One Dream Man versus Twenty-Five Women with Dreams: Gender and Ambition in the Bachelor Japan

ABSTRACT

With a flashy montage, viewers of television show The Bachelor Japan (2017–present) are introduced to Japan’s inaugural bachelor, 35-year-old Kubo Hirotake. Kubo is described as everything women in Japan are said to want – he is tall, handsome, sporty, highly educated, and most importantly, rich. In the program Kubo is presented with a pool of 25 potential marriage partners and charged with finding the woman of his dreams in what producers describe as the ultimate modern fairy tale, a ‘heated battle’ for the heart of the perfect man. Appearing at a time in Japan when marriage rates are at an all-time low and young people increasingly deem romantic love unimportant to their lives, the program may on initial viewing be a treatise on the importance of marriage. On closer inspection however, the politics of The Bachelor Japan reveal the dreams of contemporary Japanese women and the pressures they face surviving a society hostile to their independence. In this article I argue that The Bachelor Japan, far from following the traditional fairy tale narrative in which a woman is rescued by a handsome prince, instead shows women on a completely new path – one on which they may become princesses on their own terms.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Jennifer Coates whose encouragement and feedback was essential throughout the process of bringing this paper to life. Thank you also to Thomas Baudinette for generously providing feedback on the final draft. I am grateful for the time and expertise of the anonymous reviewers. Finally, I would like to extend a huge thank you to Amazon Japan G.K. for very kindly providing permission to use the images featured.

Notes

¹ Also known as the ‘3 Ks’ (san kō) Japanese women are said to want; highly educated (kōgakureki), highly paid (kōshūnyū), and tall (kōshinchō) men. See Ueno Chizuko (1998) and Yoko Tokuhiro (2009) for more on the traits Japanese women are said to desire in a marriage partner.

² The bachelor does not have to select one of the women with whom to pursue a relationship. Notably in 2007 the US Bachelor’s eleventh bachelor, Brad Womack, chose neither of the final two women from his series, coming back for a second turn as the bachelor four years later and proposing to Emily Maynard in the finale. The couple broke up a few months later.

³ Popular websites such as Jezebel (jezebel.com), and Mamamia (mamamia.com.au) dedicate whole sections to Bachelor news and viewers can be seen sharing blow by blow commentary on the latest gossip about Bachelor couplings and breakups on Twitter, with hashtags provided by the program to encourage fan participation.

⁴ See Watanabe, 1995; Escoffery, 2006; and Murray and Ouellette, 2009. In 2007 the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, charged with regulating the broadcasting industry, conducted an investigation into television production, resulting in some unflattering findings. See Schilling (2007) and Okada (2009).

⁵ Gyaru (from the English ‘girls’) refers to young women belonging to a fashion-conscious subculture. Peaking in the 1990s and early 2000s, the gyaru aesthetic is characterized by big bleached hairstyles, heavy makeup, gaudy clothing, elaborately decorated nails, and a cute or childish way of speaking. For a detailed introduction to gyaru culture, see Suzuki and Best (2003).

⁶ Notable examples include Germaine Greer’s The female eunuch (1970), and Angela McRobbie’s Jackie: An ideology of adolescent femininity (1978). For a detailed discussion of second wave feminism’s struggle with romantic ideology, see Joanne Hollows’ Feminism, femininity, and popular culture (2000).

⁷ The fictional television program UnREAL (2015 to present), also available on Amazon Japan Prime Video, has been remarkably successful as a result of its ability to tap into audience’s concerns that reality television may not be as rooted in reality as they may have initially expected. Set on the production site of a fictional Bachelor-like television show titled Everlasting, UnREAL depicts the lengths to which producers will go to achieve maximum ratings, including drugging contestants and exploiting family tragedies. The show makes disconcerting viewing for Bachelor fans as it holds up a mirror to audiences and asks to what extent they desire producers to go to in the name of entertainment.

⁸ It must be remembered, however, that from the very beginning casting is clearly done with the intention of creating not only a number of potential romantic central storylines, but also as much controversy as possible.

⁹ On 4 March 2018 user Marie (@MPELaps) tweeted ‘Yuki is wonderful. We need more Yuki. #BachelorWinterGames’. In a similar vein, on 19 March Twitter user Tristalyn (@tristalyn) tweeted ‘Ok #bachelorwintergames you weren’t supposed to make me cry. I absolutely fell in love with Yuki. #adorable.’. Online news site Romper went so far as to publish the headline ‘Yuki Will Be Your Favorite Contestant On “The Bachelor Winter Games”’ (Iovine, 2018) and some Twitter users demanded that Yuki get her own show, or at least a turn as Japan’s first bachelorette.