“Cool Japan”, the policy that resulted, was an attempt to mobilize the soft power of anime, manga and J-pop in the West. The country’s economy had been in the doldrums since the asset bubble burst in 1991; its geopolitical heft now seemed contingent on its role as the homeland of Sailor Moon, Naruto and Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved Studio Ghibli. Foreign policy aside, the finances of anime were not to be sniffed at either — the global industry will be worth more than $60 billion by 2032.

Western children and teens — particularly in France and Russia — were by now already hooked on the absurd, dreamlike aesthetics of anime and manga, with their narrative worlds so different from the rigid Christian morality of Disney. In this, they mirrored the Japanophiles of the 19th century who, after the country reopened to Western trade following two centuries of isolationism in 1853, fixated on Japan as a land of mystique, with its “charming, artistic, doll-like inhabitants”. Then, Van Gogh, Degas and others were among the European sophisticates who hoarded lacquered cabinets and ukiyo-e prints. This time, 4Chan christened the white Japanophiles calling each other senpai in school cafeterias “Wapanese”, then Weeaboo — and finally, Weebs.

Twee governmental efforts to push Cool Japan — including appointing a cartoon cat as an anime “ambassador” — belied the strangeness of the Western appetite it courted. Very soon, things would get very weird. By the time the initiative began, the scourge of offputting dorkiness had already taken root among Weebs, with young men embracing otaku culture — obsessive fandom — and feminists balking at the eroticized little girls of manga, notoriously printed onto dakimakura pillows to be embraced by undeodorized, undersexed disciples. From the 2010s, more and more Western cosplayers packed out miasmatic comic-con events, their bright pink and blue wigs, peace signs and puff-cheeked duck pouts becoming shorthand for a certain type of internet nerd — obsessive, horny and curiously alienated from the mainstream. For them, Japan represented a sort of aestheticized dreamland, a refuge from the blows of high-school jocks.

In 2025, the “manga accent”, with its accompanying hand gestures and bouncy body language, has become a staple of American dorkdom. Alongside this, the hikikomori lifestyle has taken hold: in 2022, there were about 1.46 million such people in Japan — recluses who have not left home for six months or more, wrapped up in virtual worlds and living from bed. Now, the nihilism of hikikomori seems to appeal to alienated Americans who might once have been goths, with anxiety-wracked bloggers emulating the lifestyle with their own videos of snack-strewn beds, figurines and drawn curtains.

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At the same time, there is increasing alarm within Japan around the rise of soshoku-danshi, or “herbivore men”, who have little interest in sex or relationships. Their abstinence is often connected with the lure of hyperstimulating anime porn, or hentai, the supreme weirdness of which has done little for Japan’s global reputation. The subset of much-whispered-about “tentacle porn”, initially an Eighties ploy to circumvent censorship rules, crystallizes the Western fixation on Japan as a land of paraphilias. In this strange sexual environment, around a third of Japanese men and women aged 18-34 show no interest in having a relationship — a figure borne out by a plummeting birth rate, a trend to which the West is rapidly catching up.

The Cool Japan initiative certainly didn’t intend to play up the nation’s reputation as a fantasyland of intense, intoxicating fandom and alienated, fantastical hypersexuality. But Weeb culture has latched upon this vision of Japan, making it synonymous with social disengagement, strangeness, sexlessness and aggressive introspection. Japan has always been a site of Western anxieties — think of Ridley Scott’s neon-lit Blade Runner vision of dystopian LA, based on the Shinjuku district of Tokyo — but what’s new is the heavy identification of homegrown anime fans with a lifestyle of imagination and isolation.

There is a curious irony in this. A progressive generation of Westerners raised with the hot breath of Edward Said forever on its neck has come to see rhapsodizing over distant lands as a cardinal sin — but Japanophilia is a notable exception. Japan’s figurative power as an otherworldly site of eroticism is the textbook example of Orientalism — yet this blind spot is everywhere, perhaps owing to Weebism’s close associations with queer culture. Recently, a white trans X user pulled the pin on a grenade in announcing they would be adopting the name Saeko; this month, a TikToker made a viral appeal: “Just because you’re non-binary doesn’t mean you’re also Japanese.” The confluence between gender discourse and anime is not a coincidence; despite springing from a highly conservative country where even gay marriage is not yet legal, anime is replete with boyish sylph protagonists, as in Revolutionary Girl Utena and The Rose of Versailles. The iconography is all languorous androgyny, shaggy hair and slender bishōnen, or “beautiful boys” — modeled on the effeminate princeliness of Tadzio in Visconti’s 1971 adaptation of Death in Venice.

