ janitors for daily cleaning. Instead, students spend part of each afternoon sweeping their own classrooms, wiping down hallways, and taking turns cleaning the toilets, a practice known as sōji. The idea, reinforced for years before anyone puts on a national team jersey, is that a shared space is everyone’s responsibility rather than someone else’s job to be paid for separately.

That habit sits on top of an older set of ideas about cleanliness tied to Shinto practice, where physical dirt and spiritual impurity have long been treated as related concepts. Visitors to a shrine still rinse their hands at a temizuya, a stone water basin, before approaching the main hall, a small ritual that treats washing as something more than hygiene. Whether or not any individual fan connects a stadium cleanup to a purification ritual at a shrine, the broader cultural instinct, that a public space reflects on the people using it, runs deep enough that picking up litter after a match doesn’t register as unusual generosity. It registers as the bare minimum.

This is, in part, what the American anthropologist Ruth Benedict was gesturing toward in her 1946 study of Japanese culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, when she described a society unusually attentive to how its behavior appears to others. Benedict’s book is dated, and later scholars have pushed back hard on parts of it. But the basic observation, that a sense of being watched shapes public behavior, still gets cited because it tracks with something visible: cleaning a stadium in front of a global television audience is exactly the kind of act that framework would predict.

Not everyone in Japan is convinced the instinct is quite so pure, though. Online critics pointed out that Japan’s own festivals, and crowded gathering spots like Shibuya on Halloween night, are routinely left buried in litter once the crowds disperse, no international cameras required.

Some reached for a specific term for this: ee-kakko-shii, a colloquial phrase meaning something close to “putting on a good face,” or performing decency for an audience that happens to be watching. From this angle, the stadium cleanup isn’t exactly hypocritical, but it is selective: a form of care that switches on when an audience exists and switches off when it doesn’t.

Defenders pushed back just as quickly. “What’s shameful about this,” one user wrote, arguing the cleanup was still preferable to the alternative, international headlines about Japanese visitors leaving a mess behind. Whatever the underlying motivation, they argued, a cleaner stadium was worth defending on its own terms.

Share Roido Does Japan

The Image That Changed the Conversation

Sometime after the Netherlands match, a single illustration began circulating on Japanese social media that gave the whole debate a shape. It showed the same man twice, side by side. In one panel, he wears his Japan jersey, crouched down, smiling, gathering trash beneath a stadium seat. In the other, he’s home on the sofa, looking at his phone. A laundry basket sits untouched in front of him. In the background, a woman, deliberately left ambiguous as either wife or mother, stands at the sink working through a stack of dishes alone. Across the top ran four words:

「家でやろう。」

Ie de yarō. Do it at home.

The image spread quickly, gathering more than 60,000 likes on one post in mid-June, and then, roughly a week later, resurfacing with new force behind a separate post that reportedly crossed 1.9 million views. The accompanying text made the argument explicit rather than leaving it to the image alone: Japanese men’s household labour hours rank among the lowest in the developed world, it said, and the least they could do is start sharing that work at home.

“Everyone wants to save the world. Nobody offers to help with the dishes.”

One user borrowed that line, a paraphrase of a joke by the late American writer P. J. O’Rourke, to sum up the mismatch. Others raised a related point that had nothing to do with statistics: some of the men being photographed for their diligence in a stadium thousands of miles from home had, presumably, left their own wives managing young children alone for the length of a World Cup trip.

What the Numbers Actually Show

The joke landed because the underlying statistics back it up. Japan’s Cabinet Office, citing 2021 OECD time-use data, found that Japanese women spend five and a half times as long on unpaid domestic labour as Japanese men, a gap far wider than comparable figures for the United Kingdom (1.8 times), France (1.7 times), or the United States (1.6 times). A related figure from the same period put actual daily hours on the table: Japanese women logged more than three hours a day on unpaid work, against 47 minutes for men.

The imbalance sharpens further in the households that might need relief the most. A 2021 government survey of dual-income couples with children under six found that mothers spent more than seven hours a day on housework and childcare, while fathers in the same households spent under two. Both parents, in other words, were working outside the home. Only one of them came home to a second job.

None of this means Japanese men, as a group, work less overall. Japan has long recorded some of the longest average working hours among OECD countries, a fact that complicates any simple story about laziness. The imbalance isn’t really about total effort; it’s about where that effort is allowed to count. Paid labour happens mostly in public, gets measured, and shows up in GDP. Unpaid labour happens mostly at home, doesn’t get measured the same way, and, as a result, doesn’t carry the same social weight, even though someone still has to do it every day.

Why the Gap Has Been Slow to Close

Part of the explanation sits in how Japan’s postwar economy was built. The high-growth decades after 1945 ran on a model built around lifetime employment and seniority-based pay, in exchange for near-total availability: long hours, routine overtime, and evening obligations to colleagues that left little time for much else. That system needed someone managing the household on the other end, and for most of the postwar period, that role fell to wives by default

The arrangement wasn’t purely cultural inertia; parts of it were built directly into policy. Japan’s tax code still includes a spousal deduction that reduces a household’s tax burden as long as a lower-earning spouse, almost always the wife, keeps her own income under a set threshold, long informally known as the “1.03 million yen wall.”

Many employers layer their own spousal allowances on top of the same threshold. The practical effect, whatever the original intent, has been to make part-time or unpaid work a financially rational choice for a great many households, reinforcing exactly the division of labour the viral image was mocking.

A Debate That Split More Than One Way

The response to the viral post itself didn’t fall neatly into a single camp. Some users agreed with real enthusiasm, one suggesting, half-joking, that any wife tired of an unhelpful husband should start by making him wear his national team jersey at home too, on the theory that the uniform seemed to be doing more of the motivating than any underlying sense of duty.

Others pushed back hard against the framing itself. “主語が大きすぎる,” one popular reply read, roughly: your subject is too broad. The complaint wasn’t that the statistics were wrong. It was that turning an entire gender into a single indictment felt unfair to the men who already split chores evenly, or who came home from twelve-hour days too depleted to do much of anything.

That second objection points to something the first misses. If a demanding, inflexible work culture is a large part of what keeps men out of the kitchen, the fix isn’t obviously a matter of individual willpower. It starts to look like a workplace problem wearing a household costume.

Some Evidence of Change

The numbers aren’t entirely static, either. The share of eligible Japanese men taking childcare leave has climbed for twelve consecutive years, reaching a record 40.5% in fiscal 2024, up sharply from 30.1% the year before, according to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. Disclosure rules that originally applied only to companies with 1,000 or more employees starting in 2023 were extended to companies with 300 or more employees in 2025, adding public pressure on a wider range of employers to report how many of their male staff actually use the leave they’re entitled to. The government's target was 50% uptake by the end of 2025; the most recent confirmed figure, for fiscal 2024, was 40.5%, meaning Japan was on track to fall short before the year even finished.

It’s worth being precise about what that number does and doesn’t show. A rising childcare-leave rate measures whether a father takes time off around a birth, not whether he keeps doing an equal share of laundry, cooking, and school pickups years later, once the leave itself is a distant memory. The OECD’s unpaid-labour comparison and the childcare-leave figures are measuring different things, and it would be easy to mistake progress on one for progress on the other.

Sociologists have a name for the daily grind that continues well past parental leave: the “second shift,” a term coined by the American sociologist Arlie Hochschild to describe the unpaid work that begins the moment a paid job ends for the day. Whether Japan’s rising leave numbers eventually bend that second shift toward something more even is, for now, an open question rather than a settled one

Where This Leaves Things

The stadium cleanup and the unequal division of labour at home aren’t really contradictions of each other. They’re both expressions of the same underlying belief, that care for a shared space matters and reflects on the person providing it. What the viral image argued, in effect, wasn’t that Japanese men should stop cleaning stadiums. It was that the instinct behind the cleanup, noticing a mess, feeling some responsibility for it, doing something about it without being asked, is exactly the instinct that seems to switch off at the front door.

Whether that’s a matter of habit, workplace culture, tax incentives, or some combination the statistics can’t fully separate is still being argued out, loudly, in the same place the photographs first went viral.

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Key Takeaways

• The phrase 「家でやろう」 (”Do it at home”) went viral after Japanese supporters were praised for cleaning up a World Cup stadium, with critics contrasting that public diligence against a much less equal division of labour at home.

• Citing 2021 OECD data, Japan’s Cabinet Office found Japanese women perform 5.5 times more unpaid domestic labour than men, a wider gap than the UK (1.8x), France (1.7x), or the US (1.6x).

• In dual-income households with children under six, Japanese mothers average more than 7 hours a day on housework and childcare, compared to under 2 hours for fathers.

• Some critics call the international praise selective, using the term ee-kakko-shii, and point to domestic festivals that are often left littered without an international audience watching.

• Reactions to the viral post split online, with some pushing back on generalizing all Japanese men and pointing instead to Japan’s demanding work culture.

• Male childcare leave uptake has risen for twelve straight years, hitting a record 40.5% in fiscal 2024, though this tracks leave taken around a birth rather than the ongoing daily division of household labouur.

FAQ

What does 「家でやろう」 mean, and why did it go viral? It translates to “Do it at home.” The phrase appeared on an illustration contrasting a Japanese fan cleaning a stadium abroad with the same man ignoring housework at home, and it spread after critics used it to argue that praised public behavior wasn’t matched by private behavior.

Why are Japanese fans known for cleaning World Cup stadiums? The habit is often linked to sōji, the daily practice in Japanese schools where students clean their own classrooms rather than relying on janitorial staff, along with a broader cultural emphasis on shared responsibility for public spaces.

How much more unpaid labour do Japanese women do compared to men? According to 2021 OECD data cited by Japan’s Cabinet Office, Japanese women perform 5.5 times more unpaid domestic labour than men, the widest such gap among the countries compared in that data.

Did everyone in Japan agree with the criticism? No. Some users defended the stadium cleanups as harmless and worth celebrating regardless of the domestic debate, while others argued the criticism unfairly generalized all Japanese men rather than addressing Japan’s demanding work culture specifically.

What does ee-kakko-shii (ええ格好しい) mean? It’s a colloquial term meaning roughly “putting on a good face” or performing decency for an audience. Critics used it to suggest the stadium cleanups may be partly shaped by the presence of international cameras.

Is Japan doing anything to close the domestic labour gap? Male childcare leave uptake has risen for twelve consecutive years, reaching a record 40.5% in fiscal 2024, and disclosure requirements for employers have expanded. However, this measures leave taken around childbirth, not the day-to-day division of ongoing household chores.

Is the stadium cleanup unique to this World Cup? No. FIFA and international media have praised Japanese supporters for the same behavior at previous tournaments, and fans from other countries, including Portugal, have since been seen copying the practice.

But that’s not really what stayed with me from Japan’s tournament.

What stayed with me was, every match, the few minutes before kickoff, when both teams lined up for their anthems. The players, the fans, and, most notably, manager Moriyasu became overwhelmed with emotion in every fixture. A few looked like they were fighting to hold their composure, singing in a low, steady wave that built slowly instead of erupting.

Anyone who has watched Japan play in a World Cup or any other global sporting competition has probably noticed it: the unusual stillness, the players and fans who seem genuinely moved. It's a strange thing to notice at a sporting event, and an even stranger thing to feel curious about. Is the anthem really that emotional, or are we just imagining a kind of solemnity that isn't there?

It turns out the question has a real answer, and it has very little to do with the melody itself. Japan’s national anthem, Kimigayo (君が代), carries more than a thousand years of history, and the same thirty-two syllables have meant something different in nearly every era of the country’s existence. To understand why it lands the way it does, you have to go back almost as far as the anthem itself.

An Anthem Unlike Almost Any Other

Most national anthems were written to do a specific job: rally a population, mark independence, celebrate a military victory, or flatter a monarch. La Marseillaise is a call to arms against tyranny. The Star-Spangled Banner commemorates a night of bombardment survived. God Save the King is, structurally, a prayer for one person’s continued health. These songs were composed with nations already in mind, often written quickly, in response to a specific political moment, and built to be sung by large crowds with some force behind them.

