These classes exist because of a gap, not a plan. A lack of public funding, a drive to cut costs, and a shortage of professional teachers created the conditions for volunteers to step in. Their unpaid labour has reinforced a common assumption: that any native speaker can teach their language to foreigners. This is one reason why the professionalism of certified language teachers is so often undervalued, with many qualified teachers working under insecure conditions.

Since the mid-1980s, the number of migrants in Japan has risen steadily, with only a brief dip during the COVID-19 pandemic. Falling birth rates and an ageing population have left many sectors facing severe labour shortages. Foreign workers are expected to fill the gap, but many arrive with little or no Japanese and generally have no opportunity to learn, except through volunteer-run local classes.

To address this, the ‘Act on the Promotion of Japanese Language Education’ was introduced in 2019, establishing clear roles for professional language teachers, coordinators, and volunteers as support staff. In practice, however, this intended division of labour often conflicts with conditions on the ground. Figures from 2021 tell the story plainly: about 50% of Japanese language teachers in local communities are volunteers, around 40% are part-time, and only 10% are full-time.

One common route into language support is through training courses offered by local authorities, which equip volunteers with basic knowledge of Japanese grammar and teaching technique. But research has revealed a tension at the heart of this arrangement: the more enthusiastic non-specialist volunteers are about helping foreign residents learn Japanese, the more foreign residents may become conscious and anxious about their lack of Japanese proficiency.

The difficult working conditions faced by many foreign workers make systematic, grammar-focused learning, the kind that requires preparation and follow-up, hard to sustain. To meet their needs, broad knowledge about teaching methods and teaching expertise are required.

At the same time, not all volunteers primarily want to act as teachers. Interviews reveal a wide range of motivations:

‘I wanted to pursue a meaningful, human-like activity alongside my very demanding and exhausting job.’ / ‘After my retirement, I looked for a meaningful activity I could continue.’ / ‘I like meeting people and have many hobbies. Japanese language support is one of them.’ / ‘I was interested in international exchange before.’ / ‘I looked for an activity to give back to society, somehow the favours and help I had received when my husband died.’ / ‘My daughter had stayed abroad before.’

This brings us to the promise, and the tension, of local Japanese classes. The variety of participants makes them a distinctive kind of space: a third place beyond work and family, a site where people can connect with the wider community, a place to be and belong. But this potential is hard to realise when the focus stays locked on school-like teaching.

There is nothing inherently wrong with language instruction. Many volunteers enjoy teaching, and many migrants expect to be taught. For young labour migrants especially, passing the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test offers tangible advantages for work in Japan and for job searches after returning home. Many seek focused test preparation and expect professional guidance from their ‘teachers’.

The problem is one of framing. When too much emphasis falls on formal instruction, migrants come to be seen primarily as non-native speakers rather than as fellow community members. And volunteers who came hoping to engage with foreign residents and develop new activities may find themselves pushed into a teaching role they never wanted.

For the diversity of local Japanese classes to flourish, migrants need to be recognised as active members of the community. The Basic Surveys on Foreign Residents, carried out annually by the Immigration Services Agency, offer valuable insight here. The 2024 survey found that the longer foreign residents plan to stay in Japan, the greater the proportion who wish to participate in local activities. Some 26.5% of respondents wanted to join club activities with people who share similar hobbies. Another 21.1% were interested in volunteer work such as interpretation and community clean-ups. And 12.0% expressed interest in joining neighbourhood or local community associations.

But when asked about obstacles to social participation, the most common answer was stark: ‘not knowing what activities are available’.

Some communities are already finding creative responses. In Soja City, Okayama Prefecture, the local authority has developed a programme training foreign residents to become ‘Foreign Disaster Prevention Leaders’, enabling them to work alongside local government and provide self-help and mutual aid in emergencies. The initiative is striking because it inverts the usual dynamic: foreign residents are no longer positioned as people who receive help, but as people who give it.

Volunteering in local Japanese-language support is, indeed, a double-edged sword. But the people who should not be criticised are the volunteers themselves. The real problem is structural. In the current arrangement, the potential of both volunteers and migrants remains underused. For this to change, municipalities need to hire and adequately compensate professional Japanese teachers. With that foundation in place, civil actors, both foreign and Japanese, might develop their potential and participate in activities driven by their own interests, fostering connections that move beyond the supporting-and-supported dynamic that currently defines too many of these spaces.

