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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