Japanese Reality TV as American Therapy
"the boyfriend" and "terrace house" on netflix ☼ sex as queer belonging ☼ learning to be american as a child ☼ collectivism versus individualism
The first time I encountered Japanese Reality TV was in Japan. Around the age of twenty, I decided to design my own “work-exchange” program and travel around Asia on a student’s budget, arranging gigs with local businesses in exchange for housing. Towards the end of my travels, I spent a month in Kyoto in a crowded flat with seven strangers. As these stories go, those strangers became friends, the kind of friends you fall in love with so deeply that they become synonymous with the memory of joy: two from Malaysia who biked across Korea to get to Japan, one from Spain with eyes like bubbles and hair like silk, one from Argentina who brewed mate every morning, one from Indonesia that taught us all about Asian rap, and four from the United States who made me, for a brief moment, not embarrassed to be American. We became a small family that lived above a restaurant, exchanging a few hours of labor each day in return for a bunk to sleep on, a kitchen to cook in, and a small matted room to share meals and laughs. In the mornings, we cleaned apartments. In the afternoons, we biked to temples. In the evenings, we cooked dinner, drank sake, and huddled inside izakayas as the skies watered the earth.
After spending a month in what I often view as the ideal life design (mixed cultures, shared living, very little responsibility and the absence of politics—corporate, academic, or romantic), we all went our separate ways. I was the first to leave the little flat above the restaurant: We stayed up all night, watched the sun stretch above the Kamo River, and embraced in goodbyes as I boarded a bus to Tokyo. I laughed and cried and smiled at the seams of my skin until I arrived at a small condo in the Minato district, where I would spend a week with my family before traveling north. I had a few days before they arrived and the entire place to myself.
In anticipation of two weeks jam-packed with activities and travel, I did what every vagabond finds themselves longing for after rotating around trains, planes, floors, and futons like Goldilocks: absolutely nothing. I walked around the neighborhood, stocked up on my favorite sweet breads from 7-11 (which is, as everyone says, so much better than the 7-11s in the United States), and laid in front of a small television, seeking refuge from the go-go-go of the previous eight weeks. I switched on the television and there it was: Terrace House.
If a therapist were to ever prescribe reality television as relief for a loud mind, Terrace House would be it. The program is more meditative than stimulating, more reflective of an attention practice than the attention economy, where participants live together in a single house and string together a narrative built from noticing things: their feelings, their behaviors, and their perceptions of both. The show is ordinary, plain, and, for those very reasons, entirely refreshing. In short, it is a show about real people’s lives, the kinds of people who feel shy on dates, doubt themselves, think up towards conversations about their emotions, and, more often than not: do nothing. Yet, while the show is a lot of nothing (compared to the sexual, emotional, or political debauchery of American/British reality television), it feels like something special.
At every minimal occurrence—the brush of two arms in the kitchen, a modest smile or frown, an everyday glance—a panel of speculators, mainly famous Japanese entertainers and comedians, dictate their live reactions with a wave of “oos” and “ahs,” narrating the emotional development of the cast (“she doesn’t want to come off as too interested, a lot of people do that”...”they have different energies, that’s why he doesn’t like her”). The show embraces the art of noticing, an art that is reflective of what many people understand Japanese culture to be: gentle, grounded, and detailed. It was the first time I saw behavior like that amplified by a major program, let alone reality television, and the first time I saw an all Asian cast onscreen.
The newest addition to the craze around Japanese Reality TV was released this month: The Boyfriend. If a therapist were to ever prescribe reality television as relief for a queer mind, The Boyfriend would be it. The series follows the same design as Terrace House—gentle scenes, thoughtful conversations, cast members thinking through their internal monologues as they might in therapy—with several of the same speculators narrating the show. In a world where sex and trauma are sold like candy, platforms like HBO striving to be the Willy Wonka Factory, it is refreshing to see a gay dating series focused on minor feelings. The gratitude for such a show amplifies when I consider that the queer community continues to be painted in a hypersexualized light, nevermind the fact that the generation that is more likely to identify as queer is having less sex.
Sex can be a beautiful part of life, just like clubbing, but it is not, as I thought when I first came out, a means of achieving queer belonging. And for anyone who is not white, it can require a tiring journey through our community’s pervasive problems with fetishization, racism, and gendered stereotypes. Once I realized my personal value was not tied to my sexual activity, I stopped thinking about having it so much. When watching The Boyfriend, I am reminded of the fact that hypersexuality has nothing to do with being queer. Participants take their time getting to know each other and set boundaries and expectations that might be more descriptive of the user base on Hinge, as opposed to Grindr.
There is, of course, something to be said about Japan’s “demographic crisis” born from a continual decline in intercourse, marriage and child-rearing. One might argue that the hyposexual ethos of The Boyfriend is a symptom of a cultural crisis: The Japanese people aren’t having enough sex. To that, I ask: Why is not having sex a crisis?