This post is based on Gildenhard, Bettina. 2026. “Volunteering in Local Japanese Classes – Insights into a Microcosm between Personal Initiatives, National Language Policies and the Quest for Professionalism.”?Japan Forum, April, 1–25. doi:10.1080/09555803.2026.2656200. Read more

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The walled-in town in Murakami Haruki’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls (2024) looks, at first glance, like a refuge. Its walls curve gently, like a binding ribbon. Social harmony is absolute. No one quarrels, no one suffers, no one ages. Residents are assigned roles and carry them out without friction. For the novel’s narrator, a forty-year-old man still haunted by the disappearance of his teenage love twenty-three years earlier, the town promises exactly what nostalgia always promises: that the past can be preserved whole, that loss can be undone. The girl he loved claimed her ‘real self’ lived inside this town, and so the town becomes the place where he might find her again.

But perfection has a price. To enter, you must surrender your shadow, and along with it your memories, your emotions, and your capacity to change. The girl is there, identical in appearance, but she does not remember him. She is a shell fashioned from yearning, someone to sit beside but never speak to. The town’s flawless surface conceals a void. Its stability costs its residents the things the narrator came looking for.

Scholars have often treated nostalgia in Murakami’s fiction as a dead end, a symptom of disillusionment and the inability to process history. The narrator initially seems to confirm these readings. For over two decades, he has been frozen in place. He keeps the girl’s letters, written in turquoise-blue ink, and her white gauze handkerchief. He rereads them obsessively, lamenting the summer when he was seventeen. He cannot see the point of being with anyone else.

What the sociologist Fred Davis calls ‘Simple Nostalgia’ captures this condition well: an unexamined, emotionally driven conviction that the past was simply better. At this level, nostalgia downplays hardship, idealises what is gone, and offers no way forward. The narrator’s retreat into the walled town is Simple Nostalgia made architectural, a timeless utopia where no one ages, no one grieves, and no one remembers.

The turning point arrives outside the town, in a modest, pre-digital library in a provincial Japanese town called Z**. The Z** Town Library is everything the walled town is not. Where the town demands conformity and the surrender of personal history, the library is intimate, unregulated, and built from one man’s private grief.

That man is Mr Koyasu, the library’s former director, who becomes the narrator’s mentor. Koyasu has also lost someone: his wife Miri. But he has not retreated into timelessness. He has woven Miri’s memory into a continuing life, and he recognises that his love for her, for all its pain, still sustains him. Under his influence, the narrator begins to do something he has resisted for decades. He questions his own memories. Was his attachment to the girl a mature bond, or a teenage infatuation he never outgrew? Was the town a sanctuary, or a prison he built for himself?

This is what Davis calls ‘Reflexive Nostalgia’, the moment when the rose-tinted lens cracks and a person starts comparing the idealised past with present reality. It is uncomfortable but also the beginning of movement.

The narrator’s deepening relationship with a woman who runs a local café pushes this further. She asks him to wait for her, just as the girl once did, and the echo forces him to ask what he has been waiting for all this time. Whether he ever really understood what it was. Past and present begin to overlap rather than oppose each other. The narrator realises he is no longer seventeen. What he wants now is something warmer and more uncertain: the gentle warmth beneath another person’s defensive wall, the rhythmic beat of a heart pulsing beneath.

This personal journey carries broader resonances. Murakami has described the tension between individuals and oppressive social structures as a confrontation with a ‘wall of the system,’ a phrase he uses in Novelist as a Vocation when discussing Japan’s education system, but which echoes throughout his fiction. The walled-in town, read in this light, becomes more than one man’s psychological refuge. It becomes a figure for any structure that holds together by keeping memory out.

The parallel with postwar Japan is hard to miss. The nation’s rapid reconstruction after 1945 delivered extraordinary prosperity, but it also involved what some historians have described as a prescriptive forgetting, an implicit agreement not to look too closely at the continuities between wartime and postwar structures. Beneath the surface of a conflict-free, harmonious, modern society lay organisational pillars firmly planted in the unexamined past. The town’s demand that residents relinquish their shadows mirrors this dynamic: peace and order, but at the cost of historical consciousness.

But the novel places its alternative in a small, handmade space. The Z** Town Library, informal, personal, managed in a pre-digital way and free from institutional oversight, might be what Murakami envisions as a ‘space for individual recovery,’ a place apart from hierarchy, efficiency, and bullying. In the novel’s logic, it is within such spaces that people can dust off their memories, let in fresh air, and begin the slow work of constructing a self that holds together across time.

In the final chapters, the narrator returns to the walled town. This time he is not seeking refuge. He says goodbye to the girl, recognising her at last as a figure the town prepared for him rather than the person he lost. And then he does something no protagonist in Murakami’s earlier variations of this story has managed. He blows out the candle and leaves. Not through the prescribed route, the pool that swallowed previous characters into nothingness, but on his own terms.

To leave the town is to accept that the past cannot be lived in, only revisited. A backward glance that steadies you for what comes next.

The narrator steps out. The wall stays. But time, at last, begins to flow again.

This post is based on Ziwei Xuan, ‘The Ambivalent Utopia: Layers of Nostalgia and Memory in Murakami Haruki’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls,’ Japan Forum. Read the full article [].