Meanwhile, yaoi and yuri — “boys’ love” and “girls’ love” — are distinct anime genres beloved by women and men respectively; these are melodramatic, idealized homoerotic romances which typify “Japanese sexuality” as a category all its own. This is a sexual world unanchored from politics or even real-world lust, all playing out in two dimensions. Nowhere is anime sexuality’s fantastical remoteness demonstrated better and more disturbingly than in a viral video of a “VTuber” (virtual YouTuber, god help us all) concert from 2023, in which an audience of parasocial teen girls screams at the “face reveal” of an animated manga-style singer.

Boy and girl-love romances are excruciatingly slow-burning and structured around heterosexual formulas — seme, or dominant, characters emotionally wrestle with uke submissives. They are designed, in the case of “boys’ love”, for the titillation of shy young straight women who are more comfortable with the unthreatening, dreamlike symbolism of two boys exchanging whispers than the real prospect of sex with a man. The politics of the genre is complicated; upon the opening of a manga exhibition at the British Museum in 2019, the academic Susan Napier told the BBC that the medium “held up very progressive models”, and in Japan, yaoi and yuri might fairly be interpreted as inevitable sproutings of liberalism in an undersexed and highly formal culture. But as these genres bobbed over oceans to the West and became incorporated into mainstream queer movements, they have become Weebish totems of alternative gender identities, something you’ll notice if you spend five minutes auditing profile pictures on X — a curious departure from their culturally conservative provenance. Both the androgynous aesthetics of anime and its atmosphere as an outsiders’ club lie beneath the Weeb-gender overlap, one which has produced viral X accounts whose sole purpose is to post “a canon/implied trans person a day” — mainly plucked from anime.

All of this is important, because it situates the very real field of Western sexual politics in the realm of dreams and imagination, and explains in part the conceptual disconnect between Trump’s generation and the young trans people he is legislating against. The American Right and gender-critical feminists are in an uncomfortable alliance in their preoccupation with physicality; for the young, online Left, and particularly that sizeable Weeb-queer nexus, imaginative potential and identification with figurative avatars — I identify with, even worship, this character, therefore I am them — has unmoored them from the politics of the body. So it is that Japan’s soft power has weaned a generation of Americans which has, according to plan, grown-up enraptured by anime — but never grew out of it. So it is too that the generation most concerned about the diktats of Said is willing to project its dreams onto Japan, imagining it as the ultimate sexual utopia; the Japanese exception to Orientalism, it seems, relies on the green light of queer, nerdy and compulsive Weebery.

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Japanese critics have long lamented the Orientalizing gaze of Weebs, with Hiroki Azuma namechecking Said’s theory in 2005 and writing that “what is behind the image … [is] completely erased when they are exported overseas”. There are fascinating analogues of this deracination in all realms of media: in the world of house music, white Western DJs are using Japanese-coded avatars. The San Franciscan DJ Dr Gabba uses the image of an evil scientist from Sailor Moon, while the Georgian musician Osean World has created a vocaloid (a synthesized singer) called Yameii, a pink-bunned anime girl who layers accented, eerie vocals over the 2020 hit Baby My Phone, which has nearly 16 million views on YouTube. Last week, the singer FKA Twigs released a collaboration with Kanye-Kardashian royalty North West, in which the 11-year-old sings in Japanese (“My name is North-chan”) for no apparent reason. All very strange, and no doubt frustrating to Japanese observers — but wasn’t it the government’s aim to spread the aesthetics and catchphrases of anime worldwide? Is this power, in the end, a little too soft?

