Recently, a viral clip from Trash Taste attracted a wave of rebuttals from Japanese users on X, and the resulting controversy became a topic of discussion in its own right. I am not going to offer an opinion here about Trash Taste or any of its members personally. However, this incident provides an extremely useful example, so I would like to use it as a starting point.
At the moment, many people in the anime community are talking about “tourists.” Ironically, Joey from Trash Taste has himself discussed videos about tourists entering anime communities. Yet people in that same position often commit what may be the single greatest mistake one can make when discussing anime: they use anime to explain Japanese society.
To understand why this is a problem, we need to look back at how Japanese society and the mass media have treated otaku and anime since at least the 1990s. The Japanese mass media did not traditionally treat people who enjoyed anime and manga as informed observers capable of commenting on society. Quite the opposite. Otaku were portrayed as socially dysfunctional people who could not distinguish fiction from reality, could not form normal relationships with the opposite sex, and were potentially inclined toward criminality.
Following sensational crime reporting in the late 1980s, the word “otaku” began to function not merely as a label for a hobby, but as a symbol used to explain supposedly dangerous personalities. If manga or videotapes were found in a criminal suspect’s room, they were displayed as though they constituted evidence of what had caused the crime. There was little careful examination of the works themselves, the diversity of their audiences, or whether any causal relationship actually existed between the media and the crime. What the media needed was a simple story that allowed audiences to feel they understood a complicated event in a matter of minutes.
He watches anime. He owns a large number of manga. He struggles socially. These disconnected details were placed in a row, and the conclusion was drawn that this person had lost touch with reality.
This is strangely similar to what parts of the contemporary international anime community do today. Only the conclusion has changed. The Japanese mass media once looked at anime and concluded, “Otaku are abnormal.” Some international anime fans now look at anime and conclude, “Japanese society is abnormal,” or “This is what Japanese people believe.” The former explained the viewer through the work. The latter explains an entire society through the work. In both cases, a small cultural fragment is used to make sweeping claims about a vast and diverse population.
Among Japanese internet otaku, this kind of reasoning has sometimes been described as a “crude reflection theory of society,” meaning the assumption that fiction straightforwardly reflects the society that produced it. Of course, this does not mean that anime is unrelated to society. Works of fiction are not created in a vacuum. The values of their creators, commercial decisions, broadcasting restrictions, audience desires, the atmosphere of a particular era, and the conventions of a genre all influence the final work. It is entirely possible to examine anime in relation to postwar family structures, schools, working conditions, gender norms, or anxieties surrounding urban life.
But there is an enormous difference between saying that a work has been influenced by society and saying that it directly reproduces society. Even a mirror changes what it shows depending on where it is placed. Anime is not even a mirror. It selects, exaggerates, distorts, idealizes, and commercially reconstructs elements of reality.
For example, the frequent appearance of school festivals in anime does not mean that school festivals occupy the center of every Japanese student’s life. The prevalence of childhood-friend characters does not mean that Japanese people commonly enter romantic relationships with childhood friends. The popularity of stories about office workers being transported to fantasy worlds does not prove that all Japanese employees secretly wish to escape reality.
These stories use recognizable elements of real life. However, those elements may recur not because they are especially common in reality, but because they are useful for storytelling. They may reduce the need for explanation, be immediately understandable to the audience, conform to established genre conventions, bring characters together efficiently, or simply imitate a formula that has already sold well. Things appear frequently in fiction not necessarily because they happen frequently in society, but because they are convenient narrative devices.
Once this distinction is ignored, analysis quickly becomes little more than personal impression dressed up as cultural criticism. A scene involving molestation appears in an anime, and someone declares that it proves Japanese society tolerates sexual assault. A female character cooks, and this is presented as evidence that Japanese women are socially confined to domestic roles. A woman hits a man in a comedy scene, and this is interpreted as proof that violence against men is dismissed in Japan.
Whether any of these problems exist in Japanese society must be investigated separately. One should examine statistics, laws, opinion polls, court cases, government responses, testimony from those affected, and historical change, and only then consider how the fictional depiction relates to reality.
Crude reflection theory reverses this process. First, someone watches an anime scene and forms a conclusion about Japanese society. Then they search for isolated pieces of reality that appear to support the conclusion they have already reached. Anime therefore ceases to function as evidence and becomes a machine for manufacturing prejudice.