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The answer that came back most often was a familiar phrase: shōshi kōreika (少子高齢化)— low birth rate, aging population. It topped the list, ahead of economic concerns, pension anxieties, poverty, and even constitutional reform. On its face, this is unsurprising. Japan’s demographic trajectory has been for decades. Fewer babies, more elderly, a shrinking workforce — the math is grim and well known.

But here’s what’s interesting. When you dig into how people talked about shōshi kōreika — what they folded into it, what they connected it to, what frustrations they packed inside those five characters — the phrase starts to look less like a demographic concern and more like a shorthand for a much wider set of anxieties. Anxieties that are, at their core, about .

Gender (in)equality didn’t appear

The survey was open-ended and over 30,000 people throughout Japan participated. But across all responses, phrases directly naming gender inequality barely registered. Terms like?danjo byōdō?(gender equality) or?jendaa gyappu?(gender gap) appeared only a handful of times.

This is, on the face of it, extraordinary. Few countries have thrown more at . The Equal Employment Opportunity Law arrived in 1986. The Basic Act for Gender Equal Society followed in 1999. Womenomics became a headline policy brand under the Abe administration. have been published, targets set, slogans coined. For nearly four decades, “gender equality” has been an explicit item on the national agenda.

And yet, when 30,000 ordinary people were asked what keeps them up at night, almost none of them reached for the phrase. Gender inequality wasn’t rejected. It was simply absent, as though the entire policy vocabulary had failed to take root in everyday conversation.

This absence is telling. Not because Japanese people don’t care about gender — the survey responses make clear that many do — but because the way they express that concern is indirect, bundled into the more socially legible language of demographic crisis.

What people actually said

The word gender (danjo) in Japanese is made up of two words: male/man (dan or otoko) and female/woman (jo or 辞苍’苍补). A keyword search for on’na (woman女) and otoko (man男) across the responses revealed 185 and 96 instances respectively. When those responses were examined closely, three clusters emerged: discrimination, gender inequality, and women’s participation in society. The concerns were real and specific — but they were almost always attached to shōshi kōreika.

A woman in her fifties from the Kanto area wrote that “measures to counter the declining birthrate” were the most pressing issue, then linked this to “pension issues, gender equality, work style reform, the implementation of optional separate surnames for married couples, and economic revitalization.” She concluded that efforts were now “too late” — nothing had been done for thirty years.

A man in his thirties from Kyushu recognized that while Japan advocates for “correction of the gender gap,” women still find it nearly impossible to take maternity leave without consequence, and men face no real solution for the increased burden that falls on them. His conclusion: the employment system itself needs to change.

A woman in her twenties from Kanto was blunter. Her most pressing issue was the “gender gap.” She added: “This country is finished. I don’t want to have children in a country like this.”

Blaming women

Some responses revealed a more troubling logic. A man in his sixties from the Chugoku/Shikoku region wrote: “I believe that the root of the low birthrate and aging population problem lies in women’s advancement in society. As women have become financially independent with jobs, they are marrying later and remaining unmarried, and the birth rate is declining.”

He was not alone. Multiple respondents — men and women — framed women’s entry into the workforce as a direct cause of demographic decline. A woman in her twenties from the Chugoku/Shikoku region said she was “against the movement to encourage women to play an active role in society.” Women working, in this framing, means women not bearing children. The blame lands squarely on women’s shoulders, while the structural conditions that make combining work and family nearly impossible — long hours, absent fathers, inadequate childcare — go unmentioned.

Other respondents pushed back. One young woman from Kanto asked pointedly: “What has the government, which is asking women to have children, done for pregnant women? Does it mean that if you want to work, you don’t want to have children? If you want to have children, do you have to give up your career?” She described a society that demands women contribute to reversing demographic decline while offering them little structural kindness in return.

An idiom of distress

What emerges from these responses is a picture of shōshi kōreika 探花精选ing as something more than a demographic descriptor. It operates as what anthropologists call an “idiom of distress” — a culturally resonant shorthand that gives voice to to articulate directly. The phrase captures not just the literal reality of fewer children and an aging population, but a tangle of frustrations about stagnant gender roles, impossible work-life trade-offs, inadequate policy responses, and a social contract that no longer holds.

Japan offers the most generous paid paternity leave in the OECD nations — 52 weeks. Yet in 2021, who took any leave at all took less than a month. Company managers, often described as “Shōwa era type men supported by full-time housewives,” simply cannot comprehend why a working man would step away. The policy exists. The culture hasn’t caught up.

This gap — between policy and practice, between aspiration and reality — is precisely what shōshi kōreika encodes. Gender inequality isn’t absent from public consciousness. It’s hiding in plain sight, folded into the most voiced concern in the country. Until policymakers recognize that the links between demographic crisis and the gender crisis, very little will likely change.