Kimigayo was not built for any of that, because when it was written, the concept of a Japanese nation-state in the modern sense did not exist yet.

Its lyrics first appear in the Kokin Wakashu, a poetry anthology compiled during Japan’s Heian Period, somewhere around the early 900s. That makes Kimigayo’s lyrics the oldest of any national anthem currently in use, by a wide margin. Most anthems date their texts to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, when nationalism as we understand it was taking shape across Europe and the Americas. Japan’s anthem predates that entire framework by close to a thousand years. It wasn’t written for a country. It was written as a Waka (和歌), a short, formal poem typically composed for a private occasion rather than a national one.

It’s also unusually short. At eleven measures and roughly forty-five to fifty seconds, Kimigayo holds the distinction of being the shortest national anthem in the world by musical structure. There’s no second verse, no building crescendo, no key change for dramatic effect. It simply states its lines once and ends.

And it sounds nothing like a march, because it isn’t one. The melody draws on Gagaku (雅楽), the court music tradition of Japan’s imperial palace, which favors slow tempos, sustained tones, and a kind of deliberate stillness over rhythm or momentum. Where most anthems were composed to be played by a military band and belted out by a stadium crowd, Kimigayo was built to be closer to a hymn: unhurried, contemplative, and a little austere. That alone goes a long way toward explaining why it doesn’t produce the kind of roaring, fist-pumping energy you get from other countries’ anthems. It was never designed to.

But the melody is only part of the story. The words matter just as much, and they reward a closer look.

What the Words Actually Say

Here are the lyrics, in Japanese, and in a literal & poetic English translation.

Read in English, it can come across as oddly abstract, almost like a riddle. But each phrase is doing specific work, and once you know what that work is, the poem starts to make a different kind of sense.

The whole thing follows a traditional waka structure, a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable pattern that Japanese poetry has used for over a millennium. It was written to be read or recited as a single unbroken sentence, which is part of why it feels less like a statement and more like a wish trailing off into something larger than itself.

The opening word, kimi (君), is the one that’s caused the most disagreement over the centuries, and we’ll come back to it in detail shortly. For now, it’s enough to say that kimi originally meant something closer to “you,” in a respectful or affectionate sense — a lord, an honored guest, a loved one. It wasn’t a political term. It was the kind of word you’d use at a birthday or a New Year’s gathering, wishing the person in front of you a long and fortunate life.

Chiyo (千代) and yachiyo (八千代) are numbers stretched into something closer to a sentiment. Chiyo (千代) literally means a thousand generations; yachiyo (八千代) means eight thousand. Stacked together, “chiyo (千代) ni (に) yachiyo (八千代) ni” isn’t really proposing a precise figure. It’s the poetic equivalent of saying “forever, and then some,” using large round numbers the way English speakers might say “a thousand years” without expecting anyone to count them out.

The most evocative image in the poem, though, is the one involving the stones. Sazare-ishi (さざれ石) refers to small pebbles, the kind you’d find scattered loose on a riverbed or a garden path. Iwao (巌) refers to a large boulder, fixed and immovable. The poem imagines the former slowly becoming the latter, growing moss in the process, which in Japanese folklore was understood as something that genuinely happened over an almost incomprehensible span of time, as pebbles gradually fused together into solid rock. Whether or not anyone in the Heian court literally believed pebbles physically grew into boulders, the image works as a measure of time so long it’s barely usable. It’s not asking for a long reign in any countable sense. It’s asking for one that outlasts geology.

Taken together, the poem isn’t a statement of national pride or military strength. It’s a blessing, and a notably patient one. There’s no enemy in it, no victory, no declaration of identity. There’s just a wish that something good will go on for so long that stones will have time to turn into boulders.

That gentleness is exactly what makes its later history so striking, because almost none of that political weight existed when the poem was first written. The political weight came later, and it came from outside the poem entirely.

A Thousand Years, Several Different Songs

For most of its existence, Kimigayo had nothing to do with politics. During the Heian, medieval, and Edo periods, it functioned as a celebratory verse, recited at birthdays, banquets, and New Year’s festivities to wish prosperity on whoever was being honored that day. “Kimi” was simply the person being celebrated, whether that was a lord, a guest, or a family member. The poem traveled through Japanese culture for roughly nine centuries this way, as a piece of festive language rather than a statement about the state.

That changed with the Meiji Restoration in 1868.

When the Meiji government consolidated power and began rapidly modernizing Japan along Western lines, it ran into a problem that had nothing to do with culture and everything to do with diplomacy. Western nations arriving in Japan expected the trappings of a modern nation-state: a flag, a national anthem, military bands that could perform it during official ceremonies. Japan, despite over a thousand years of recorded history, had no anthem in the way Western diplomats understood the term.

The first attempt to fix this came in 1869, when Irish bandmaster John William Fenton, serving with the British military in Japan, set the old poem to a new melody. Fenton’s version was a fairly conventional European-style brass fanfare, the kind of thing you’d expect at a state ceremony in London or Berlin. It didn’t last. It sounded foreign, and it failed to register with Japanese audiences as something genuinely their own, so officials shelved it and went looking for something else.

That search led, in 1880, to an imperial committee turning toward Gagaku (雅楽), the same court music tradition that had shaped Japanese ceremonial life for centuries. Court musicians Yoshiisa Oku and Akimori Hayashi developed a new melody under the supervision of imperial music director Hayashi Hiromori, drawing on that older musical language instead of European convention. German military musician Franz Eckert later arranged the piece with Western harmonies so it could be performed by an orchestra, and that arrangement is essentially the one still used today. The result was something neither fully traditional nor fully Western, but distinctly Japanese in its slowness and restraint, which is part of why it still sounds so unlike everything else played before international matches.

With a melody in place, the Meiji government set about giving the song political meaning it had never previously carried. The 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education pushed Kimigayo into Japanese classrooms as a fixture of civic ritual, and the word “kimi,” once a flexible term of address for anyone deserving of respect, was narrowed to mean one person specifically: the Emperor, now positioned at the center of a rapidly centralizing, modernizing state. A poem that had spent nine centuries wishing well on whoever happened to be listening was now wishing, specifically and exclusively, for the endless reign of imperial Japan.

That shift deepened considerably over the following decades. As Japan moved into the militarism of the early Showa era and the Second World War, Kimigayo stopped being merely associated with the Emperor and became an active instrument of wartime mobilisation. Schoolchildren in Japan, and in territories Japan had colonised, including Korea and Taiwan, were required to sing it daily while bowing toward the Imperial Palace. Soldiers sang it heading into combat, framed as an offering of loyalty to an Emperor the state had elevated to the status of a living god. The same gentle wish about pebbles and boulders had become, in this context, a hymn of total submission to the state.

Japan’s defeat in 1945 didn’t erase that history, but it did force a recalculation. The Allied Occupation stripped the Emperor of political authority and reduced his constitutional role to that of a symbol — a representation of the state and the unity of the Japanese people, with no governing power attached. Occupation authorities restricted the use of the Hinomaru flag during this period but never formally banned Kimigayo. It kept functioning as Japan’s anthem in practice, sung at events without much fanfare, but the government deliberately avoided giving it official legal status. After everything the song had been used for during the war, making it official again carried obvious risk, and for more than five decades, Japan simply let the matter sit unresolved.

It might have stayed unresolved indefinitely, if not for a tragedy in 1999. A high school principal in Hiroshima took his own life after becoming caught between a conservative school board insisting the anthem be sung at graduation and a group of pacifist teachers refusing to comply. The case drew national attention to a dispute that had been quietly simmering in Japanese schools for years, and the government responded by finally passing the Act on National Flag and Anthem later that same year, formally designating Kimigayo as Japan’s national anthem for the first time in its history.

To make that designation politically workable, Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi offered an updated interpretation of the lyrics. “Kimi,” the government now said, referred to the Emperor strictly in his constitutional role as a symbol of the state, within a democracy where sovereignty belonged to the people, not to him. The text of the poem hadn’t changed at all in over a thousand years. What changed, again, was what the country agreed the words meant.

A Song Still Being Argued Over

That 1999 law settled the legal question of whether Kimigayo was Japan’s national anthem, but it didn’t settle the disagreement over what the song represents, and in some ways it sharpened it.

For many Japanese citizens, the anthem today is simply a quiet, dignified piece of national tradition, no more loaded than any other country’s anthem, and arguably less so given its gentle subject matter. For others, particularly pacifists, some on the political left, and many people across countries that suffered under Japanese wartime occupation, Kimigayo remains tightly bound to memories of empire, forced loyalty, and militarism that the song was actively used to encourage. Both readings draw on real history. Neither is simply wrong.

That tension has played out most visibly in Japanese schools. Following the 1999 law, regional boards of education, most prominently in Tokyo, issued directives requiring teachers and students to stand, face the Hinomaru flag, and sing the anthem at graduation and entrance ceremonies. A number of teachers, citing pacifist, anti-imperialist, or religious objections, refused to comply, and many were formally reprimanded as a result, facing salary cuts, suspensions, or difficulty being rehired.

These disputes eventually reached Japan’s Supreme Court, where teachers’ unions argued that compelling participation in the anthem violated Article 19 of the Japanese Constitution, which protects freedom of thought and conscience. The Court’s rulings landed in a genuinely split place: it found that requiring teachers to stand and sing was constitutional, treating it as a routine part of school ceremony rather than a violation of belief, but it also ruled that the harshest disciplinary measures taken against teachers who refused, including termination or extended suspension, went beyond what the law could reasonably justify. In other words, the song could be required. The punishment for refusing it could not be unlimited.

None of this makes Kimigayo unusually controversial by the standards of national symbols generally. Most countries have some version of this argument buried somewhere in their relationship to a flag, an anthem, or a founding myth. What makes Japan’s case distinctive is how directly the dispute traces back to the song’s own history, and how openly that history sits with the country today, neither fully resolved nor fully suppressed.

What the Players Are Actually Singing

Which brings the story back to the players, arms around each other, lining up on the pitch moments before kickoff, with cameras lingering on faces that looked like they were somewhere else entirely.

It’s tempting to read that moment as pure patriotism, the same uncomplicated pride you’d assume from any team standing for its anthem. But given everything the song has carried across the last thousand years, it seems more accurate to say that no two people in that lineup, or in the stands behind them, are necessarily hearing the same song. Some are hearing a wish for peace and continuity that predates the country’s entire modern history, a piece of language passed down from court poets a thousand years before anyone wore a national team jersey. Some are hearing tradition in a simpler sense, a connection to family, ceremony, and home. And some, including people watching from countries that remember Japan’s twentieth century very differently, are hearing an anthem that was once sung by soldiers on their way into a war built on conquest, sung in classrooms as an instrument of obedience, sung as an offering to an emperor treated as divine.

All of those readings are legitimate, because all of them are true of the song at different points in its history. Kimigayo never really resolved which one it is. It just kept being sung, generation after generation, carrying every one of those meanings forward at once rather than settling on a single one.

Maybe that’s actually the more interesting explanation for why the moment lands the way it does, more interesting than any claim about the melody being unusually beautiful or the players being unusually emotional. A thirty-two-syllable poem about pebbles slowly becoming boulders has now outlived nine separate eras of Japanese history, absorbing something from each one without ever losing the others. It’s been a birthday wish, an imperial decree, a wartime hymn, a quiet and unofficial tradition, and finally, in 1999, a piece of settled law that still hasn’t settled the argument underneath it.

Standing on that pitch in Houston, a century removed from the war that gave the song its darkest associations and a millennium removed from the Heian court that gave it its first ones, the players singing it are connected to all of that whether they’re thinking about it or not. It’s a strange kind of weight for a song that, on its surface, is just a wish for something good to last a very long time.