The critical characteristic of Weebism is its situation within fantasy — which the lead singer of The Vapors presciently captured in his song Turning Japanese, written from his Guildford bedroom in 1980. In it, the singer obsesses over a photograph of his lover — “I sit there staring and there’s nothing else to do” — and embraces the slow creep of isolation: “No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women”, maddened by his own private idol-worship. Though unconscious — David Fenton said he’d heard the phrase “turning Japanese” in a dream, and had even written a motif which “is more likely to be Chinese, so I got that completely wrong!” — the song captures the shut-in, engrossed individualism of Weebery decades before its time, the tentacles of which have spread into Western youth politics, conducted not from the streets but from a lonely bedroom.

Given all this, has the experiment of Cool Japan failed? Of modern-day manga creators, Miyazaki Hayao said in 2014 that “some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people.” In this, Weebs are the perfect cognate. A decades-old Japanese government initiative around soft power has instead produced a sort of soft Orientalism, one which reduces the nation to an eroticized cartoon fantasy. This is how Cool Japan was transfigured from the real-world politics of diplomacy to the splintered, bedroom-bound dreamworlds which now characterize the young Western Left. Progressive youth movements, weaned on screens and taught morality by the internet, are beginning to creak in the face of a nastier, more robust camp intent on dashing every trace of Weebish woke. The heirs of Cool Japan are a generation those ministers in Noughties Tokyo would hardly recognize. And the Weebs themselves? They are culturally at sea, now that the jocks are back in charge.

The Eighties was an era of trade frictions between Japan and the West, of bellicose political rhetoric and literal Japan-bashing: American lawmakers gleefully took sledgehammers to Japanese electronics on the steps of Congress. But my friends and I were not deterred, enchanted as we were by animated fantasies so strikingly different from anything in our own culture. And even then, we could tell that there was something different about a certain anime auteur. His name was Hayao Miyazaki.

It is the rare creator who possesses the knack of appealing simultaneously to casual moviegoers, die-hard genre fans and tastemakers alike. Miyazaki’s latest film, The Boy and the Heron, set records when it was released in Japan this year; this weekend, it made history as the first original anime movie to reach number 1 in both American and Canadian cinemas. Influential international devotees include Wes Anderson and Guillermo Del Toro, who took David Cronenberg to a screening of Miyazaki’s beloved ode to childhood, My Neighbor Totoro. And last year, a stage adaptation of Totoro premiered at the Barbican to so much acclaim that it has been revived already.

Miyazaki never set out to appeal to the outside world, let alone change it; he claims to be “baffled” by the popularity of his work abroad. Nevertheless, his films have captivated generations of foreign audiences — and transformed our view of Japan. The nation made itself rich by selling the world things, ranging from appliances to automobiles. But Japan made itself popular by selling us fantasies: anime, manga, Nintendo. Where my grandfather’s generation saw an aggressive foreign power, mine saw a factory of dreams.

Today, Japan is associated with cleanliness and order, but when anime was born, in the decades after the Second World War, the scars of conflict were everywhere and civil unrest commonplace. In 1960, millions of Japanese rallied to protest the Anpo, a military treaty with the United States that war-weary citizens fiercely opposed, for fear — justified, as it turned out — that it would drag their nation into America’s conflicts. The ruling party eventually railroaded it through parliament by forcibly ejecting politicians who dissented: a blatant rejection of democracy, which triggered demonstrations that would escalate into open violence over the course of the decade.

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It was in this era that Miyazaki joined the ranks of Toei, then Japan’s biggest animation company, as a fresh university graduate. His career was minted mere months after anime itself: on the New Year’s Day that year, 1963, Japan’s first domestically produced, full-length animated television series, Mighty Atom, had debuted. Its creator, Osamu Tezuka, proudly described his work as anime, a contraction intended to distinguish it from imported animeshon, as imported foreign cartoons were known. Mighty Atom reminds us that protest runs in anime’s blood: the very first episode ends with a mass demonstration, as robots take to the streets to demand equality.

