/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Japan is no longer what it used to be – namely the world’s second largest economy – thanks to China, which overtook it in 2010. Elsewhere too, China finds itself triumphant. Where else? On campus. In love.

Roughly 87,000 Chinese exchange students are enrolled in Japanese universities – nearly twice as many as 10 years ago. “Herbivorous male” is a term coined several years ago to describe young Japanese men’s approach to sex these days. It suggests timidity and indifference. The Chinese students are not herbivorous. They are carnivorous. The result, says Shukan Bunshun (Feb 2) is that the Chinese enjoy a rich campus sex life while the Japanese look on in mingled envy, resentment and bewilderment.

How do they do it? They hardly even speak the language. But they know the words they need, and they don’t take no for an answer. Take it from a Meiji University sophomore the magazine calls Sudo. There was a girl he loved from afar. He couldn’t bring himself to get closer. She was a year older, probably more sophisticated, and somehow intimidating. “I had the feeling it wouldn’t do to be aggressive,” he explains. A Chinese who spotted her knew no such scruples. “Really,” he would say to her in his broken Japanese, “you are so beautiful. I never met anyone so beautiful. Is your mother beautiful too?”

Poor Sudo! In less than a month, the girl and the exchange student were a couple, while he licked his wounds unnoticed on the sidelines.

http://www.japantoday.com/category/kuchikomi/view/china-outperforming-japan-in-campus-romance