[Japanese] Japan's Buzzwords of 2015 Show a Different Side of the Country

The shortlist for Japan's 2015 buzzword awards is out. A handful of words can show you how a country has changed.

1. Bakugai ("explosive buying")

Gendai Yōgo no Kisochishiki, Japan's most influential buzzword list, named "bakugai" its "new word and buzzword" of the year. Dentsu's top topic of the year was also "bakugai." Shopping sprees abroad have, almost by accident, made the number one buzzword in someone else's country. According to the Japan Tourism Agency, 70% of Chinese tourists in Japan buy cosmetics and medicine at drugstores. One of the biggest winners is Matsumoto Kiyoshi. In 2007 it became the first in its industry to accept UnionPay cards, and tax-free goods now make up 10% of its sales, or 26.5 billion yen. To sell even more tax-free goods, Matsumoto Kiyoshi has opened drugstores aimed squarely at foreign visitors in tourist-heavy Ginza-Yurakucho, at the Makuhari outlet mall and at Haneda Airport. It has even joined Singles' Day on November 11, China's homegrown "bakugai" festival.

The "bakugai" boom has produced some curious side effects. This September, Kobayashi Pharmaceutical quietly made 10,000 boxes of fever-cooling patches in gold packaging and sold them only at 19 drugstores in Osaka's Shinsaibashi shopping district, with "limited edition" printed on the box in Chinese. Kobayashi just wanted to test the rumor that Chinese shoppers love gold. They do: the gold boxes outsold the same patches in blue and pink, and Kobayashi is now considering adding gold packaging to its product line.

Or take horse oil, a fixture on every Chinese tourist's drugstore "must-buy list." Japanese people who read the news couldn't help wondering, "Is horse oil really that good?" Some who tried it found it moisturizing and gentle on sensitive skin, but others have waited months and still can't buy any. Sonbahyu, the best-known horse oil brand, needs about a year to go from extracting the oil from the horse to filling a jar. Production can no longer keep up with shoppers' "bakugai" fervor. Horse oil has caught Japanese shoppers' attention again, a case of an export product coming back home.

1. Touken Joshi ("sword girls")

Japan's hottest browser game for women in 2015 was without question Touken Ranbu. Following the Japanese habit of coining "xx joshi" ("xx girls") labels, the women devoted to the game are naturally called "touken joshi."

We covered the game back in March. It turns famous historical swords into handsome young men, and it was still wildly popular at year's end. Its gameplay resembles Kantai Collection, from the same operator, which turns warships into girls (known affectionately in China as "kanmusu"), so Kantai Collection fans inevitably mock Touken Ranbu for lacking ideas. But the fact that a game that changed only the setting, not the gameplay, could become this popular proves one thing: how barren the market for browser games aimed at women had been.

These sword-smitten "touken joshi" go all out. The game features a sword school called "Sanjō" that survives to this day, and many "touken joshi" travel a long way to Nara Prefecture just to see the shop run by Sanjō's descendants. Some even try the Sanjō family's forge and make swords of their own. In August, the merchandise maker Kotobukiya released limited-edition Touken Ranbu goods. A line of 6,000 "touken joshi" stretched from Akihabara Station to Ochanomizu Station, and in the end the police came to break up the crowd.

The "touken joshi" are keen, and museums, galleries and shrines across the country have learned to play along. At the fans' request, the Tokyo National Museum exhibited swords that appear in the game, such as "Mikazuki Munechika" and "Shishiō," and even borrowed the format of the AKB48 general election to hold a "sword general election." Not to be outdone, the Kyoto National Museum hired Touken Ranbu voice actors to record the audio guide for its exhibition of famous swords.

Touken Ranbu has also brought about something momentous: the Tokugawa and Toyotomi clans have crossed a historical divide to collaborate. The Tokugawa Art Museum and Kyoto's Toyokuni Shrine have released joint merchandise for the swords in their collections, and the museum's Facebook page even ran a poster of the Tokugawa and Toyotomi crests shaking hands. We have also written about the boom in 2.5-dimensional stage plays sweeping Japan's anime industry. Yes, even Touken Ranbu, a browser game you play by clicking a mouse, is getting a stage play and a musical.

1. Love Livers

Japan's most popular girl group today is AKB48, no contest. But in the two-dimensional world of anime and games, the most popular girl group has to be "μ's," from the mobile rhythm game Love Live!. This year the voice actresses behind "μ's" will sing on the stage of NHK's Kōhaku Uta Gassen.

Love Live! tells the story of nine girls, including Honoka Kōsaka, who form the idol group "μ's" to raise their school's profile and save it from closure, overcoming all kinds of obstacles along the way. It began as a mobile game and was later adapted into an anime. The anime film opened in June 2015 and took 2.8 billion yen in 150 days, the best box office ever for a late-night anime. The show is so popular that NHK, unusually, decided to rebroadcast the series. Yet the plot has nothing new in it, and cute character designs and catchy songs alone can't explain the craze. Anime fans usually show their love for a work by buying books, discs and merchandise. Much of Love Live!'s popularity comes from the seamless link between the two-dimensional world and the three-dimensional one. The voice actresses give real concerts as "μ's," and "Love Livers" can cheer for them just as they do for the characters in the game. A crush that lived in fans' heads has become real.

As soon as the news broke that "μ's" would appear on Kōhaku, Twitter erupted. The "Love Livers'" peculiar concert etiquette may soon be on display for all of Japan. At concerts, "Love Livers" wave glow sticks in unison and make the same gestures. When the voice actresses shout catchphrases from the show during a song, the fans in the audience shout the response together. Outsiders find this baffling, but for "Love Livers" it is the best way to show their devotion.

1. Pro Kanojo ("professional girlfriend")

When the entertainers Taichi Kokubun and Masanobu Takashima announced their marriages, both described their brides as "ordinary women," meaning outsiders to show business. Plenty of fans began to daydream that they too might one day be the "ordinary woman" an idol marries, until the essayist Mineko Nomachi said bluntly: "Those are professional girlfriends."

A "professional girlfriend" meets these conditions:

• She dates only entertainers or athletes
• She is not famous herself, and even if she has modeled, she leaves no trace that anyone could dig up online
• Her blog cannot be found
• The media describe her as an "ordinary woman"
• As a girlfriend, she performs at a professional level
• An entertainer's popularity rises after he marries her

To begin with, an "ordinary woman" is not necessarily far removed from show business. Many have worked as entertainers or models (or, failing that, as magazine reader models). TV station staff, PR people at big companies and women who work at the upscale restaurants entertainers frequent can easily become "ordinary women" too.

To go from "ordinary woman" to "professional girlfriend," a woman has to be able to endure. After the popular actor Hidetoshi Nishijima married his "ordinary woman" girlfriend, he revealed his rather baffling requirements for a partner: she must let him focus on work; they cannot go to the movies together; she must give everything to her own goals; she cannot be with him all the time; she won't try to understand a woman's psychology; she won't mind going a month without a text from him; and she can bear going a month and a half without talking. In short, she must accept being invisible. Anyone who follows Japanese show business knows that male idol agencies such as Johnny & Associates rarely let their stars marry. The industry has an unwritten rule: when a male star has many female fans, his agency prefers that he date an "ordinary woman" with a "professional attitude." The relationship between stars and fans contains an element of make-believe romance. If a star dates a fellow actress, fans inevitably compare themselves with her and resent it. An "ordinary woman" avoids that risk.

1. Hibana ("Spark")

In 2015 Naoki Matayoshi, one half of the comedy duo Peace, won the Akutagawa Prize and shook the Japanese literary world. The winning novel, Hibana (Spark), was his first. For a Chinese comparison: imagine the crosstalk comedian Yu Qian writing his first novel and winning the Mao Dun Literature Prize.

Matayoshi's hobbies are reading and music, and he owns 2,000 books and 2,000 albums. Perhaps every good comedian harbors a more repressed self. His favorite writer is Osamu Dazai, who sought freedom and release through a self-lacerating, decadent style, and even his phone wallpaper is a picture of Dazai. Eimi Yamada, a member of the Akutagawa Prize committee, said of Hibana: "We did not discuss his career as an entertainer. All kinds of life experience, a sense of restlessness: these values of life are present in every word and line of Mr. Matayoshi's work." Still, there is no denying that a comedian winning a literary prize stirs curiosity. On December 1 the book distributor Nippon Shuppan Hanbai announced Japan's ten best-selling books of the year: Hibana had 2.39 million copies in print, making it Japan's best-selling book of 2015. In the reviews on Amazon Japan, some praise it as "a highly accomplished work of pure literature," while others say "it isn't good enough for the Akutagawa Prize, it's overpraised, and the prose is still too immature." None of this has dampened the film and TV industry's appetite: Netflix Japan has announced it will make a TV series of Hibana to stream exclusively.

1. The Olympic Emblem Scandal

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics is unlikely to be an ordinary Games. The main stadium is stuck in a game of pass-the-buck over its budget, and the emblem has drawn intense scrutiny over plagiarism allegations.

On July 24, 2015, exactly five years before the Games, the organizers unveiled the Olympic emblem, designed by Kenjiro Sano, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building. Most people's first thought on seeing it was probably: Japanese design should be better than this... Japanese netizens complained on Twitter: "This emblem is so ordinary. The one from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics looked better." Had it merely been forgettable, things would never have gone this far. On July 27 the Belgian design firm Studio Debie claimed the emblem copied the logo it had designed for the Théâtre de Liège in Belgium. A few days later, eager netizens found that the emblem's black, red and gold color scheme resembled the work of a Spanish design studio. Combine the two European studios' work and you get the Tokyo Olympic emblem.

On July 31, Sano said through the organizing committee that "when I designed it, I knew nothing of the overseas studio's work reported in the media, so there is no question of having referred to it." On August 3 the Théâtre de Liège wrote to the Tokyo organizing committee demanding it stop using the emblem. A rattled Sano held a press conference on August 5, showing his original sketches and the English lettering derived from them to prove his innocence. That only stoked netizens' anger. They began combing through the past work of Sano's design team piece by piece, and found that 8 of the 30 tote bags he designed for a Suntory summer promotion appeared to be copied. A few days later Suntory announced it was pulling those 8 bags.

On August 14 and again on August 28, the organizing committee issued statements saying it "believes the design is original." Meanwhile, Japanese netizens began designing their own emblems for the Games, the digging never stopped, and more and more of Sano's team's work came under suspicion. Finally, on September 1, the organizing committee withdrew Sano's design. Trademark registration and taking down posters put up across Tokyo had already cost 57 million yen, and the 69 million yen spent on the July unveiling went to waste. What left Japanese netizens even more speechless was that when reporters asked who was responsible, pass-the-buck, version 2.0, played out all over again... The result of the new emblem competition will be announced next spring. Running the process again means spending the money again.

1. Hokuriku Shinkansen

On March 14, 2015, the Hokuriku Shinkansen opened as far as Kanazawa in Ishikawa Prefecture. Residents of the Hokuriku region had waited 40 years for the line, and the Japanese media regard it as the last Shinkansen line capable of changing the Japanese economy.

According to JR West, about 4.84 million people rode the Hokuriku Shinkansen in its first six months, three times the number who rode conventional trains over the same period a year earlier. Other figures also show the economic pull of the Shinkansen. Kenrokuen in Kanazawa, one of Japan's three great gardens, had 40% more visitors in the six months after the line opened than a year earlier. Mare, the NHK morning drama that aired in the first half of 2015, was also set in Ishikawa Prefecture, and visitors to the Wajima morning market featured in the show also rose 40%. The Hokuriku branch of the Development Bank of Japan forecasts that the line will bring Ishikawa and Toyama prefectures about 12.4 billion yen and 8.8 billion yen a year in economic benefits, respectively.

Hokuriku is famous for heavy snow and for fresh, rich seafood, which brings Hokkaido to mind. As it happens, the Hokkaido Shinkansen will open through to Hakodate on March 26, 2016, but so far the Japanese show far less interest in it than in the Hokuriku line. Komatsu Airport is far from central Kanazawa, so flying there from Tokyo is slow and tiring, while the Hokuriku Shinkansen takes just 2 hours 10 minutes. The convenience speaks for itself. The Hokkaido Shinkansen will take 4 hours 10 minutes to reach Hakodate, while a flight takes an hour and a half. More important, Hakodate Airport is only half an hour's drive from the city center. The Hokkaido Shinkansen will struggle to repeat the Hokuriku line's success.