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The numbers themselves are not entirely surprising. English-speaking countries have traditionally directed their students who study abroad toward the United States, the United Kingdom, and increasingly other English-speaking destinations. Japan’s language barrier is real, and postgraduate opportunities there are often less visible to Australian students than equivalent programmes in Europe or North America.

But these numbers point to something beyond logistics. They raise a harder question: why do some students look at a country like Japan and see an exciting challenge, while others look at the same country and see an environment that feels fundamentally inaccessible? And for those who do go — what happens when they arrive?

Who Goes to Japan to Study?

Before asking what happens after arrival, it is worth understanding who is actually there.

According to the Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), Japan hosted 336,708 international students across all institution types as of May 2024 — a record high, up more than 20% from the previous year. Of those enrolled in higher education institutions specifically, 229,467 students were studying at universities, graduate schools, junior colleges, and professional training colleges.

The composition of that student body reveals everything about how Japan fits into the global flows of international education. The five largest source countries for higher education were China (94,635 students), Nepal (37,203), Vietnam (22,633), South Korea (13,566), and Myanmar (6,996). Together, these five countries account for nearly three-quarters of all international students in Japanese higher education.

Now consider the English-speaking world. The United States sent 3,032 students. The United Kingdom, 769. Canada, 482. And Australia — despite being Japan’s closest major English-speaking neighbour, despite decades of trade and diplomatic ties, despite Japan being one of Australia’s most significant economic partners — sent just 383 students to Japanese higher education institutions in total.

The Gap Between Arrival and Belonging

The decision not to apply to study in Japan is made long before anyone fills out a form. It is made when a prospective student asks themselves: can I imagine building a life there? Can they form friendships? Find employment after graduation? Participate in society beyond the international student bubble?

These are not irrational questions. They reflect a calculation that many international students — and particularly those from English-speaking countries — face with unusual acuity in Japan. The prospect of learning a new language and adapting to a radically different culture can be exciting. It can also create an underlying fear that meaningful participation requires not just learning new skills, but becoming someone else.

This is where the research becomes relevant in ways that go well beyond economics.

When international students who do go to Japan struggle to integrate — when friendships stay surface-level, when the language keeps them at arm’s length from the culture around them, when the social world contracts to other foreigners — the experience is often interpreted as evidence that Japanese society is closed to outsiders. The research literature describes what can happen next as negative assimilation: a process by which people who become more familiar with a society simultaneously become more aware of the barriers preventing them from fully participating in it. Rather than finding their footing, they develop a growing sense of distance. And when they leave, they carry that sense of distance with them, sometimes passing it on to others who might have considered going.

In this way, the low participation of Australian students in Japanese higher education is not just a data point. It is, in part, the accumulated result of experiences that did not go the way people hoped.

What Negative Assimilation Actually Means

The conventional story of migration goes like this: you arrive, you struggle, you adapt, and over time — through language acquisition, cultural familiarity, social connection — you rise. Time in a new country is the engine of improvement. The longer you stay, the better you do.

This is what researchers call positive assimilation, and for a long time it was treated almost as a law of migration. But a growing body of research has been quietly complicating the picture, particularly in Japan.

A landmark study by Takenaka, Nakamuro and Ishida — drawing on survey data from Chinese, Korean, and Western immigrants living in Japan — found that for migrants from English-speaking Western countries, earnings actually declined the longer they stayed. The foreign skills they arrived with — English fluency, internationally transferable expertise, credentials from prestigious foreign institutions — were highly valued at the point of entry. But those same skills did not compound over time the way conventional wisdom would predict. As immigrants stayed longer, the premium attached to their foreign skills diminished. Yet the locally acquired human capital that assimilation theory predicts should improve outcomes often failed to deliver comparable rewards. Japanese education, rather than boosting earnings, was associated with lower wages than foreign-earned credentials. For many immigrants, the skills and qualifications most valued at entry proved more economically valuable than those acquired through deeper integration into Japanese society.

What makes this finding so unsettling is what it implies. If locally acquired human capital — Japanese education, professional socialisation, and other forms of host-country integration — does not consistently translate into higher earnings, then the entire logic of “just integrate harder” begins to unravel. Immigrants were not necessarily failing to assimilate. In many cases, the rewards attached to foreign capital remained stronger than those attached to becoming more like native workers.

The Employment System Nobody Warned You About

To understand why, it is necessary to understand something distinctive about how Japan’s labour market is structured — something that catches many skilled immigrants entirely off guard.

Research by economist Hashimoto Yuki lays this out with unusual clarity. The Japanese Employment System (JES) is built around a single, pivotal moment: the mass simultaneous recruitment of new graduates, every spring, into companies that then train and promote them internally for the rest of their careers. Miss that window — arrive a year late, come from a foreign university, graduate at the wrong time of year — and you are effectively locked out of the main pathway. The door does not close gently. It simply was never designed to open for you.

Hashimoto distinguishes between two types of highly skilled immigrant workers that emerge from this reality. Type I workers end up in professional and technical roles — hired for specific external skills that Japanese companies cannot produce internally: native English instruction, international IT expertise, country-specific knowledge. They remain, in a sense, complementary to the Japanese workforce rather than integrated into it. Type II workers, by contrast, are those who have navigated the Japanese system from within — often educated in Japan, fluent in the cultural expectations of the workplace, embedded in the internal labour market. They are treated more like Japanese employees.

The historical parallel Hashimoto draws is striking. Type I immigrants today, he suggests, resemble the oyatoi-gaikokujin — the foreign specialists Japan hired during the Meiji era to import Western knowledge. Highly paid. Respected for their specific utility. And never quite expected to become Japanese.

This distinction matters because it reveals how institutional structures can produce a kind of permanent foreignness regardless of how hard someone tries to belong. You can be exceptional at your job, deeply committed to your adopted country, and still find yourself positioned by the system as a temporary specialist rather than a permanent member — not through any act of discrimination you could point to, but through the accumulated logic of a hiring structure that simply was not designed for you.

The Persistence of the Gap

The economic data makes the structural problem concrete. Liu Yang’s econometric analysis of Japan’s employment data — drawing on the 2010 national census — found that across all immigrant groups, immigrants face significantly higher rates of unemployment and significantly lower rates of permanent employment than Japanese natives, even after controlling for education, age, and household characteristics.

The gap is not small. Native Japanese men held permanent employment at a rate of 87.1%. Immigrants from Asian countries: 70.9%. Immigrants from the US and UK: 72.6%. Immigrants from South America: just 34.9% — a gap of more than 52 percentage points compared with Japanese natives.

And the gap persists. For immigrants from English-speaking Western countries in particular, Liu describes what he calls a possible “failure in assimilation”: their unemployment rates approach those of natives over time, but this appears to be because they are accepting more impermanent jobs — not because they are being welcomed into the stable, lifetime employment relationships that define economic security in Japan.

So what is actually happening? Immigrants are adapting. They are making themselves more acceptable to the system. But the system is not reciprocating. People who have spent years — sometimes decades — reshaping themselves to fit find themselves looking at the numbers and wondering what all that effort was actually for.

The Language Nobody Talks About

Language sits at the centre of all of this, but not in the way most people think.

The conversation around language and migration almost always focuses on practical functionality: can you navigate bureaucracy, participate in a meeting, read a form? These things obviously matter. But language is not just a tool for getting things done. Language is the medium through which personality travels. It is how you make jokes, express subtlety, signal that you are someone worth knowing.

When you lose access to that — when you are stuck at a level of expression that makes you sound simpler, less interesting, less fully yourself than you actually are — the social cost is immense. You start to experience your host country through a kind of glass. You can see the life happening around you, but you cannot quite reach it. Acquaintances remain acquaintances. Conversations stay functional. The deeper layers of a society — the ones that are worth moving across the world for — stay just out of reach.

Many international students arrive expecting immersion. But immersion requires access, and access requires language competence that most people significantly underestimate how long it takes to develop. Without it, people gravitate toward others who share their background. There is nothing wrong with that instinct — community among people who understand your experience is genuinely necessary. But if that becomes your only social world, you can spend years inside a country while remaining entirely outside its culture. When that happens, disappointment can be misread — by the international student and sometimes by the host society alike — as evidence that belonging was never really possible.

The research bears this out. Liu found that Japanese language skills function as something even more significant than a communication tool. Japan has been described in the academic literature as “the most high-context country in the world,” meaning that effective communication requires not just vocabulary but a deep understanding of cultural codes, hierarchy, and implication. Immigrants who lack this are disadvantaged in the labour market in ways that cannot simply be fixed by working harder or learning more grammar. The language barrier is also a cultural barrier, and it operates in hiring rooms and promotion decisions long after someone can order food or read train signs.

The Difference Between Growing and Disappearing

None of this is an argument against adaptation. Living between cultures changes people, and that change can be one of the most valuable parts of the experience. Exposure to different societies forces people to question assumptions, develop empathy, and understand that their own way of seeing the world is not universal. The goal was never to remain unchanged.

The question is not whether to adapt. It is what kind of adaptation you’re being asked to do — and whether it is building something or eroding something.

There is a meaningful difference between expanding your identity to include new ways of being and replacing your identity with performances of fitting in. One of them leaves you more whole. The other leaves you, over time, with less of yourself to draw on — and with a growing unease that you cannot quite name.

Takenaka and colleagues capture something of this in their economic findings. What they found, counterintuitively, is that the foreign skills immigrants brought with them to Japan were worth more in the labour market than the locally acquired credentials they accumulated after arrival. The things that made someone distinctively themselves — their international education, English fluency, external professional networks — these retained value. The attempts to become more Japanese, more local, more embedded in the system, frequently did not.

This is economically specific, and should not be generalised too far. But it points toward something philosophically significant: that what you were before you arrived is not simply a liability to be overcome.

What Institutions Owe the People They Ask to Adapt

There is a version of the integration conversation that places all the responsibility on the migrant or the international student. Learn the language. Understand the culture. Work harder. Be patient. Give it time.

There is genuine truth in this. But the research on Japan makes clear that institutional structures carry enormous weight in determining whether integration is actually achievable — not just attempted. The Japanese employment system’s reliance on simultaneous graduate recruitment is not a natural law. It is a design choice. And it is a design choice that systematically disadvantages people who did not grow up inside it, regardless of their talent, their commitment, or the effort they put in.

When immigrants from English-speaking countries fail to achieve positive assimilation in permanent employment — not through lack of trying, but because the doors were structured to admit people who came through specific pathways they had no access to — that is a question about institutional design, not individual character.

Similarly, when Liu’s data reveal that ethnic penalties in Japan’s labour market persist even after controlling for education and experience, the conclusion is not that immigrants need to try harder. It is that Japan — like most countries — has not yet built institutions that make the promise of meritocracy real for people who look and sound different from the majority.

The most powerful forms of assimilation pressure are rarely overt. They do not arrive as demands. They arrive as the accumulated friction of a hundred interactions in which your difference is, subtly, treated as a problem. You learn to minimise it. You learn to present yourself in ways that make others more comfortable. And eventually, the minimisation becomes habit, and you stop noticing what you have put down.

Belonging Without Disappearing

Return, for a moment, to those numbers. Eighty-five Australian postgraduate students in Japan. Two hundred and seventy-three undergraduates. In a country of 125 million people, with one of the world’s largest economies, one of the most distinctive intellectual traditions, and research universities that rank among the finest in Asia.

Why so few? Part of the answer is practical — language barriers, unfamiliar application processes, misaligned academic calendars. These are real and should be addressed. But underneath the logistics is a more fundamental question that prospective students are implicitly asking: can I imagine belonging there?

That question deserves a serious answer. And the honest answer, based on the research, is complicated. Japan offers a genuinely rich intellectual and cultural environment. It also has institutional structures — in employment, in social life, in language — that make full participation difficult for people who arrive from outside. That is not a reason not to go. It is a reason to go with clear eyes.

The question worth asking — for Japan, for Australia, for anywhere that describes itself as genuinely multicultural — is not how quickly newcomers can be made to resemble insiders. It is whether the society is flexible enough to let different people fully participate while remaining, recognisably, themselves.

That is a harder goal. It requires institutions to design for diversity rather than assimilation. It requires host societies to examine the assumptions built into their systems. It requires honesty about the difference between asking newcomers to share a society and asking them to become a different kind of person.

And it requires those who live between cultures — in whatever form that takes — to hold onto the distinction between the changes that make us more whole and the changes that make us less visible.

Because the best version of cultural exchange is not one side finally becoming acceptable to the other. It is both sides arriving somewhere neither of them expected, each carrying something the other did not have before.

The goal was never assimilation. It was always belonging — and those are not the same thing.

Data on international student enrolments in Japan sourced from the Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), Result of International Student Survey in Japan, 2024 (published April 2025).

The three academic sources informing this piece are: Takenaka, Nakamuro & Ishida, "Negative Assimilation: How Immigrants Experience Economic Mobility in Japan" (International Migration Review, 2016); Liu Yang, "Immigrant-Native Gaps of Unemployment and Permanent Employment in Japan" (Economic Analysis and Policy, 2024); and Hashimoto Yuki, "Highly Skilled Immigrants' Occupational Choices and the Japanese Employment System" (RIETI Discussion Paper, 2017).

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The 2026 World Cup is less than a week away. Japan’s squad has already departed for North America, coach Hajime Moriyasu declaring openly at Narita Airport that their goal is to win the tournament. The team’s official slogan, unveiled by the Japan Football Association in March, is 最高の景色を — “For Our Greatest Stage.”

It is a slogan full of ambition and poetry. But before we talk about where Japan is going, it’s worth remembering where they’ve already been — and what actually happened the last time the world came to their shores.

Because the story of the 2002 World Cup is not just a football story. It’s a story about institutional power, political survival, financial corruption, and a governing body willing to bend the integrity of sport to serve its own expansion ambitions. And Japan was caught right in the middle of it.

Two Nations, One World Cup

The controversy of 2002 began not in June of that year but in the summer of 1996, six years before the tournament kicked off, when FIFA announced that Japan and South Korea would co-host the World Cup. It was the first, and to this day only, time two nations have shared hosting duties for the tournament.

The decision papered over what had been a bitter, acrimonious rivalry. Both nations had been bidding independently, each determined to outdo the other in securing football’s biggest prize. Neither had the facilities to host alone, so FIFA forced them together — a decision framed as historic and progressive, but driven largely by logistical necessity and FIFA’s ambitions to crack open the Asian market.

There was an obvious irony here: at the time of bidding, Japan had never qualified for a World Cup. The logistics were also widely criticised. Fans travelling between venues would have to cross seas, European broadcasters would face morning kick-off times, and the monsoon season would hang over the entire tournament. As the first World Cup staged in Asia, many accused FIFA of prioritising political expedience and market access over sporting merit. Those accusations would only grow louder as the tournament unfolded.

The Man With Everything to Lose

To understand what happened at the 2002 World Cup, you need to understand who Sepp Blatter was and what position he was in when the tournament began. Blatter was elected as the eighth President of FIFA on June 8, 1998 — just two days before the tournament kicked off in France — but the circumstances of that election were murky from the start.

FIFA’s presidential voting gives every member nation an equal vote, regardless of size or footballing stature. It was a system Blatter understood better than anyone, and he used it to his advantage. His 1998 campaign was accused of bribing African member nations through promises to bring the World Cup to Africa, and of securing CONCACAF delegates through the influential — and later disgraced — Jack Warner. His opponent, Lennart Johansson of UEFA, had strong backing from the Confederation of African Football, the largest voting bloc in FIFA, but that backing, it seemed, could be bought. Blatter’s team reportedly reached out to African football officials through intermediaries, offering financial inducements in exchange for votes. Blatter won. Johansson lost. The full picture of what had been paid to whom would only emerge years later.

By the time the 2002 World Cup opened, Blatter was already fighting for his political survival. In May 2002, just weeks before the tournament began, FIFA’s secretary-general Michel Zen-Ruffinen produced a 21-page dossier, supported by 300 pages of internal documents, accusing Blatter of financial mismanagement, conflicts of interest and abuse of power. Eleven of the 24 executive committee members filed a criminal complaint to a Zurich court on the basis of Zen-Ruffinen’s evidence. Blatter won the presidential election at the end of May anyway, then turned on his accusers with characteristic contempt: “Friday, I throw Zen-Ruffinen out of the door.” In December 2002, the Zurich public prosecutor closed the investigation, remarkably describing the complainants themselves as “reprehensible.” Blatter remained in power for a further 13 years.

Japan Builds Ten Stadiums — Then Loses in the Round of 16

Japan spent enormously to host. The Nissan Stadium in Yokohama, which hosted the final between Brazil and Germany, cost $621 million to build — at the time the most expensive World Cup stadium ever constructed. Across Japan, ten new or heavily renovated stadiums were built or upgraded specifically for the tournament.

One member of Japan’s World Cup bidding committee later admitted: “They did not have a post-World Cup strategy” — and six out of ten stadiums went on to lose millions in the years that followed. Some found second lives: the Sapporo Dome, for instance, became a hybrid football-baseball venue. Others struggled badly. Sendai’s stadium — built for the tournament but never becoming the home of the local J-League side — was used mainly for athletics and occasional events.

The Samurai Blue performed respectably, topping their group and advancing to the Round of 16 before losing 1-0 to Turkey. It was a solid debut for a country appearing in only its second World Cup. But as Japan exited, their co-hosts were just getting started — and what followed made many question whether sport had anything to do with it.

The Referees, the Red Cards, and the Conspiracy That Still Burns

South Korea had a good team in 2002, managed brilliantly by Guus Hiddink in a disciplined 3-4-3 system built around high-pressing, energetic football. Their group stage — topping ahead of Portugal and Poland — was widely considered legitimate. But from the Round of 16 onwards, the results became increasingly difficult to explain.

Italy, Round of 16

The match against Italy in Daejeon became one of the most controversial in World Cup history. Ecuador’s Byron Moreno was the referee. Hiddink’s South Korea pressed aggressively and Italy — despite boasting Maldini, Cannavaro, Totti, Nesta, Inzaghi, Materazzi and Vieri — were rattled. Christian Vieri scored to make it 1-0, but Italy’s lead wouldn’t last.

What followed was a litany of decisions that left Italian players, fans and journalists in disbelief. Francesco Totti was sent off for diving in a decision widely considered unjust. Damiano Tommasi had a goal wrongly disallowed for offside. Two South Korean players committed serious fouls — including a two-footed challenge and an elbow — that went completely unpunished. Ahn Jung-hwan headed a golden goal three minutes before the match went to penalties, sending South Korea through.

Back in Italy, the reaction was volcanic. Legendary sports journalist Giorgio Tosatti wrote in Corriere della Sera: “Italy have been thrown out of a dirty World Cup where referees and linesmen are used as hitmen.” Jung-hwan, who was on loan from Serie A club Perugia, had his contract cancelled by the club’s president in an act of petty vengeance. Moreno was later investigated by FIFA over “a number of controversies” and in 2010 was sentenced to 30 months in prison in the United States on drug trafficking charges.

Spain, Quarter-Final

Italy had already had four perfectly good goals disallowed in the group stages — against Croatia and Mexico — before the South Korea match. Against Moreno, Tommasi’s golden goal became the fifth Italian goal chalked off in the tournament. If the Italy match left a bitter taste, the Spain quarter-final turned the bitterness into fury. Egyptian referee Gamal Al-Ghandour disallowed two perfectly legitimate Spanish goals — Ivan Helguera’s header and Fernando Morientes’ header from a Joaquin cross. Paul Hayward wrote in The Telegraph: “The records say that the Koreans knocked out Spain in a penalty shoot-out in Gwangju on Saturday. The records are a lie and this tournament has descended into farce.”

The response from the public was unprecedented. Following the Spain match, 400,000 emails were sent to FIFA complaining about the officiating decisions — so many that they crashed FIFA’s servers. Blatter was forced to acknowledge there had been problems with officials. Italian and Spanish television threatened to sue FIFA, arguing the skewed refereeing had cost them millions in broadcast revenue.

The Referee Selection Theory

Here is where it gets interesting from an institutional perspective. The referees appointed to South Korea’s knockout matches were not from major footballing nations. They came from Ecuador, Egypt, and Trinidad — countries with minimal international football pedigree, whose officials were arguably more susceptible to the pressure of 50,000 screaming Korean supporters.

Blatter’s motive was clear.

Asia represented half the world’s population and football’s largest untapped commercial market. Getting an Asian team to the semi-finals gave the entire project — the first World Cup on Asian soil, the controversial co-hosting decision, the years of political manoeuvring — its justification. A South Korean run deep into the tournament was worth billions in broadcast rights, sponsorship deals, and long-term fan development across the continent. South Korea were eventually knocked out by Germany in the semi-finals.

The 2015 Reckoning

For years, the conspiracy theories around 2002 remained exactly that — theories. Then came 2015.

In May of that year, US and Swiss authorities arrested seven FIFA officials in Zurich on corruption charges. The indictments alleged decades of bribery, kickbacks and financial fraud at the highest levels of world football. Blatter — who had somehow survived every previous scandal, winning re-election as FIFA president four times, including once while nine of his officials were being indicted — finally resigned, though not before winning yet another election days after the arrests.

In the wake of the 2015 scandal, Italy’s Corriere dello Sport reopened the 2002 files, directly alleging that FIFA and referee Byron Moreno had been involved in match-fixing to keep South Korea in the tournament. The paper argued that the 2015 corruption arrests provided the institutional context that had always been missing: here, finally, was proof that FIFA operated as a corrupt organisation willing to manipulate outcomes to serve commercial interests.

By Blatter’s third term, accusations of bribery, financial mismanagement and World Cup bid-rigging had become alarmingly commonplace. In 2006, FIFA vice president Jack Warner was accused of massive fraud involving the resale of World Cup tickets in Germany through a travel company controlled by his family — FIFA cleared him and merely expressed “disapproval.” By 2010, vote-buying allegations surrounded the awarding of the South Africa World Cup. Then in May 2015 came the reckoning: the US Department of Justice disclosed a 47-count criminal indictment charging seven FIFA executives with having received $150 million in bribes over more than two decades. They were arrested at the Baur au Lac hotel in Zürich, where FIFA was based.

Two days after the indictment, Blatter was installed as FIFA president for a fifth term. Three days later he resigned. The ethics committee subsequently imposed an eight-year ban on both Blatter and UEFA president Michel Platini over a $2 million payment made to Platini in 2011. Blatter received a further six-year ban in 2021.

His reign — which began with the 1998 election won through alleged bribes to African officials, ran through the 2002 refereeing controversy, the 2006 ticket fraud, the 2010 vote-buying allegations, and ended in the 2015 mass arrests — was the most comprehensively corrupt era in the history of international sport governance. He never accepted moral responsibility, and was never criminally convicted. He simply left football in disgrace, blaming everyone but himself.

FIFA Today: Same Structure, Different Faces?

The question worth asking is whether anything has fundamentally changed. The 2026 World Cup is to be hosted across the United States, Canada and Mexico and will be the largest in history, expanded to 48 teams. The 2030 edition will be spread across six countries on three continents. The 2034 edition has been awarded to Saudi Arabia, a decision that drew fierce criticism from human rights organisations and football governance reformers.

FIFA under current president Gianni Infantino has pursued the same expansion logic that Blatter championed: take football to new markets, grow the commercial footprint, manage the politics. The structure that allowed 2002 to happen — one country, one vote; small federations holding disproportionate influence; commercial interests shaping tournament outcomes — remains largely intact.