I get it: Less sex means less babies, which is bad for the economy, but this is the part where the queer reprimands capitalism and dreams of a world in which economic gain is not humanity’s north star. The capitalist design of the Global North is responsible for our own crises: The American people are depressed, cannot afford groceries, and denounce crushing other populations to the ground in order to remain a world power. In a culture that is obsessed with production (families, wealth, fame), we are experiencing existential burnout on a mass scale. The simplicity of a show like The Boyfriend reminds me of a way of life that I felt closer to when I was younger.
Oftentimes, I feel as though being American with a capital A is a performance I memorized the lines to from a young age. I recall a friend of mine pulling me aside in the first grade and asking me why I was so quiet. He told me that I never led class activities, made noise or spoke aloud unless called on, and that all of those things were things I was supposed to do. That was the moment I realized expression was a currency: the people who did it with the most volume earned the most attention—which, in American culture, often equates adoration—and the people who did not were deemed odd.
In the years that followed, I encountered similar demands from friends and strangers alike: Speak louder, don’t be shy, decide what you want and go get it. A lot of the demands I heard when I was younger were justified: For the most part, I mumbled (still do). I tend not to raise my voice and rarely yell unless I am throwing my ass in a circle watching a movie with irredeemable characters (see my partner’s imitation of me: Fuck you, you stupid bitch! I hope you die!). I took the feedback and learned to assert myself more, renouncing the timidity I wore like a cloak when I was a child. However, the anger that shaded many of those demands always confused me:
Why were quiet people so upsetting? Why was it a bad thing to be soft, to listen and wait instead of interject and monologue?
The answer is more complex than one sitting can tackle, however, I presume it has something to do with people expecting Americans to be Americans, not Asian-American or any other American identity that sprouted from the soils of another culture. Furthermore, it is a lack of understanding of those other cultures: It is not that Japanese-American people are shy and spineless, nor that we have no opinions to scream to the world. Rather, it is that we express ourselves differently.
In American eyes, the world is something to conquer, a canvas on which we assert ourselves. A gentle nature has never been central to America’s national identity. If anything, it is something Americans are ashamed of: observing, as opposed to being observed, is the wrong end of the stick. In America, dreams are informed by the ego, where individuals route themselves towards self-realization, in which uniqueness indicates worth. In Japan, dreams are designed around duty, where individuals route themselves towards collective-realization, in which alikeness is a center of pride (though we should not forget that Japan saw the world as something to conquer prior to 1945).
Of course, collectivism and individualism do not parallel good and bad. At one point in The Boyfriend (spoiler alert), a cast member leaves the show early. In a heartfelt goodbye, he encourages everyone to speak their truth and tell each other how they feel, prompting a cry from everyone on-screen. One might presume that this tear-jerking moment sheds light on how difficult it can be to express yourself in a collectivistic society like Japan that emphasizes group harmony over individual expression. Such a cultural backdrop can make it difficult for minorities to express their personal identities, not to mention the country’s lack of comprehensive anti-discrimination laws protecting queer individuals or its failure to recognize same-sex marriage.
A generalization is a generalization is a generalization: Not all Japanese people are the same; not all American people are the same. Prescribing behavioral tendencies to any group of people—based on political or personal experience—risks reducing an individual’s humanity to our subjective observations. Yet, as general as these ideas might be, they are still reflected in the types of reality television shows both countries produce: compare Jersey Shore to Terrace House. The contrast speaks for itself.
I am grateful for the parts of American culture that celebrate individual expression, as well as the political atmospheres in many states that support queer lives (CA, NY, MA, OR, WA, VT, CO). However, as an Asian-American born and raised in the United States, I more often suffer from the demons of self-realization and long for a society in which collective-realization is prioritized. Watching The Boyfriend and Terrace House reminds me of the life I actually value (one that is soft, shared, and spent noticing things) as opposed to the life I learned to value (one that is loud, individual, and spent attaining things).
The gentle nature of Japanese reality television programs like The Boyfriend pronounce the power of a gentle life. It comes with gratitude, compassion, and mental strength. It appreciates the small and large emotions we experience on a day to day basis and the mazes of our minds that we navigate as human beings. Furthermore, there is an essence to these shows that transports me back to that month I spent in Kyoto, in which my only concern was understanding the people and places around me.
Though it is idealistic to compare one’s life to a month spent traveling or a TV program in which people are paid to spend time together, it is practical to think that, by practicing the art of noticing, we can better embrace the gentle power in our everyday lives. We can stop to “oo” and “ah” at the small events that occur around and within us. We can consider the excitement buried beneath a relationship we may too often take for granted: a friend, a partner, a family member. We can relish in the big joy of being in a place we call home, filling a bowl with snacks, and queuing up our favorite show on the screen, pausing to watch the rain fall outside the window when the credits roll and the music stops. ☷
With love,
Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane
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