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06/14/2009: "Japan's Generation XX"
For much of this decade, the older men who drove this country to the top of the economic league tables have looked on in bewilderment at the foppish antics of the generation below.
Japan's twenty- and thirtysomething males seem disinterested in careers and apathetic about the rituals of dating, sex and marriage. They spend almost as much on cosmetics and clothes as women, live with their mums and sit down on the toilet when they pee. Some have even been known to wear bras. "What is happening to the nation's manhood?" wonders social critic Takuro Morinaga.
Coined by columnist Maki Fukasawa, the term soshoku-danshi (herbivorous male) has become one of those cultural buzzwords that hijacks the Japanese media every couple of years. With its implied disdain for vegetarians, the term has been popularised in a bestselling new book called The Herbivorous Ladylike Men (who) are Changing Japan by Megumi Ushikubo, president of Tokyo marketing firm Infinity. Her company claims that roughly two-thirds of all Japanese men aged 20-34 are now partial or total grass-eaters, and a very long way from the classic twin stereotypes of 20th-century Japanese masculinity: the fierce, unyielding warrior and the workaholic salary-man.
[ That's the domesticating dysgenic effect of civilisation! Note that most young Japanese men have turned into these freaks. ]
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/japans-generation-xx-1704155.html