In 2026, FIFA is still far from a clean, non-political organisation. Under Infantino, the governing body that once bent tournament results to serve Blatter’s Asian ambitions has found new ways to blur the line between football and politics. At the 2026 World Cup draw ceremony at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. in December 2025, Infantino presented Trump with the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize — an award suddenly announced just three weeks after Trump had been overlooked for the Nobel Peace Prize. There was no explanation for the process behind the award, no candidates named, and no selection criteria given. Senior officials within FIFA were surprised by the announcement, which had not been discussed with the FIFA Council. Trump called it “truly one of the great honours of my life.”

The politics don’t stop there. With US-Iran tensions running high, Iranian players and fans faced genuine uncertainty over whether they could even enter the United States to participate. Iranian fans are permitted to attend matches, but entry remains complicated by travel restrictions, and FIFA has banned the display of the pre-revolutionary Lion and Sun flag inside stadiums. For a tournament billed as football uniting the world, the geopolitical fault lines running beneath it are hard to ignore.

Japan in 2026: 最高の景色を

Which brings us back to Japan, preparing to chase their most beautiful scenery on American soil.

Japan have never gone beyond the last 16 at a World Cup, but they were the first team to qualify for 2026 and their soaring confidence has been boosted by impressive recent results. They beat Brazil 3-2 in October, then defeated Ghana, Bolivia, Scotland, England and Iceland in succession — six consecutive victories heading into the tournament. Japan have mapped out a plan to win the World Cup by 2050. Whether 2026 is too soon for that plan to bear fruit is the question.

They have been drawn in Group F with the Netherlands, Sweden and Tunisia, opening against the Dutch in Dallas on June 14. The squad has genuine European club quality throughout, though the loss of Brighton winger Kaoru Mitoma to a hamstring injury is a significant blow. Addressing the crowd at the National Stadium after Japan’s send-off match, Moriyasu was unambiguous about the target. “It’s not easy to become world champion,” he said. “I think everyone on the team and all of our supporters understand that. But we want even more people across Japan to support us. … The players will give everything they have in every match, fighting bravely and with toughness until the end.” He framed the campaign in terms of Yamato spirit and the pride of the Japanese people — language that signals this is more than a football tournament for Japan. It is a statement of national ambition.

最高の景色を — the most beautiful scenery. Whether Japan will find it at this year's World Cup, only time will tell. Their journey begins against FIFA-ranked number 7 Netherlands on June 14 at Dallas Stadium — kick-off 4 p.m. ET (5 a.m. JST, June 15 for fans watching back home in Japan).

In May last year, the shop was paying ¥327 per kilogram for Brazilian chicken thigh. By March this year, that had climbed to ¥418 — a jump of nearly 30%. When they eventually passed some of that cost on to customers, raising prices by ¥30 across their menu, it wasn’t enough. The numbers stopped working. They shut the doors.

This story is playing out at restaurants, supermarkets, and food businesses across Japan right now. And to understand why, you have to follow a supply chain that stretches from the Strait of Hormuz to the American Midwest to the chicken farms of Brazil — and eventually lands onto the dinner tables of Japan.

Japan’s Quiet Dependence on Imported Chicken

Chicken has become Japan's most consumed meat in recent years, overtaking pork. Of that, 64% is domestically produced — but the remaining 36% is imported, and 70% of that comes from Brazil.

That dependency looks even more fragile when you dig deeper. Even “domestic” chicken is mostly raised on feed — corn and grain — that is imported. When you factor in feed dependency, only around 8% of chicken consumed in Japan is truly produced here from start to finish. Japan’s food self-sufficiency ratio has collapsed from 73% in 1973 to 38% in 2024. For chicken, the real number is far worse than the headline figure suggests.

For years, this system worked because it was efficient. Japan sourced from wherever was cheapest, kept inventories lean, and passed the savings to consumers. In a deflationary economy where food was expected to be cheap, that made sense. But efficiency, it turns out, is a terrible substitute for resilience — and the cracks are now very visible.

Three Shocks, One Supply Chain

Shock 1: The Currency Double Bind

The yen’s long slide against the dollar is well-documented, but for chicken imports, the more relevant number is the yen against the Brazilian real. Brazil’s central bank has kept interest rates at 15%, drawing global capital and pushing the real to its highest level against the dollar since mid-2024. The result: Japan is paying more in yen and paying more in real terms for the product it’s buying. A single yen movement in the exchange rate costs one major Japanese chicken importer an additional ¥17 million per month.

Shock 2: The Bird Flu That Shook the World’s Biggest Exporter

On May 16, 2025, Brazil announced something that had never happened before: high pathogen avian influenza confirmed at a commercial poultry farm in Rio Grande do Sul, the country’s main chicken-producing state. Brazil supplies more than a third of the world’s chicken exports. When that farm went under, the ripple effect was immediate and global.

China, Europe, Mexico, South Korea — major importers halted Brazilian chicken. Brazil’s own government data put the value of affected exports at over $4 billion USD annually — roughly 40% of its total chicken export market, effectively shut overnight.

Japan suspended imports from the affected region. According to data from the Agriculture and Livestock Industries Corporation (ALIC), Japan’s import chicken inventory as of end-January 2026 had fallen to 80.6% of the prior year level, and total chicken inventory (domestic and imported combined) had dropped nearly 10%. ALIC projected further declines through February and March.

Brazil declared itself avian flu-free in June 2025 after 28 consecutive days without new infections at commercial farms — but supply doesn’t snap back instantly. Chicken travels by ship, and the cargo that couldn’t leave Brazil during the outbreak wouldn’t begin clearing Japanese customs until September at the earliest. The effects of the October shipping delays were still being felt months later.

The price tells the story. In January 2026, Brazilian chicken thigh was selling at ¥600–650 per kilogram. A year earlier, it had been ¥390.

Shock 3: The Strait of Hormuz

Here is where the Iran situation enters — and where things get complicated in ways most news coverage misses.

The Strait of Hormuz is the narrowest chokepoint in global energy shipping: over 25% of the world’s seaborne oil passes through it. Japan sources approximately 94% of its crude oil from the Middle East, and roughly 90% of those tankers use this route. When the strait comes under threat, the effects fan out far beyond oil prices.

The chain reaction goes like this:

Rising oil and gas prices — NHK reported oil up approximately 1.5x and gas up 1.8x from baseline — flow directly into fertilizer costs. Nitrogen-based fertilizers are produced using natural gas as a primary input. When gas prices spike, fertilizer becomes more expensive. When fertilizer gets more expensive, the cost of growing corn and feed grain in the American Midwest goes up. That corn and feed grain is what Brazilian chicken farmers use to feed their birds. So before a single chicken even reaches a processing plant, its cost of production has already risen.

Then the production facility itself faces higher energy costs — the gas-powered heating systems that keep chickens at the right temperature for healthy growth, the factory machinery, the domestic trucks moving birds to processing plants. All of it moves with oil.

Then there’s the shipping. The cost of moving a container from Brazil to Japan has multiple fuel-surcharge components. Major container shipping lines have already introduced emergency bunker surcharges (EBS) in response to Middle East tensions, running at around $150–200 per TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit) on long-haul routes. Add to this the “container shortage” problem flagged by industry insiders: when ships are forced onto longer detour routes, containers take longer to return, tightening supply and pushing freight rates even higher. The CIF price — Cost + Insurance + Freight — gets hit on the freight side from two directions at once.

Once the chicken arrives in Japan, it still has to reach restaurants and supermarkets via domestic distribution. Trucking costs are also tied to fuel prices. Every stage of the multi-layer Japanese distribution system adds a little more to the final number.

Even the PE bags (ポリエチレン袋) used to package and ship chicken have risen in cost, adding another layer of pressure for importers already squeezed by freight rates and the weak yen.

NHK estimated the cumulative effect of these pressures could add around ¥20,000–¥30,000 to annual household chicken expenditure.

The “Triple Punch” at Retail

TV Asahi’s reporting from a supermarket in Saitama captured what this looks like on the shop floor. The meat manager, with nearly 30 years in the business, described something he had never seen before: imported chicken priced higher than domestic pork. Brazilian chicken prices have risen more than 1.5x in a single year and the wholesale price for the next month is set to climb another ¥50 per kilogram.

“Whatever happens with Iran, if it continues, fuel costs go up, and that gets passed through to us,” the manager said. He was preparing for more.

A town-style Chinese restaurant in Tokyo famous for its towering karaage sets — the kind where customers joke they couldn’t finish it alone — had been going through around 50 kilograms of chicken a day, using frozen Brazilian thigh. This year, they switched to domestic breast meat after the Brazilian thigh hit ¥850 per kilogram. “We changed to survive,” the second-generation owner said plainly. He adapted his preparation method for the new breast meat to replicate the texture of thigh meat, and customers approved. But he remained anxious about what comes next.

At Kunichan’s Kitchen in Chuo, Tokyo, Brazilian chicken is the backbone of their karaage — prized for its fat content and juiciness. But between March and April alone, the price climbed ¥160 per 2kg bag. The shop goes through 5–6 boxes of 10kg per week, so that adds up fast. Owner Maruyama Kunio described the impossible position many small operators now find themselves in:

The same pressure is reshaping what supermarkets even stock. At Super Celcio in Wada-machi, the Brazilian chicken section has simply disappeared. “We couldn’t meet customer needs anymore,” said Tsuruta Satoshi, the store’s general manager. “We were handling Brazilian, but with prices rising continuously and the gap with domestic narrowing, we stopped.” The store switched to domestic-only — but domestic is rising too. Now they’re considering bringing in Thai chicken as the more affordable alternative. “We think we can offer it at a lower price point,” Tsuruta said. It’s a telling snapshot of how the substitution chain works in practice: Brazilian gets expensive, demand shifts to domestic, domestic rises, retailers scramble for the next option.

Karaage specialist Maruyoshoten in Showa Ward was using Thai chicken rather than Brazilian — but found no escape. “Brazilian supply is getting tight, so demand for Thai has increased, and Thai is going up too,” store manager Inano Masayoshi explained. Imported chicken that cost around ¥350 per kilogram in January last year had climbed past ¥400 by early this year — and the shop’s wholesale price for foreign chicken is now approaching double what it was in 2019.

To manage costs, the shop stopped buying pre-cut Thai chicken and switched to purchasing 2kg whole blocks, with staff cutting them in-house. Even so, they raised prices by ¥30 across part of the menu on April 1st. “It was a painful choice,” Inano said. “Chicken has gotten too expensive — we had no option but to do this.”

Shoppers are feeling it too. “If it’s not on sale, I can’t really bring myself to pick it up. I buy it when it’s cheap and freeze it,” one customer said. Another: “When I’m tired I buy ready-made — karaage, yakitori — but food costs really are piling up.”

A supermarket in nearby Seto city, Isseya, sells domestic chicken at the fresh meat counter and uses Brazilian chicken for its prepared foods. Even on a special sale day in late April, prices were broadly up. Meat section manager Matsura Masanori, with nearly 30 years in the business, described something he’d never seen before. Domestic chicken thigh was on the floor at ¥117 per 100g that day — normally ¥150 per 100g. “Our current regular price is about the same as what we’d normally see at the peak of Christmas and year-end, our busiest season,” he said.

The traditional assumption — imported chicken is cheap, domestic is premium — has flipped. “In the past two or three months, it’s essentially reversed. Oil is up, so shipping costs and feed costs have all gone up. In 30 years of doing this, it’s the first time. Our price increases can’t keep pace.”

Matsura also pointed to a Japan-specific dimension that is quietly making the situation worse. Japanese buyers require unusually precise handling: packages must be weighed to exact tolerances (240g to 260g, for instance), bone fragments near joints must be removed, trimming must meet meticulous standards that other markets don’t demand. “I’m starting to hear from overseas that processors are struggling to meet that level of precision”, he noted.

With global labor shortages at processing plants and competing buyers who don’t impose the same requirements, overseas suppliers are starting to route their product to easier customers. Japan’s high standards, once a mark of quality, are becoming a competitive disadvantage in a seller’s market.

