"Grass Eaters" on the Rise, MMA on the Decline in Japan

The “herbivore male” subculture, like Jordan has mentioned, has been developing for a while—it’s just that no one named it until recently, which was when it began to gain widespread media attention.

In 2006, the term was officially introduced by Maki Fukazawa. She penned a a series of columns detailing the “herbivore male” for Nikkei Business Online, only to have her ideas taken up and expanded upon in 2008 by Masahiro Morioka, a sociologist at Osaka University, who published a book on them. As soon as that happened, the media picked up on it and it became a topic of popular discussion.

One thing that Fukazawa and Morioka are very clear on in their assessment of “grasseaters” or “herbivore males” is that despite their non-aggressive attitudes toward women and relationships, that does not necessarily mean that they shun romantic relationships or that they don’t have sex. Rather, as the generation raised under the notion of gender equality, qualities that are stereotypically attributed to Japanese males no longer necessarily apply. I think that it would be safe to say that that assessment could be extended to their attitudes toward conflict and competition, as well. Their attitudes toward conflict and competition need not be mutually exclusive to their patronage of sports (or combat spots, for that matter).

The real issue is that there is subculture of Japanese males that are deviating from traditional perceptions of Japanese masculinity, and what these changes mean for the future of Japan—particularly given its low birthrate and rapidly aging society. Just from my anecdotal experience, speaking to and even training with self-described “herbivore male” acquaintances, there is little here to definitively prove that this subculture is somehow responsible for “killing fight sport in Japan.”

There is a possibility that there is some kind of correlation, but all my experience here in Japan tells me otherwise. For now, however, Jordan’s observations on the tendencies of Japanese interests and their fad-cycles is a much more perspicacious assessment of the Japanese audience and their patronage of MMA.