Japan: What Every Man Should Know Before He Goes
Japan will make you feel inadequate in the best possible way. This is not the humiliation of incompetence — the language barrier, the unfamiliar currency, the trains that seem impossibly complex until suddenly they don’t. That inadequacy is temporary and trivial. The more lasting feeling is the recognition that Japan has solved certain problems of human life in ways that your own culture hasn’t, that there are dimensions of craft and beauty and social organization that you simply haven’t considered, and that you have been walking around with large blank spaces in your understanding of what a civilization can accomplish.
That recognition is the beginning of a serious engagement with Japan.
The Aesthetics First
Before the practical questions — where to go, how to behave, what to eat — it is worth spending time with Japan’s aesthetic philosophy, because it is the key to understanding almost everything else.
The concept most Westerners know is wabi-sabi — a compound of two related ideas. Wabi originally referred to the loneliness and simplicity of life in nature, the austere beauty of imperfection. Sabi referred to the beauty that comes with age and use, the patina of time on objects, the moss on stone. Together they describe an aesthetic that finds beauty precisely where Western aesthetics tends to find failure: in the imperfect, the incomplete, the transient.
The philosopher and art critic Soetsu Yanagi, in The Unknown Craftsman (1972), extended this into a theory of craft: the finest objects are those made by anonymous craftsmen who worked within a tradition rather than seeking individual expression, and whose work carries in its imperfections the evidence of a human hand and a finite life. A Song Dynasty tea bowl — asymmetrical, slightly rough, deepening in color where the glaze pooled — is more beautiful than a perfectly machined equivalent because it is alive in ways that perfection forecloses.
This is not merely an aesthetic preference. It is a metaphysics. The tea ceremony (chado) that Sen no Rikyu systematized in the 16th century is built on wabi — the small imperfect room, the asymmetrical bowl, the single flower in a plain vase. The ceremony’s radical claim is that this setting, precisely because it strips away everything unnecessary, creates a space for the kind of attention and presence that the decorated and elaborate world prevents. The tearoom is a training ground for consciousness.
For Western men accustomed to evaluating objects by their technical perfection and their price, this requires a genuine reorientation. Japan will ask you to look at things differently. Specifically, it will ask you to notice what time has done to objects, what use has revealed, what the hand has left behind.
Mono no Aware
There is another concept that matters: mono no aware — usually translated as “the pathos of things” or “an empathy toward things.” It refers to the bittersweet awareness of impermanence, the heightened appreciation of beauty that comes from knowing it will not last. The Japanese word aware contains both sadness and appreciation simultaneously.
The cherry blossom (sakura) is the cultural symbol of this: flowers that last roughly two weeks, whose beauty is inseparable from their brevity. The Japanese hanami (flower-viewing) tradition is built around gathering to watch something beautiful knowing it is almost gone. This is not melancholy in the Western sense — it is not pessimistic. It is a training in attention, a practice of being present to beauty precisely because it passes.
A man who has sat under cherry blossoms with this understanding, who has let the brevity of the beauty register as beauty rather than as loss, has understood something about time and attention that is available nowhere else in quite this form.
The Male Culture: A Study in Contradictions
Japan offers a portrait of masculinity that challenges almost every Western framework for understanding men.
The Salaryman
The dominant model of Japanese male identity in the postwar era was the salaryman (sarariiman): the company employee who defined himself through total organizational loyalty, working seventy-hour weeks, socializing almost exclusively with colleagues, subordinating family and self to the corporation. This was not an aberration; it was the consciously cultivated norm, the basis of Japan’s postwar economic miracle and the implicit social contract of the “Japan, Inc.” era.
The costs were extraordinary. The Japanese language has a word — karoshi — that means “death from overwork.” It is a recognized medical and legal cause of death, the result of strokes and heart attacks brought on by sustained overwork. In 2016, the government began publishing annual statistics on karoshi deaths. The salaryman model was, quite literally, killing men.
This model has been in crisis since the 1990s economic collapse, and its decline has produced its own cultural anxieties.
The Herbivore Men
In 2006, the journalist Maki Fukasawa coined the term soshokukei danshi — “herbivore men” or “grass-eaters” — to describe a generation of young Japanese men who seemed to have opted out of the traditional masculine drives: aggressive career ambition, sexual conquest, social dominance. They were soft-spoken, fashion-conscious, uninterested in alcohol-fueled corporate culture, often uninterested in romantic relationships.
The term became a moral panic. Conservative commentators blamed herbivore men for Japan’s declining birth rate, its economic stagnation, its loss of competitive drive. The sociologist Masahiro Morioka argued, in contrast, that herbivore men were a rational response to a masculine ideal that had produced karoshi, broken families, and fifty years of lives subordinated to organizational demands. If the old deal was work yourself to death and call it honor, then opting out of the deal was a form of intelligence.