1. Onigirazu ("no-press rice balls")

On November 30, Cookpad, Japan's largest recipe site, named its dish of the year: "onigirazu." A traditional Japanese rice ball needs just the right pressure. Press too hard and the rice packs too tightly and tastes bad; and sticky hands after shaping are a nuisance too. "Onigirazu" solves both problems.

"Onigirazu" first appeared in the food manga Cooking Papa, in which a father, short of time to make his son's lunch one morning, improvised the quick dish. It is simple to make: put some rice and filling on a sheet of nori (tamagoyaki, Spam, crab sticks, anything you can think of), spread the ingredients out toward the edges with a spoon, fold in the four corners of the nori, and cut the square bundle in half. Your hands never touch the rice, so it is more hygienic. The cut face looks pretty, and children are happier to eat rice balls like these from a lunch box. People who rarely cook need no skill at all. Making something that looks good and tastes good without heating a pan of oil builds confidence in the kitchen.

Of course, ambitious foodies are pursuing fancier versions. Cookpad held its second "local onigirazu" contest, in which cooks put regional specialties and seasonal vegetables into their rice balls. They seem to taste even better!

1. Same-Sex Marriage

In March 2015, Tokyo's Shibuya and Setagaya wards announced they would let same-sex couples aged 20 and over obtain partnership certificates recognizing their relationship. It was the first local regulation in Asia to recognize same-sex partners. Japan does not allow same-sex marriage, but couples in Shibuya or Setagaya who hold a certificate are treated as family when renting a home or visiting a partner in hospital, and can apply for ward housing meant for families. A Shibuya official said: "If a business violates the regulation, the ward will publish its name. The certificate has no legal force; it is a completely different system from marriage under the constitution."

On November 7, Koyuki Higashi and Hiroko Masuhara, who live in Shibuya, became the first couple in the ward to receive a partnership certificate. They posed for a photo in front of Shibuya's Hachiko statue, which was hung with rainbow bunting. Masuhara told reporters: "I am grateful that the place we live recognizes my partner and me as family. Because this is only a local government measure, there are still many problems a certificate cannot solve. I hope these local measures spark a national discussion, and I hope Japan allows same-sex marriage soon."

In March, Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research surveyed 2,600 people aged 20 to 79 about same-sex marriage. 51% said they supported it, and the older the man, the stronger his opposition to LGBT people. Likewise, a Reuters survey found young Japanese relatively accepting of LGBT people. Japan faces no religious pressure on the issue, but a long-standing lack of understanding has kept its LGBT community out of the open. To raise society's awareness, the place to start is with the young.

1. Osaka Metropolis Plan

This year's Japanese buzzwords stand out for how political they are. Besides constitutional revision, the most closely watched was the "Osaka Metropolis Plan," which, after much controversy, ended in defeat in May 2015. Japan's current administrative system is "one metropolis, one circuit, two urban prefectures and 43 prefectures." Osaka City is a government-designated city (similar to China's directly administered municipalities) with autonomy over many matters, yet it also belongs to Osaka Prefecture. The tangle between prefectural and city government sometimes produces "dual administration" that wastes public resources. The plan's ultimate aim was to split Osaka City from Osaka Prefecture and create a metropolis-and-wards system like Tokyo's.

Besides cutting administrative waste, the plan had another aim: to make Osaka more competitive. A Japanese variety show called Getsuyō kara Yofukashi specializes in stirring up regional rivalries. Its crew asked Osaka residents, "What are Japan's three biggest cities?" and many blurted out, "Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama." The crew then asked Yokohama residents the same question, and they answered, "Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka." Osaka residents ended up embarrassed: Japan's second-largest city today is indeed Yokohama.

Yokohama owes its rank largely to being very, very close to Tokyo. The Great Hanshin earthquake dealt the Kansai economy a heavy blow, and in recent years every region of Japan has watched money and talent flow to Tokyo. Tokyo's dominance has badly sapped regional economies. Osaka, Japan's commercial capital since ancient times, hoped the plan would revive its economy. Yokohama, also a government-designated city, is pushing for a "special autonomous city" system that would make it independent of Kanagawa Prefecture and raise its tax revenue (Yokohama residents currently pay both a Kanagawa prefectural resident tax and a Yokohama city resident tax). The Osaka Metropolis Plan failed spectacularly, but the Osaka Restoration Association has already begun planning a second vote. In a recent Asahi Shimbun survey, 41% of Osaka residents said they support the plan.