Across Japan, workers struggled against managers. Toei was no different. Miyazaki’s early years there were marked by low wages and unpaid overtime; he soon banded together with fellow animators in a labour union to protest. The vice president of the union, Isao Takahata, took a shine to the young Miyazaki, and recruited him to work on a new animated feature he was directing. Takahata aimed to jettison Toei’s established corporate structure in favour of making art on more democratic, even communal terms. The resulting film was a commercial failure; the partnership was a success.

Over the course of the Seventies, Miyazaki and Takahata, worked on a series of children’s shows. But manga and anime were evolving rapidly from kid’s stuff into something more, firing up a generation of young adults who were passionate about righting the wrongs of the world. Western authorities strictly regulated illustrated entertainment with measures such as “comics codes” and “comics campaign councils”. In Japan, artists were left to their own devices, allowing manga to emerge as a platform for delivering biting socio-political commentary, right under the noses of the establishment.

Japanese student demonstrators carried copies of manga Weekly Shōnen Magazine into their protests against the Vietnam War. And when members of the Japanese Red Army hijacked a passenger jet in 1970, they sent a missive claiming responsibility to the press that ended with the words “Never forget: we are Tomorrow’s Joe” — the name of a popular manga character who fights his way out of crushing poverty through boxing.

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Miyazaki always claimed to eschew politics in favour of symbolism. “I have no interest whatsoever today in producing animation as part of an ‘art’ movement, in trying to bring attention to social issues, or in sending out messages,” he wrote in a 1985 essay for Japanese readers. “I want to create works that children can enjoy.” But the bite of his convictions, which bubble up in his works in quiet ways, is precisely what gives his films such power. It is impossible to ignore its ever-present anti-authoritarian bent.

It was an original feature film called Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind that served as Miyazaki’s breakthrough. Arriving in Japanese cinemas in 1984, it told the story of a young woman in a dystopian future, where Earth is now a toxic jungle, filled with poisonous air, towering fungi, and enormous insects. Fiefdoms of human survivors feud endlessly over what little habitable land remains. Miyazaki was not globally famous at this point, but Nausicaä was released abroad, albeit after being disastrously re-edited and censored.

Foreign anime fans sought out Nausicaä in its uncut, untranslated form. The coveted bootlegged VHS arrived in my parent’s basement towards the end of the Eighties, and even on a fuzzy cathode-ray tube screen, even without subtitles, the film proved revelatory. It is classic Miyazaki: a young female protagonist navigates a strange world; venal adult authority figures clash with young dreamers; the story gently guides the viewer to question class and power, war and peace. Here is a fundamentally countercultural Japanese worldview, expertly cloaked in artistic allegory. Watching this wild drama made it impossible for me or my friends to view Japan as an enemy or a rival. How could it be, when its fantasies spoke to us so deeply?

After Nausicaä, Miyazaki’s rise was meteoric, and inextricably linked to Studio Ghibli, which he co-founded in 1985. While rivals pursued lucrative corporate sponsorship, Studio Ghibli was self-funded, which gave it total creative control. Now, the studio’s reputation has reached such heights that it recently made the unthinkable decision not to promote The Boy and the Heron at all. Despite reportedly being one of the most expensive Japanese films ever made, Ghibli released no trailers, no print ads, no interviews, no press screenings, nothing at all save one cryptic poster. It had the biggest opening weekend in Studio Ghibli history.

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But the flip side of total creative control was that neither Takahata nor Miyazaki could cede enough of it to anoint a successor. Takahata passed away in 2018, and Miyazaki, now 82, has announced and renounced his own retirement numerous times. Ghibli continues to flourish as a business, but its future remains uncertain: the closure of the production division was announced in 2014, only for it to be reopened long enough for Miyazaki to make The Boy and the Heron. That film’s stunning success has led to rumblings of another production in the works, but nothing concrete has been announced. Earlier this year, the studio sold a controlling stake to the Japanese television network NTV, ending nearly four decades of independence.

Ghibli’s concerns about its future mirror those of Japanese society as a whole. In the half-century since Miyazaki’s 1963 debut, Japan emerged as an economic superpower, before becoming a case study in stagnation. It is one of the oldest societies on the planet, Japan’s young people seem to see the world quite differently from Miyazaki’s; they are a minority, after all. They express less hope and less faith in their ability to affect meaningful political change, if multiple surveys are any indication.

Stagnation seems to have brought the dreams of anime down to Earth, too. New features focus less on changing the world than simply finding ways to survive in it — or escaping it altogether, as in the hugely popular genre of isekai, literally “other worlds”, where protagonists flummoxed by reality find meaning for themselves in fantasy realms. A demand for adventure has given way to a hunger for comfort and familiarity. Your Name became a hit in 2016 by cut-and-pasting a hodgepodge of anime clichés. It was set not in a vividly rendered imaginary world but a Tokyo so meticulously accurate that fans can use its scenes as a literal tourist map. Miyazaki, perhaps unsurprisingly, is notoriously ambivalent about the direction anime has taken in recent years, concerned that it has become narcissistic.

“I think that animated movies can relax, cheer and refresh,” he said in a 1983 interview. “And in so doing, they can help us escape from ourselves.” But through his work, Miyazaki has proven that anime is more than a form of entertainment; it can bridge cultures, and help young people understand and come to terms with the world in which they find themselves. We need it as much as we ever have — even though, or perhaps especially because, it feels harder to dream these days.

So far, so inoffensive. And yet over the past month, the Code, which is now the binding authority over all civil disputes in China, has become the subject of fierce internal criticism. Its origin? China’s increasingly outspoken new generation of feminists, who are furious at its introduction of a one-month “cooling-off period” before a divorce is finalised.

During that time, a husband and wife now have the power to revoke a divorce application without the other’s consent. That may seem like a mere technicality, but for China’s feminists it represents an infringement on women’s freedom to divorce, as well puts the victims of domestic violence in a potentially dangerous situation. They are also concerned that the ultimate purpose of the “cooling-off period” is to remedy China’s decreasing birth rates by keeping marriages afloat. In essence, they argue, it treats women as resources instead of rights-bearing individuals.

Since it was first mooted last year, Chinese feminists have launched a number of anonymous online social media campaigns against the move. And while they would seem to have failed, they have certainly succeeded in making their presence felt. Whether China’s ruling Communist Party (CCP) likes it or not, over the past year the country’s nascent feminist movement has become a force to be reckoned with.

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Indeed, Beijing was so rattled by this new feminist opposition that in recent months it has felt compelled to call in in legal experts to cite foreign precedents to the “cooling-off period”, as well as to emphasise that in extraordinary circumstances such as domestic violence, either side of a marriage can file a divorce lawsuit. Suffice it to say that these explanations did not convince China’s feminists, who pointed out that divorce is not easily granted by Chinese civil courts — not to mention that disadvantaged women may not be able to afford the lawsuits.

And so, last October, President Xi decided to take matters into his own hands — and in doing so, inadvertently assured China’s feminist movement a place in the history books. “Gender equality is China’s basic national policy,” he said in a speech to the nation. “Women are the pioneers of human civilisation and the promoters of social progress, and they have written extraordinary achievements in all walks of life.” Although he did not directly comment on the “cooling-off periods”, a clear attempt was made to placate China’s feminists; Xi identified gender equality as a principle in China’s post-pandemic recovery plan, and promised that the government will provide concrete help to females affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Xi’s response, as well as the recent opposition to his new Code, raise two important questions: just who are China’s feminists? And how did they become such a powerful force?

The typical Chinese feminist is, to put it simply, the embodiment of a new progressive activism which is often — and some might say paradoxically — rooted in support for the CCP and its scepticism towards capitalism. To make a direct comparison with today’s Western feminist movement is, to say the least, a frustrating, near-impossible task. China’s feminists are, after all, the product of not just a different culture, but an entirely different political system.

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What both movements do share, however, is youth. According to sociological research, Chinese feminists are predominantly born after the 1980s. It’s telling that this coincides with the country’s one-child policy, which was a binding rule in China between 1980 and 2016. Without having to compete with any brothers, these young women were usually well-educated and privileged. In terms of where they live, my own research has found that 57% of the feminist advocates on Chinese social media are from major economic centres in China. This partly explains why they tend to hold conscious or unconscious contempt for men from poorer regions — though this is partly a result of the boy-favouring traditions in those places. In the eyes of young feminists, such traditions are backwards, and often lead to the cruel treatment of women and girls.