Japan’s hikikomori phenomenon — a term for severe social withdrawal, predominantly affecting young men — is a related but distinct issue, involving clinical levels of isolation. But herbivore culture is not hikikomori; it is a conscious redefinition of masculine success. These are men who value craft, aesthetics, friendship, and inner life over status and competition.
Neither the salaryman nor the herbivore is a complete model. Japan’s actual men are more varied, more conflicted, and more interesting than either category captures. But understanding both gives you a framework for understanding the particular male anxieties that run through contemporary Japanese culture — visible in its manga, its film, its literature.
What Japan Teaches About Craft
The Japanese relationship to craft — to the making and maintaining of things — is the most practically instructive thing the country offers to a visitor willing to pay attention.
In Kyoto, the traditional crafts — lacquerwork, ceramics, weaving, metalwork — have survived not as tourist curiosities but as living practices, because Japan has a system for recognizing and supporting Ningen Kokuho (Living National Treasures): masters of traditional crafts designated by the government and supported to transmit their knowledge to apprentices. These are not museums. They are ateliers where skills developed over centuries are still being practiced and refined.
The concept of shokunin — usually translated as “craftsman” or “artisan” — carries more weight in Japanese than its English equivalent. A shokunin does not merely perform a skill; a shokunin is identified with and defined by the practice. The sushi chef Jiro Ono, subject of the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, is perhaps the most famous example to Western audiences: a man who spent more than seventy years making sushi with the same focused seriousness that a philosopher brings to metaphysics. Ono has described his work as a continuous attempt to improve, a project without completion, a practice with no ceiling.
This is a different relationship to work than most Western men have been taught. The question is not “what job will make me successful?” but “what practice will I commit myself to completely?” The answer to that question is what makes a shokunin.
For men who struggle with meaning — with the sense that their work is purely instrumental, that they are exchanging hours for money without genuine engagement — the shokunin concept is more than interesting. It is a prescription.
Practical Knowledge for the Man Going to Japan
The railway system is not complicated once you understand the hierarchy. Shinkansen (bullet trains) connect the major cities; local lines connect everything else. Buy a JR Pass if you’re traveling between cities. Learn to read the Suica card system. Do not be afraid of the trains; they are the best way to understand the country’s scale and variety.
The food is not what you think it is. Sushi and ramen are real, and both are better in Japan than anywhere else on earth. But Japanese cuisine is vastly wider: kaiseki (the high culinary art built around seasonal ingredients and aesthetic presentation), izakaya food (the small plates of a Japanese pub), yakitori, tonkatsu, soba, the extraordinary variety of regional cuisines. In Osaka, eat okonomiyaki and takoyaki. In Kyoto, eat kaiseki at least once even if it’s expensive. In Tokyo, eat everything.
The onsen (hot spring bath) is an institution. Strip, wash thoroughly before entering the communal baths, soak in silence. This is not strange; it is simply how it’s done. The experience of a wood-paneled outdoor bath in Hakone, with steam rising into cold mountain air, is among the finest sensory experiences Japan offers.
The etiquette matters, but it’s forgiving of foreigners. Don’t tip (it’s considered rude). Don’t eat while walking. Don’t speak loudly on public transport. When you receive a business card, receive it with both hands and look at it. The Japanese are extraordinarily patient with foreigners who make errors in good faith.
Spend time in places that are not Tokyo. Kyoto for the traditional culture. Osaka for the food and the directness (Osakans are famously more abrasive than Tokyoites — a relief after the exquisite indirectness of the capital). The Nakasendo — the old highway between Edo and Kyoto — is walkable in sections and takes you through post-towns that have been largely unchanged for a century. Naoshima Island for contemporary art in conversation with the landscape. Rural Kyushu or Tohoku for a Japan that the tourist infrastructure hasn’t fully reached.
Read before you go. Yasunari Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes for the aesthetic philosophy. Yukio Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility tetralogy for Japan’s confrontation with modernity. Haruki Murakami for contemporary Tokyo, though he is as much Western as Japanese in his references. Donald Richie’s A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics is the best short introduction to the concepts you’ll be encountering.
The Lesson
What Japan ultimately teaches is a version of a lesson that is available nowhere else with quite this clarity: that beauty and discipline are the same thing, that the finest experiences in life require a kind of sustained, serious attention that our culture has largely trained out of us, and that the work of becoming better at paying attention is the most important work a man can do.
It is a lesson the Japanese have encoded in ceramics, in gardens, in railway timetables, in the way a chef slices fish, in the way a man carries himself in a tearoom. The country itself is an argument for a particular kind of life.
Whether you accept the argument is up to you. But you have to encounter it first.
Further reading on Playboy-X: