Japan's samurai culture

Japan's samurai culture

They need another hero

Oct 29th 2009 | TOKYO
From The Economist print edition

Swooning over sword-wielding samurais, not sober-suited salarymen

FAT, raccoon-faced, and with the severed head of one of his enemies at his feet, Ieyasu Tokugawa, Japan’s mightiest shogun, hardly looks like a heartthrob. Yet this is the image of him that confronts awestruck young women when they travel to the village of Sekigahara in central Japan.

There, in 1600, Tokugawa used brilliant tactics—and treachery—to win the deciding battle in a civil war that enabled him to found a 265-year ruling dynasty. Now young women are turning him, and the warlords who fought against him, into objects of hero worship. “It’s like a samurai boom,” says a curator at the local museum. “The young women seem to adore the codes of loyalty and friendship by which the samurai lived.”

BridgemanThe analogue version

Who says video games poison the minds of the young? The phenomenon of the “history-loving women” is the serendipitous offshoot of a Japanese video game called “Sengoku Basara” (Devil Kings), which has the usual male fare of flashing swords, castles and conquests.

What is different, says its creator, Hiroyuki Kobayashi of Capcom, an Osaka-based gaming company, is that there is no severing of limbs or gushing of blood. Moreover, the characters are brave, noble and, above all, attractive—even if their namesakes bore few of these qualities in real life (see picture below).

To his surprise, Mr Kobayashi found himself besieged by women smitten with the characters—sometimes over their boyfriends’ hunched shoulders. Besides the good looks, they said they yearned for the sense of adventure and honour of the medieval era. From a gaming point of view, he may have stumbled upon a badly needed new source of revenue. Women rarely play action video games, but, when they do, tend to be more loyal to a game (men apparently bore sooner of slashing their enemies to bits).

Capcom

From a social point of view, his experience is also interesting. He believes women are partly escaping into fantasy because they cannot find suitably heroic partners in real life. Capcom’s samurai groupies may be the corollary of a widely discussed trend in Japan, that of “grass-eating men”, who eschew the typical male trappings of cars and big salaries, and may prefer shopping and fashion to sex.

The phenomenon may also reflect a bigger issue: young women failing to find marriage partners. Since the 1970s the number of men and women marrying in their 20s and early 30s has fallen sharply, which is one of the main reasons the birth rate has fallen so low. It is largely the result of poor job prospects for men—and for women who marry. It will also have a severe impact on Japanese GDP in coming years.

As it is, the popularity of Capcom’s warlords is already being put to good political effect. One of them was used on a voting poster in a governor’s election on October 25th to encourage young people to vote. It is hard to replicate, however. “Every time we try and develop a game for female gamers, we fail,” Mr Kobayashi says. “Women always want to be chasing something. When they feel they’re being chased, they run away.” A lesson, perhaps, to be heeded by Japan’s growing army of frustrated bachelors.