The Japan Problem: Being “Outbid” on the World Market

Something more structurally troubling is happening in Brazil that goes beyond short-term price movements.

Japan has historically been one of Brazil’s most important and loyal chicken buyers. Large Japanese trading companies built relationships over decades. Japanese-Brazilian immigrants helped establish trust that shaped long-term contracts. But that legacy advantage is eroding.

Brazil’s domestic borrowing rate sits near 30% — so high that companies can earn better returns leaving cash in the bank than investing in expanded production capacity. New processing lines aren’t being built. Supply isn’t growing fast enough to meet global demand.

Into that constrained supply, new buyers are arriving — China, South Korea, India, Europe — prioritising supply security over price and buying in volumes of 100 containers at a time, at prices Japan won't match. They are buying in volumes of 100 containers at a time, at prices Japan won’t match. Japan, shaped by decades of deflationary consumer expectations, has a structurally low price tolerance. Restaurants can’t raise prices easily. Supermarkets are pressured to keep food cheap. The result is that Japan consistently bids lower than competitors, and is consistently being deprioritised by suppliers.

This is what 買い負け (kaimake) looks like in practice: Japan being outcompeted not because it lacks demand, but because its decades-long deflationary psychology has left it unable to compete in a world where food security is increasingly expensive.

The Amplifier: How Domestic Panic Makes It Worse

Global fundamentals alone would have pushed prices up. But Japan’s distribution structure has an amplification mechanism built in.

When supply risks emerge — a bird flu announcement, an escalation in the Strait of Hormuz — large domestic food companies and retail chains start building inventory defensively. They buy ahead of the key demand seasons: the May holiday period, the December Christmas chicken rush. When major wholesalers hoard stock “just in case,” the available supply in the open market shrinks rapidly.

This triggers secondary panic buying by other businesses, who fear being left without product. They’re not buying because real demand has increased — they’re buying because they expect scarcity. This speculative demand, or 仮需 (kariju), drives prices sharply higher without any change in underlying production costs.

The effect radiates outward. Imported chicken gets scarce, so buyers switch to domestic chicken, pushing domestic prices up too. Thai chicken becomes the alternative to Brazilian, so Thai prices rise. By December, restaurant owners were receiving sudden wholesale price increase notices they couldn’t explain — because the reasons had cascaded through three or four layers of the distribution system before reaching them.

The Structural Picture

None of the forces driving this situation are going away quickly. The yen’s structural weakness relative to other major currencies is a long-term feature, not a temporary anomaly. Brazil’s high-interest-rate, low-investment environment constrains supply expansion. Global demand for protein is growing. The geopolitical uncertainty around the Strait of Hormuz is unlikely to resolve on a schedule that benefits Japanese food importers.

The one variable that could bring meaningful cost relief — a substantial appreciation of the yen — is outside anyone in the food industry’s control.

What this means in practice is that the price of chicken has undergone a structural reset, not a temporary spike. The era of sub-¥400 chicken is not coming back.

What Needs to Change

NHK’s reporting pointed toward two levels of response.

At the industry level, importers are beginning to diversify their supplier base, investing directly in Brazilian grain research, funding production improvements, and deepening relationships at the farm and processing level rather than simply buying at spot market prices. The goal is to position Japan as a preferred customer — one worth supplying — rather than a price-sensitive buyer that can be deprioritised when better offers arrive. Building genuine, sustained partnerships with producers overseas, including equity investment in farmland and processing facilities, is increasingly seen as the only way to ensure reliable access.

At the policy level, the concept of food security is being reframed. Japan’s pursuit of supply-chain efficiency — always buying from the cheapest available source, maintaining minimal inventory — maximised cost competitiveness but created fragility. The shift being proposed is from 効率性 (efficiency) to 耐久性 (durability): accepting somewhat higher baseline costs in exchange for supply stability.

At the consumer level, NHK suggested practical adaptations: shifting toward more vegetables, buying domestic and seasonal produce where possible, and choosing products with fewer imported inputs. These are small individual adjustments to a structural problem — but they reflect the reality that the supply chain running beneath everyday meals is now visibly under strain.

The Bigger Picture

Japan’s food self-sufficiency rate of 38% is among the lowest of any major developed nation. The country has spent 50 years trading away supply security for price efficiency, and is now confronting the consequences…

A karaage shop in Nagoya closes. A restaurant in Tokyo quietly swaps thigh for breast. A supermarket manager in Seto, after 30 years in the trade, sees imported chicken priced higher than domestic pork for the first time in his life. These aren't isolated incidents. They're the visible surface of a structural shift that runs from the Strait of Hormuz, through fertilizer plants and grain farms in the US, to chicken farms in Brazil, across container ships on the Pacific, and onto the dinner tables of Japan.

The question isn't whether chicken prices will stay elevated. The question is whether Japan has the institutional appetite — and the consumer tolerance for higher prices — to rebuild the relationships and domestic capacity that a more resilient food system requires.

Buy Me A Coffee

Easy enough — English words reshaped in Japanese sounds. But here is the thing that surprises people: not all of them are English.

Japanese has a whole category called 外来語 — gairaigo, literally “words coming from outside” — and when you trace where they actually come from, you find something much stranger and more interesting than borrowed English. You find Portuguese. You find Dutch. German, French, Spanish, Italian, even Russian. You find words that crossed the Pacific and the Indian Ocean centuries before English did, in the hands of merchants and missionaries and the Dutch East India Company.1

The Portuguese came with Christianity

Portuguese missionaries arrived in 1549. Merchants followed. And with them came words that embedded so deeply into Japanese that many speakers today have no idea they are standing on Portuguese soil.

• パン pan — bread (from pão)

• タバコ tabako — tobacco (from tabaco)

• カルタ karuta — playing cards (from carta)

• テンプラ tenpura — tempura (from têmporas)

• ボタン botan — button (from botão)

These are not obscure loanwords kept alive by historians. パン is the everyday word for bread in Japan — children learn it before they learn to read. テンプラ is a national dish. The Portuguese fingerprints on Japanese cuisine and daily life are so old they have become invisible.

Then, in 1639, the shogunate expelled the Portuguese. When envoys sailed from Macau the following year to try to reverse the expulsion, the shogunate executed sixty-one members of the mission and burned their ship. The message was clear. The Portuguese chapter was over. But their words remained.

Sakoku: not a locked door, but a guarded gate

鎖国 — sakoku — is usually translated as “closed country” or “isolationism.” That framing, while convenient, is deeply misleading. Japan during the Edo period (roughly 1603–1868) did not close, it curated.

Interestingly, the word sakoku itself is a foreign import of sorts. It was coined by Japanese astronomer and translator Shizuki Tadao in 1801, while he was translating the work of 17th-century German naturalist, physician, explorer, and writer, Engelbert Kaempfer — whose book The History of Japan was one of the few Western accounts of the country to reach European readers. The very term we use to describe Japan’s isolation was invented by a Japanese scholar translating a German text. The irony is almost too neat.

The policy hardened in stages. It was never simply about keeping foreigners out — the full picture is considerably more political. The Tokugawa bakufu had a domestic agenda: to control Japan’s foreign trade so tightly that no rival daimyō could use it to build wealth and military power. Those daimyō, particularly the tozama (outside lords), had profited enormously from East Asian trade networks during the preceding Sengoku period. Locking down maritime access was, in part, a way of locking down internal competition.

Religion was the other major driver — or at least the most visible one. The number of Catholic converts in southern Japan, particularly Kyūshū, had been rising steadily for decades. Missionaries like Francis Xavier had been remarkably effective. The direct trigger most historians point to was the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–38: an uprising of around 40,000 predominantly Christian peasants, which the shogunate crushed and then used as justification to expel missionaries entirely and ban Christianity on pain of death. The remaining Japanese Christians, mostly in Nagasaki, went underground — they became known as 隠れキリシタン, the “hidden Christians.”

The Protestant Dutch and English, crucially, were seen as able to separate religion from trade — unlike their Iberian counterparts. The Dutch, who were actively at war with Spain and eager to displace both Spanish and Portuguese merchants, had every incentive to reinforce this perception. It was a distinction that would shape the next two centuries.

So: Japan did not seal itself shut. It chose, deliberately and violently, who was allowed in. Trade continued through four carefully managed gateways — Nagasaki, Matsumae in Hokkaido (for trade with the Ainu), Tsushima (for relations with Joseon Korea), and Satsuma (as a conduit to the Ryūkyū Kingdom). Historian Tashiro Kazui draws a useful distinction between Group A — China and the Dutch, under direct shogunate control at Nagasaki — and Group B — Korea and Ryūkyū, dealt with through domain intermediaries. The Group A relationship mattered most for language, because it placed foreign merchants in direct, sustained contact with Japanese society.

The physical mechanism of that contact was a small fan-shaped island in Nagasaki harbour called Dejima — barely 120 metres wide. Chinese and Dutch traders lived there, separated from the city by a narrow strait. They could not enter Nagasaki without special permission. Japanese civilians could not enter Dejima at all. A guard watched the bridge to the mainland around the clock. And yet: trade happened. Words crossed that bridge even when people largely couldn’t.

The Dutch Stayed — by Agreeing to Everything

The Dutch East India Company survived the sakoku purge for one reason: they were willing to be subordinate in a way the Portuguese were not. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) had no missionaries. They wanted trade, not souls. They agreed to confine themselves to Dejima, to submit to humiliating inspections, to trade entirely on Japan’s terms. And so while British, Russian, French, and American ships all attempted to force open a relationship with Japan and were turned away — the Dutch stayed on their small island for over two hundred years.

This extraordinary arrangement produced an extraordinary intellectual exchange. Rangaku — 蘭学, “Dutch learning” — became the umbrella term for all Western science and medicine that filtered into Japan through Nagasaki. Japanese scholars, permitted limited contact with VOC staff, translated Dutch medical texts, studied Dutch anatomy, and learned Dutch cartography.

The word ランドセル (randoseru) — the hard-backed school bag that every Japanese child carries today — comes directly from the Dutch ransel, meaning knapsack.

• ビール bīru — beer (from bier)

• ゴム gomu — rubber (from gom)

• ランドセル randoseru — school backpack (from ransel)

• ピンセット pinsetto — tweezers (from pincet)

Every one of these words is a record of two centuries of enforced proximity on a 120-metre island. They are linguistic sediment.

The Gates Open and Everyone Rushes in

On July 8, 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States Navy steamed four warships into Edo Bay — ships that would become known as the kurofune, the Black Ships. He demanded Japan open to trade. The following year, at the Convention of Kanagawa, the Shogun signed. Within five years, Japan had signed similar treaties with Britain, Russia, France, and the Netherlands — treaties that Japanese intellectuals almost unanimously regarded as unequal, forced through the same gunboat diplomacy being used across Asia.

The floodgates opened, and with them came a new wave of foreign words — this time overwhelmingly from English, reflecting British and American commercial and cultural dominance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gairaigo from this era is what most people today assume is the whole story: テレビ (terebi). コンピューター (konpyūtā). インターネット (intānetto).

But the Portuguese and Dutch words were already there, embedded beneath the surface like an older stratum of rock. Sakoku hadn’t prevented borrowing — it had simply determined, with great precision, who Japan would borrow from.

The English Problem

The Portuguese and Dutch loanwords slipped into Japanese and settled. They filled gaps — new objects, new concepts, new foods that had no existing Japanese equivalent. パン named something that simply didn’t exist in Japan before the Portuguese arrived. The language absorbed the word and moved on, undisturbed.

Modern English borrowings are doing something different. They are not filling gaps. They are replacing perfectly functional Japanese words that already exist.

