"Always Crying, Never Quitting: What Chiikawa Says About Being Young In Japan": BLOG Beitrag von Jayson M Chun, University of Hawaiʻi West Oʻahu
- vor 7 Stunden
- 2 Min. Lesezeit
"Chiikawa reflects the emotional anxieties of Gen Z youth and younger Millennial workers. Tobe Mamiya, a Japanese cultural critic, argues that Chiikawa embodies the human desire to simply live on instinct, like a baby, free from obligation and competition. That fantasy is what Nagano first drew on Twitter in early 2020, in a series of comics about how she wanted to live: The wish to opt out is where the show starts. But it does not let its characters stay there. Work arrives. Exams arrive. The world makes demands.
You would think that with a declining birthrate and aging population, wages in Japan would be rising fast due to a labor shortage. But as of August 2025, Japan’s national average minimum wage sits in Tokyo at ¥1,226 ($7.76 as of March 10, 2026). I remember when Japanese college students visited my classroom. The mostly blue-collar Hawaii students gasped when several Japanese students revealed they earned the equivalent of $8 an hour at part-time work. Hawaii’s minimum wage in 2026 was $16, though prices here are considerably higher.
And in this world one struggles to connect with others. That feeling of running hard alone just to stay in place shows up directly in one of the show’s most telling images. Chiikawa works a tedious shift putting stickers on lemons at a factory, and the other creatures sitting nearby are drawn as grey, anonymous silhouettes, stripped of faces and individuality. Japan has a recognized loneliness problem, serious enough that the government established a Minister of Loneliness in 2021. In the world of Chiikawa, you are surrounded by others but still, in a meaningful sense, alone."
Jayson Makoto Chun is a professor at the University of Hawai‘i – West O‘ahu specializing in Asian popular media culture. He has written “A Nation of a Hundred Million Idiots”?: A Social History of Japanese Television, 1953–1973 (2006) and articles on J-pop and K-pop.
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