As one might expect, it is the habits and interests of Chinese feminists which sets them most apart from their Western counterparts. Brought up in a culture that places an extraordinary amount of existential capital on the internet, they are huge fans of online shopping and are the driving force behind China’s $670 billion ‘sheconomy’. They also spend a lot of time cultivating a robust digital presence — in particular by browsing online forums dedicated to TV shows, films and ACG (anime, cartoon and games) fandoms. More recently, their craze for yaoi — female-oriented anime with a focus on fantasy erotic relationships between men — has made them natural allies of China’s LGBT community.

But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that China’s feminists content themselves with passing their time on online frivolities. When feeling threatened or attacked, the young feminists can quickly turn into a highly organised force. In this sense, at least, today’s well-educated, liberal-minded feminists draw inspiration from activists in the West, such as Emma Watson. And they are not afraid of challenging the CCP’s policies. In fact, the recent battle over “cooling-off periods” represents just one area in which they are starting to campaign.

Only last year, China’s feminists led a protest campaign against the disturbing rise of media monopolies in the country. It all started on February 27, when the fans of Xiao Zhan, a poplar Chinese actor and singer, reported the global fanfiction sharing website Archives of Our Own (AO3) to the Communist Party because one of its stories portrayed him as a cross-dressing sex worker who falls in love with a teenage boy. Xiao’s fans felt that the fictional portrayal tarnished their idol’s image and complained to the Chinese authorities about AO3 “showing pornographic content to underage audience” and “promoting child pornography”. The Chinese government responded by blocking access to the foreign site, as well as several other Chinese fanfiction hubs.

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Concerned that this violated authors’ freedom and constituted an attack on China’s LGBT community, China’s young feminists quickly mobilised. Together with other subculture groups, they launched a series of campaigns on Weibo — only to find that their posts were being suppressed: even though one thread had 700 million hits, it was somehow excluded from Weibo’s “trending stories” list. Meanwhile, supportive messages for Xiao topped the list almost every day.

Believing that Weibo was kowtowing to Xiao’s management company, feminist campaigners urged the Party to control media monopolies and impose stronger regulation on China’s wild “idol economy”. After facing a barrage of online protests, the Chinese government finally stepped in, and fined Weibo for “manipulating the display of information”. Its “trending stories” list was also taken down for a week as punishment.

No doubt China’s feminists chalked it down as a step in the right direction, although the CCP is yet to heed their calls to bring back AO3. What is particularly interesting about this emerging movement, though, is its symbiotic relationship with China’s ruling party: it both puts pressure on the CCP to enact change, while also embodying many of its values.

Take the feminists’ recent campaign against commercial surrogacy, for example, which is inextricably linked to the CCP’s antipathy towards capitalism. Commercial surrogacy is prohibited in China, though wealthy would-be mothers tend to get round this by travelling to the West to find a surrogate. Only last month, Chinese actress Zheng Shuang was effectively “cancelled” by the feminist movement after it was reported that she’d had two surrogate children through overseas services, whom she later abandoned. But while her treatment of her children was, of course, a source of criticism, it was the method of their conception which attracted the most ire.

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For while some members of the LGBT community support surrogacy — largely because they cannot conceive naturally— China’s feminists refuse to stand with them. One post by an anonymous user on social media platform Zhihu summarised their concerns: “Let’s use some imagination. What will happen if surrogacy becomes legal in China? The giant e-commerce companies will lead the price war. They will try to attract customers by promising the best surrogate mothers and the desired gender of babies. What do you think they will do to keep the promises? Don’t think I’m talking nonsense. Capital will trample on all human laws for profit.”

It was a comment typical of today’s generation of feminists in China: in many ways, despite feeling empowered by consumerism, much of their ideology is also rooted in the CCP’s political project. No doubt that will sit uneasily with a number of Western feminists. But just as Western women are a product of their culture, so too is the case with Chinese feminists. And while their priorities are certainly rooted in a different world, it is increasingly becoming clear that they do have the power to change it.