クレーム (kurēmu) from "claim" — used specifically to mean a complaint to a business, replacing 苦情 (kujō). シェア (shea), from “share,” is increasingly used where the native 共有 (kyōyū) once stood unchallenged. Some will argue that the english counterpart in Japanese has some different nuances, and they may be right, but the trend is overwhelming. Some English words arrive so reshaped that their origins become almost unrecognisable — a whole phenomenon the Japanese call 和製英語, wasei-eigo: “Japanese-made English.” Words like サラリーマン (sarariiman) — “salaryman,” a term that has actually looped back into English with its Japanese meaning intact.2

Japanese linguists have a term for this anxiety: 国語の乱れ, kokugo no midare — “the disordering of the national language.” It surfaces periodically in public discourse. The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics has, at various points, issued official guidelines recommending native alternatives to fashionable English loanwords in bureaucratic and media contexts.

But language doesn’t take orders. Young Japanese speakers are not consulting official guidelines when they text each other. And the pressure is not easing — it is intensifying, driven by global media, social platforms, English-language media, and an economy that has made English proficiency valuable in a way Dutch never was.

What Sakoku Actually Tells Us

There is a temptation to look back at the sakoku period and see only restriction — a paranoid feudal state sealing itself off from progress. But the linguistic record tells a more interesting story. Japan during that period was not a static, sealed container. It was a system of deliberate, asymmetric openness. It chose its interlocutors. It set the terms. And the words that survived that system — the Portuguese bread, the Dutch backpack, the Chinese characters that form the backbone of the writing system — are evidence not of isolation, but of selection.

Modern Japan has no such gatekeeping. English words arrive faster than any commission can evaluate them, through screens rather than ships — fused with native Japanese words, twisted into verbs, their meanings stretched until they become hard to follow even for native speakers.

The question of what a language loses when it stops selecting is one that Japanese, and perhaps every non-English language, is quietly beginning to answer. Loanwords were never just words. They were always a record of power — of who was allowed in, on whose terms, and what they left behind when they came.

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A familiar pattern runs through these organisations: the world is ending, you are missing something essential, and only by following our teachings can you be saved. Some even claim levitating messiahs and supernatural healing.

You might wonder: who actually believes this?
As it turns out — a lot of people. Well‑educated professionals. University students. Even politicians. And these groups are far more deeply embedded in Japanese democracy than the public has ever been comfortable admitting.

Born Shinto, Die Buddhist

To understand how Japan arrived here, you have to start with its spiritual foundation.

Shinto is Japan’s indigenous religion, and at its heart is a creation mythology as dramatic as any in the world. The gods Izanagi and Izanami were ordered by the heavenly deities to create land. Standing on a celestial bridge, they stirred the ocean with a jewelled spear, and the drops that fell formed the first islands of Japan. Later, as Izanagi purified himself after descending into the underworld to seek his dead wife, three great deities were born from his body: Amaterasu, the sun goddess, from his left eye; Tsukuyomi, the moon god, from his right; and Susanoo, god of storms, from his nose.

Amaterasu sent her grandson Ninigi-no-Mikoto down to earth to rule Japan, and Ninigi’s great-grandson became the legendary Emperor Jimmu — the first emperor, and the origin point of an unbroken imperial line that continues to this day. Emperor Naruhito, who ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne in 2019, is considered a direct descendant of this lineage and is formally the head of the Shinto religion. Until his grandfather Emperor Hirohito renounced his own divinity on 1 January 1946 — in what is known as the Ningen-sengen, or Humanity Declaration, issued at the behest of General Douglas MacArthur — the emperor had literally been regarded as a living god. The idea of divine imperial legitimacy had been central to Japanese political and religious identity for centuries.

Buddhism arrived in Japan from Korea and China in the 6th century and folded itself remarkably smoothly around Shinto. Rather than clash, the two traditions complemented each other. There is a saying in Japan that captures this elegantly: you are born Shinto, marry Christian, and die Buddhist (the Christian part comes from the fact that the majority of weddings in Japan are held at churches and follow Christian-style ceremonies). Shinto governs life’s beginnings and celebrations; Buddhism attends its endings and spiritual reflections. Many Japanese observe both without any sense of contradiction. As people move through life, the teachings of the Buddha tend to take on greater meaning — and pilgrimages, like the famous 88‑temple circuit on Shikoku, become serious undertakings. Emeritus Professor Richard Harrison at Kobe University knows a thing or two about pilgrimages.

Enter the New Religious Movements

The Japanese term is 新興宗教 — shinko shukyo, meaning “new religious movements.” Whether they deserve the word “religion” at all is a question worth asking. “Cult” may be more honest.

These groups exist everywhere in the world, and Japan is no different. Their recruiting strategies follow a familiar script: doomsday prophecies, the promise of belonging, the suggestion that you are missing something — some divine spark, some hidden truth — that only they can provide. In Japan, many of these groups enjoy the same tax protections as legitimate religious organisations. They build hospitals, run schools that compete at the national level in baseball and other sports tournaments, hold spectacular festivals and fireworks ceremonies, and erect large, architecturally bewildering towers that seem to exist for no particular reason except to project permanence and power.

Their recruiting particularly targets universities, where young people away from home for the first time are impressionable and desperate for community. Most Japanese universities actually include warnings in their orientation materials about approach tactics used by these groups. For those seeking belonging, the warmth offered in the early stages of recruitment can be genuinely seductive — and it does not take long for critical thinking to become suppressed. They rarely start by asking you for money or demanding you break contact with your family. That comes later.

Aum Shinrikyo: A Cult That Became a Terrorist Organisation

The most notorious of Japan’s cults is Aum Shinrikyo — a group whose story reads less like a religious movement than a slow-motion atrocity.

Aum Shinrikyo was founded in 1984 by Shoko Asahara, born Chizuo Matsumoto, a partially blind yoga teacher from Kumamoto. Starting from a single room in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, Asahara built a syncretic doomsday religion drawing on Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christian apocalyptic prophecy. He declared himself the reincarnation of Christ and the first “enlightened one” since the Buddha. He attracted graduates from Japan’s most elite universities — lawyers, scientists, engineers, doctors — earning it the nickname a religion for the elite. By the early 1990s it had close to 10,000 members in Japan and around 30,000 in Russia.

What the Japanese government and public did not know — or chose not to look too hard at — was that underneath the yoga classes and spiritual literature, Aum Shinrikyo had begun manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. Asahara became obsessed with precipitating a global Armageddon. His followers stockpiled firearms, developed biological agents, and synthesised the nerve agent sarin.

Before testing sarin in Japan, the cult quietly purchased a remote sheep station called Banjawarn, 800 kilometres north‑east of Perth in the Western Australian Goldfields. There, in a makeshift laboratory set up in the homestead kitchen, cult members conducted nerve-agent experiments on the sheep. When Australian Federal Police raided the property after the Tokyo attacks, they found sarin residue in the soil and in the wool of 29 dead sheep. The outback had served as Aum’s testing ground.

On the morning of 20 March 1995, five Aum members boarded Tokyo Metro trains during the rush hour. Each carried bags of liquid sarin wrapped in newspaper. At a pre-arranged moment they punctured the bags with sharpened umbrella tips and slipped off the trains. The gas spread through the carriages and onto station platforms. By the end of the day, 13 people were dead, 50 were severely injured, and over 6,000 filed injury reports with police.

And yet, before all of this, Aum Shinrikyo had operated openly in Japan as a legally registered religious organisation, protected under freedom of religion. It ran facilities and schools, and had even set up its own animation studio in 1991 — producing anime, manga, music, and radio programs used for both indoctrination and recruitment, specifically targeting young people and anime fans. The government had grown suspicious of its activities, but by the time they moved against it, the sarin had already been made, tested, and deployed.

Shoko Asahara was arrested in May 1995, convicted of masterminding the attacks and 12 other crimes, and sentenced to death in 2004. He was executed by hanging on 6 July 2018, along with six other senior members. Aum Shinrikyo still exists in Japan today — under the name Aleph.

The Assassination That Forced Japan to Look in the Mirror

For decades, the entanglement of religious organisations with Japanese politics had been an open secret — known in some corners, but largely ignored by the broader public. That changed on 8 July 2022.

Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — Japan’s longest-serving prime minister and one of its most internationally recognisable figures — was shot dead during a campaign speech in Nara. The weapon was a homemade gun, assembled from pipes and tape. The shooter, a 41-year-old former Maritime Self-Defence Force seaman named Tetsuya Yamagami, made no attempt to flee.

When police investigated his motive, what they uncovered was not the act of a random extremist. Yamagami’s mother had become a devoted member of the Unification Church — formally known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, a South Korean-founded sect famous for its mass arranged weddings and fierce anti-communist ideology. She had donated approximately $700,000 to the church, bankrupting the family. His father had died by suicide. His brother later did the same. Yamagami had grown up watching his family destroyed, and he blamed the church entirely.

Unable to reach the church’s leadership directly, he targeted Abe, whom he believed had deep and longstanding ties to the organisation — ties that went back generations, including to Abe’s grandfather, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi.

At first the Japanese public had little idea what to make of the motive. But as investigators dug in, and as journalists began pulling on the threads Yamagami had exposed, the scale of what emerged was staggering. An internal survey of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party found that 179 of its 379 lawmakers had some documented connection to the Unification Church — attending events, accepting donations, or relying on church volunteers during election campaigns. The church had quietly built a political infrastructure inside Japan’s democracy over decades. Four cabinet ministers resigned. Public trust in the government collapsed. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was forced to publicly distance the LDP from the church.

The reckoning that followed was slow but significant. In October 2023, the government formally sought the dissolution of the Unification Church through the courts. On 25 March 2025, the Tokyo District Court ordered the church dissolved. The church appealed, and on 4 March 2026, the Tokyo High Court upheld the dissolution order — the first time in Japanese history that a religious organisation had been ordered dissolved on civil, rather than criminal, grounds.

A Problem That Isn’t Going Away

The relationship between dangerous religious organisations and political power in Japan was not built in a day, and it will not be dismantled in a court ruling. Japan’s cult problem is deeper and more structural than a single assassination or a single dissolved organisation. It lives in the tax system, in university recruitment halls, in election campaigns, and — until very recently — in the comfortable silence of a political class that found these groups too useful to examine too closely.

The country is asking, belatedly, where the line should be drawn: how can we stop new religious movements from becoming manipulative machines? And when does the protection of freedom of religion turn into a shield for exploitation? These are not easy questions. But Japan is finally — and publicly — asking them.

I didn’t either.

But somehow, one of Japan’s most famous beaches has more in common with an Australian beach than you’d ever expect.

When people think of beautiful beaches in Japan, they usually think of Okinawa: tropical water, coral reefs, island vibes. Wakayama is not usually the first place that comes to mind. But Shirarahama Beach (白良浜) is different.

(Note: the beach is called Shirarahama, while the surrounding town is Shirahama — I’ll use Shirahama throughout for simplicity.)

It’s famous for its incredibly white sand, blue water, and nearby onsens — honestly one of the greatest combinations humanity has ever invented. Swim at the beach during the day, sit in an outdoor hot spring at night. What more is there?

The beach stretches about 620 metres in a graceful arc, and it even has a sister beach partnership with Waikiki in Hawaii. Not bad for a spot in Wakayama Prefecture that most international tourists overlook entirely.

But what most people don’t realise is that the sand itself isn’t originally from Japan. A huge portion of it was imported from Western Australia — and the reason why says a lot about modern Japan.

Japan’s Disappearing Beaches

The sand at Shirahama is silica sand, primarily composed of quartz. This type of sand is the same material used as a raw ingredient for glass, which gives it that strikingly bright, almost snow-white colour.

But by the late 20th century, Shirahama had a serious erosion problem. Sand beaches naturally lose sand to waves, but they’re replenished by sediment carried down from rivers. Around Shirahama, coastal development — tourism infrastructure, housing, construction — reduced that supply. By the end of the Shōwa era, the beach had noticeably thinned.

The sand was disappearing.

So in 1989, Japan launched a major restoration project. Officials first sourced sand from various locations across Japan, but nothing matched the whiteness of the original Shirahama sand. The search eventually expanded overseas — and the sand from around Perth, Western Australia, turned out to be a near-perfect match. Over the following years, approximately 140,000 tonnes of Australian sand was shipped in and added to the beach.