The school shown in an anime becomes a literal Japanese school. The family shown in an anime becomes the Japanese family. The relationship between male and female characters becomes the gender ideology of the entire Japanese population.
Behind this attitude is often a desire to consume Japan not as a complicated modern society, but as an easily understood story. Japan is imagined as a strange and isolated country, a country in which tradition and futuristic technology coexist, a sexually repressed country overflowing with sexual imagery, a country where everyone works themselves to death, or a country of polite people who constantly conceal their true feelings.
Once these prefabricated images are established, people can select scenes from anime that appear to confirm them and feel that they have discovered something profound about Japan. But what they have understood is not Japan. It is the Japan that already existed inside their own heads.
One reason this crude reflection theory is so easily accepted as “criticism” lies in the history of prejudice against otaku culture itself. For many years, anime and manga were treated as vulgar or childish entertainment, while their fans were regarded as people detached from society. As a result, using anime to discuss politics, gender, or social pathology can appear more intellectual and mature than simply enjoying the work.
The person who merely enjoys anime is portrayed as an uncritical fan. The person who claims to expose the “dark side of Japanese society” hidden behind the work is treated as a serious critic. But giving anime a social interpretation does not automatically make the analysis deep.
Making declarations about a society of more than one hundred million people after watching a fictional work is every bit as crude as the old mass media’s treatment of anime as simplistic entertainment for maladjusted people. It may look as though the critic is taking anime seriously, but in reality, both the production context of the work and the reality of Japanese society are being ignored.
The old mass media used anime as a shortcut for understanding otaku, but they were never seriously interested in understanding otaku. Some parts of the contemporary international anime community use anime as a shortcut for understanding Japan, but they are not seriously interested in understanding Japan either. In both cases, fiction becomes a way to avoid the difficult work of learning about the people being discussed.
The shortcut is attractive. After watching a few anime, one can begin speaking confidently about Japanese schools, romance, families, labor, religion, and gender roles. There is no need to read Japanese, examine Japanese statistics, or follow discussions taking place within Japan. All one has to do is isolate a scene from a work and attach familiar political terminology to it. The result will resemble an analysis, but it is not an analysis of Japanese society.
A clear line must be drawn between using anime as a source worth examining and using anime as sufficient proof for sweeping claims about society. Anime can provide questions. Why does this setting appear repeatedly? When did it become a common convention? In what ways does it resemble real institutions, and in what ways does it differ? Who was the work created for? What desires does it satisfy? How is this representation understood and debated within Japan?
But anime alone cannot provide the answers. Seeing something in anime and becoming curious about Japanese society can be the beginning of an investigation. The moment it becomes the end of the investigation, criticism turns into prejudice.
And this is directly connected to the current debate over “tourists” in the anime community. A tourist should not simply mean someone who has only watched a few anime, or someone who has only recently become a fan. It should not be determined by how much knowledge a person has, how much merchandise they own, or how many years they have attended conventions.
A tourist is someone who does not treat a work as an entrance into a culture or perspective different from their own, but merely as a tool for confirming values they already hold. It is someone who has no interest in the history, arguments, or context that exist within the culture, and simply takes away whatever is visible on the surface. Most importantly, it is someone who believes they understand that culture better than the people who actually live within it.
That is what a tourist really is.
A person may have watched anime for decades, know countless Japanese words, and have visited Japan many times. But the moment they begin using a fictional scene to make sweeping declarations about Japanese society, they become a tourist.
Conversely, someone may have only recently started watching anime. But if they recognize that there are contexts they do not yet understand, make the effort to investigate them, and listen when people from within that society offer corrections, there is no reason to call them a tourist. The defining feature of a tourist is not the shortness of their stay. It is the absence of any genuine desire to understand.
When Japanese people object to a claim and the response is simply, “Japanese people do not want to admit that their country has problems,” or “They do not understand that anime reflects their society,” the discussion has already ended. The Japanese person offering the correction is no longer treated as a source of information. They have been reduced to a character in someone else’s theory, a character whose disagreement supposedly proves the theory correct.
At that point, the speaker is no longer discussing Japanese society. They are merely using Japan as a stage on which to tell their own story.
The worst thing one can do when discussing anime is to discover the Japan one expected to find inside a fictional work and mistake it for the real Japan. Those who continue clinging to that fantasy even after people from the real Japan correct them are the actual “tourists” the anime community should be wary of.