This post is based on Charles D. Crabtree, Paul Christensen, Tom Phuong Le, Charles T. McClean, Lauren McKee, and Cindi SturtzSreetharan, ‘Demographic decline as an idiom of distress: Rethinking gender (In)equality in Japan,’ Japan Forum (2026). Read the full article .

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When I ask her what style she is wearing, she answers without hesitation: yami-kawaii, meaning “sick cute.” And when I ask why, she says she likes it, that it makes her feel good.

It’s such a simple answer, but it stayed with me. What does it mean for something that hints at illness, pain, or even death to feel comforting? And what does that reveal about kawaii itself?

If you spend time in Japan, it’s almost impossible not to notice how kawaii fills the streets. It’s not just fashion or youth culture. It’s in bank advertisements, police posters, government campaigns, construction signs, and hospital corridors. Cute characters explain rules, promote safety, and soften the presence of authority. The longer you’re there, the more you realize that kawaii isn’t just about looking cute, it’s doing something.

When I first moved to Japan to pursue my PhD at Osaka University, I had planned to focus on classical Japanese culture and literature. But very quickly, something else took over. Everywhere I went, kawaii was there, in places where I hadn’t expected it: universities, banks, government offices. It wasn’t just decoration. It felt like a way of communicating.

That curiosity gradually turned into a bigger question: why is kawaii so important in Japan, and what does it actually allow people to express?

The more I looked into it, the clearer it became that translating kawaii as “cute” doesn’t really capture it. Yes, it includes softness and charm, but it is also far more flexible than that.

You can see this in the growing number of compound expressions: kimo-kawaii (creepy-cute), ita-kawaii (painful-cute), and busu-kawaii (ugly-cute). At first, these combinations sound contradictory. How can something creepy or painful also be cute?

But that’s exactly what makes kawaii interesting, it doesn’t reject contradiction. It absorbs it. This ability to hold opposites together may be part of what makes kawaii so enduring. Rather than forcing a single emotional category, it allows different feelings to coexist, sometimes uneasily, but productively. The result is not confusion, but complexity.

In that sense, this kind of contradiction is not entirely new. Japanese aesthetics have long been comfortable with holding opposites together. Concepts like wabi-sabi, for example, find beauty in imperfection, transience, and quiet melancholy.

This becomes especially clear with yami-kawaii. The word yami means “darkness” or “illness,” and the style emerged in the 2010s in Harajuku fashion. Visually, it still looks soft and pastel, but the imagery is very different: pills, syringes, bandages, tears, and references to anxiety or depression. At first glance, it feels playful. But the more you look, the more something else comes through.

The effect is not shocking in the way one might expect. Nothing about it feels aggressive or confrontational. Instead, the softness remains: the pastel colours, the familiar visual language of kawaii, while something more fragile sits just beneath the surface. It creates a strange kind of tension: you are drawn in by the cuteness, but you stay because something about it feels recognizable. It is not simply about aesthetics, but about how emotion is made visible.

That moment in Harajuku helped me see this differently. Before, I had assumed kawaii was mostly about comfort, softness, harmlessness, positivity. But here it was being used to express something much more complicated, without losing its appeal.

One way to think about this is that kawaii isn’t just an aesthetic, it’s a kind of emotional language.

In many social contexts in Japan, it’s not always easy to express negative feelings directly. Emotions like anxiety, loneliness, or depression are often kept private rather than openly discussed. Within that kind of environment, visual culture can become a way of saying things indirectly.

This kind of indirect expression is not unique to fashion, but fashion makes it visible. It allows something internal to take on a form that can be seen without needing explanation. In that sense, yami-kawaii is not only a style, but a way of navigating the gap between what is felt and what might be said directly. This tension is often described through the distinction between honne (one’s true feelings) and tatemae (the public face one presents).

Yami-kawaii works exactly like that. It takes something difficult: distress, vulnerability, pain, and wraps it in pink. The “cuteness” doesn’t cancel out the darkness. It makes it easier to show.

What might be hard to say can instead be worn.

Seen this way, those contradictions in kawaii, cute and creepy, soft and painful, are not strange exceptions within Japanese culture. They are part of what gives kawaii its expressive power. Kawaii can hold different emotional tones at once: comforting and unsettling, light and heavy, playful and serious. That flexibility helps explain why it continues to evolve, and why it remains so relevant in contemporary Japan.

The woman on Takeshita Street wasn’t just making a fashion statement. She was using kawaii to express something more complex, something that might not be said directly.

What looks like decoration is also how kawaii gives form to feeling, making it visible without needing explanation.

This post is based on Shiri Lieber-Milo, ‘Kawaii as a Tool of Emotional Expression: The Case of Yami-Kawaii and Related Categories,’ Japan Forum (2025). Read the full article

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