And visually, it worked.

The beach became white again. Wide again. Beautiful again. Tourists came back. Today, Shirahama still looks like the kind of perfect resort beach you’d see in a travel brochure. The town continues to maintain it through breakwaters to prevent sand from washing away, and seasonal nets to stop it from blowing off in the wind. Even litter on the beach is treated as a conservation issue — sand sticks to rubbish, and when the rubbish gets collected, the sand goes with it.

But according to locals, something important never returned.

The sand stopped singing.

The Beach That Used to “Sing”

Suzuki Hiroyuki, 87, who grew up near the beach, still remembers walking along Shirahama in winter and hearing the sand squeak beneath his feet. He recalls:

In Japanese, this phenomenon is called naki-suna (鳴き砂), or “singing sand.”

It sounds fake, but it’s real. Under certain conditions, sand can produce chirping or squeaking sounds when stepped on. Japan once had many beaches famous for this, but today only around thirty remain.

One of the most famous surviving examples is Kotohikihama in Kyoto Prefecture, often called one of Japan’s “Three Great Singing Sand Beaches.”

Researchers comparing the sand from Shirahama and Kotohikihama found something interesting. The grain sizes were different: Shirahama contained far more ultra-fine particles. They tried adjusting the grain distribution to match Kotohikihama’s sand, but it still didn’t sing. Only after thoroughly washing the sand did the sound appear. That’s because singing sand is absurdly delicate.

According to the Kotohikihama Singing Sand Museum, the conditions have to be almost perfect. The sand needs a high quartz content — at least 60% — very specific grain sizes, and constant natural washing by waves. Even slight contamination from dirt, oil, pollution, or organic material can silence it completely.

The beach itself also matters. The geography, currents, and wave patterns all help naturally clean and maintain the sand over time.

And once that system changes, recreating it is incredibly difficult. Which is why Japan now has only around 30 singing beaches left.

Rebuilding the Beach — But Not the Ecosystem

Japan is incredibly good at reconstruction. Maybe too good sometimes. The country can rebuild landscapes with astonishing precision. Rivers are engineered, coastlines reshaped, historical districts reconstructed, entire environments carefully maintained to preserve a particular image or atmosphere.

And visually, Shirahama was restored successfully.

But many locals say the beach itself behaves differently now. One man in his 70s, who swam at Shirahama as a child, remembered that decades ago the beach was so shallow you could walk far into the ocean before the water even reached above your knees. Many of the original environmental conditions that shaped Shirahama disappeared during redevelopment projects. Artificial capes were added, seabeds flattened, seawalls modified, and coastal currents altered.

The coastline itself was rewritten.

And I think there’s something strangely melancholic about that. Because appearance is much easier to recreate than process.

You can import white sand from Australia, make the beach look beautiful again, and bring tourism back. But you can’t easily recreate centuries of geology, wave action, ecosystems, and natural environmental balance that originally made the place what it was.

Although Shirahama may look perfect in pictures, the sand no longer sings — and honestly, that feels like a metaphor for a lot of modern Japan.

Simple question. Except in Japan, it’s not simple at all.

The moment you answer, something happens. A calculation runs. A category gets assigned. You watch it happen in real time — the slight shift in posture, the recalibrated tone, the new version of you they’ve just constructed in their head.

The Labyrinth of Gakureki (学歴) in Japan

And it matters more than people are willing to admit.

Japanese people just know this stuff. It’s not taught. It’s absorbed. Everyone knows the former Imperial Universities (旧帝大学 - kyūtei daigaku). Everyone knows which schools are smart, which are rich, which are hard to get into, which are scandal-prone, which are basically famous for beauty pageants, sports results, or party culture.

And then there’s Tōdai (東大) — the University of Tokyo, the pinnacle of gakureki in Japan. Say that word in a room and watch what happens. Automatic respect. Almost involuntary. Like a reflex they can’t switch off. Make a cheeky jab at someone’s university and Japanese people are suddenly animated, debating rankings and reputations.

When I did my undergraduate exchange at Aoyama Gakuin University (青山学院大学) in Tokyo, a lot of my Japanese friends would talk about different universities and their rankings, sharing their own experiences of getting into university. This was completely new to me.

University names in Japan are generally abbreviated into a two-kanji nickname — 青山学院 becomes 青学 (Aogaku). A lot of these large private universities also have attached schools (付属 - fuzoku) — junior highs and high schools physically connected to the university. Aogaku is one of them.

Get into one of these attached schools early enough and you can ride what they call the escalator system (エスカレーター式 - esukērētā-shiki) all the way up to university without ever touching the standard exam gauntlet — known as the General Entrance Exam route (一般方式 - ippan hōshiki), as opposed to the Recommendation route (推薦 - suisen), where you sit more of an interview than a test.

Aogaku sits inside a grouping called MARCH:

• M = Meiji (明治)

• A = Aoyama Gakuin (青山学院)

• R = Rikkyo (立教)

• C = Chuo (中央)

• H = Hosei (法政)

Top private universities in Tokyo. Roughly ranked in that order. Say MARCH (マーチ) in front of any Japanese person and they’ll know exactly what you mean.

Above that, you’ve got Sōkei (早慶): Waseda (早稲田) and Keio (慶應). Sometimes grouped alongside Sophia (上智) and ICU (国際基督教).

Out here in Kansai, where I am currently studying at Kobe University — belonging to Keihanshin (京阪神): Kyoto (京都), Osaka (大阪), Kobe (神戸) — the national university tier. Then there is Kan-Kan-Dō-Ritsu (関関同立): Kansai (関西), Kwansei Gakuin (関西学院), Doshisha (同志社), Ritsumeikan (立命館) — the private university power four.

I could go on. Leagues within leagues. Abbreviations within abbreviations. This rabbit hole has no bottom.

The YouTubers Who Turned Gakureki (学歴) Into Entertainment

Enter Biyama (びーやま) and Takata Fumin (高田ふーみん) of Wakatte TV.

These two have built an empire on this stuff.

Their bread and butter: アホ街ック天国 (Aho Machikku Tengoku) — a parody of a popular Tokyo TV show — street interviews where they go around different cities and towns, approach strangers, ask about their university, assign them a deviation score (偏差値 - hensachi) on a national ranking scale, and use that to assess the area as a whole.

~70 = University of Tokyo. ~30 = high school graduate. Everything else: somewhere in between.

They also have a range of other videos — mixing blackjack and High & Low with hensachi scores, and even stacking scores from lowest to highest in a format called Gakureki Matryoshka, inspired by well-known Russian dolls.

The pair are essentially an Educational Manzai (漫才) comedy act built on educational snobbery. The red Takata Fumin (高田ふーみん) plays the unhinged Gakureki Obsessive (学歴厨 - gakureki-chū) — the guy who's obsessed, ruthless, and absolutely convinced that your university determines the level of respect you are entitled to, sometimes referring to himself as a Gakureki Monster (学歴モンスター - gakureki monsutā). Biyama (びーやま) plays the straight man, pulling him back with a tired "Stop it" (やめろお前 - Yamero omae).

Now well recognised gakureki rockstars, the pair draw crowds whenever they show up at a university. Takata Fumin even threw the first pitch at the Yakult Swallows vs Hanshin Tigers game at Jingu Stadium on the 29th last month, and Biyama (びーやま) has a popular book titled "Things I Wish I Knew at 17 About Exams and Life" (17歳のときに知りたかった受験のこと、人生のこと。).

They claim it's a character. In real life, they are associated with Takeda Juku (武田塾) — one of Japan's well known cram school chains.

But the content? It gets brutal.

Not from a top university? Not studying medicine? Fair game. Schools get branded F-rank (Fラン) and dismissed on camera. One infamous stunt: they showed up to the entrance ceremony at Hosei University (法政大学) with the hypothesis that zero students had chosen it as their first choice (第一志望 - daiichi shibo) — that everyone was there because they had failed somewhere better and it was simply their backup (滑り止め - suberidome). Their consolation prize.

They didn’t just pose the question — they celebrated when students confirmed it.

Their slogan? “Education heats people.”

Accurate. They are absolutely farming reactions.

And it worked well enough to land them on Abema Prime, where internet commentator Hiroyuki (ひろゆき) sat across from them and actually pushed back — debating whether gakureki matters in the real world, and whether judging people this way is even okay to begin with.

Their defense? They’re motivating students.

Bold strategy. Probably not wrong for everyone. Almost certainly not the whole story.

Who’s Actually Watching?

Mostly exam candidates (受験生 - jukensei) — high school students in the trenches of exam season. Kids who’ll sit the Common Test (共通テスト - Kyōtsū Tesuto) in January, the nationwide standardized test that used to be called the Center Exam (センター試験 - Sentā Shiken) until 2020.

From there: national universities set score thresholds, students sit second-stage exams (二次試験 - niji shiken), and they get one shot at the first round (前期 - zenki) and one at the second (後期 - kōki). Two chances. That’s it.

Private universities are more flexible — but expensive. Multiple attempts, multiple fees.

And some don’t make it at all. They become rōnin (浪人).

The term comes from the masterless samurai — a warrior left wandering with no master to serve. Now it means students who didn’t get in and spend another year studying, attending prep schools (予備校 - yobikō) or cram schools (塾 - juku), often living at home, preparing to go again. There are even masked rōnin (仮面浪人 - kamen rōnin) — students already enrolled at one university, secretly retaking exams to get into a better one.

Gakureki-related drama is everywhere in Japanese media. Dragon Zakura (ドラゴン桜), Birigyaru (ビリギャル), just to name a couple. The formula is always the same: struggling kid, impactful teacher, brutal grind, tense wait at the results board (合格発表 - gōkaku happyō). Will their number be there? You get the rest.

For a scared seventeen-year-old staring down exam season, that story hits like a freight train. And at an impressionable age it is easy to believe the fantasy that gakureki is life or death — that these exams are a make-or-break moment (一発勝負 - ippatsushoubu).

Why Can't Japan Quit Gakureki?

No single answer. But part of it is the seductive logic of the system.

If you could endure the grind — the cram schools (塾 - juku), the prep schools (予備校 - yobikō), the years of sacrifice — and still come out the other side with a top university on your record, then you earned your place. It’s quantifiable. It’s clean. It feels fair.

The problem is it ignores almost everything else. Individual ability. Creativity. Circumstance. Not everyone can afford years of cram school fees and prep school tuition.

So maybe gakureki isn’t uniquely Japanese at all. Just unusually visible.

What Happens Next?

Japan’s educational system has always done things its own way. But the ageing population problem is hitting hard, and the numbers are starting to force some uncomfortable conversations.

Last month, the Ministry of Finance (財務省 - Zaimushō) published a report setting out a numerical target: at least 250 private universities closed and around 140,000 student places cut by 2040. The driver is simple — with the declining birthrate, roughly half of all private universities are already falling below their enrolment capacity.

The Ministry of Education (文部科学省 - Monbukagakushō) has acknowledged that rightsizing is unavoidable. But where the Ministry of Finance is dealing in numbers, the Ministry of Education is pushing back on the purely mechanical approach — arguing that any restructuring needs to account for balance across different academic fields and regions. These are two ministries looking at the same problem from very different angles. How much of this is being planned in genuine coordination between them remains an open question.

Is Japan Still a Gakureki Society?

What does any of this mean for the future of gakureki? Does the hierarchy loosen as the pool shrinks? Does prestige concentrate even harder around the schools that survive? Does the whole system quietly reshape itself into something nobody’s quite planned for?

Nobody knows yet.

And then there’s the bigger question — the one gakureki has always been quietly forcing you to confront.

Is it right to judge a person by where they went to school? To decide who they are, what they’re worth, what they deserve — based on a standardised test sat in high school?

These are the questions gakureki keeps forcing us to confront. And as Japan’s universities start to disappear, they’re only going to get louder.

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