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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Ruru attacked a stranger with a liquor bottle. Kazu-kun set fire to someone for a dare. Ali “the Buddha” fought his way to freedom from a police car. As role models go, Japan has never had it so good.
As millions in Japan and around the world will already know, these “yankii” delinquents feature among the cast of the second season of Badly in Love — a Netflix dating reality show that puts 11 young firecrackers — in some cases with criminal pasts, in most cases severely troubled — in one place and waits for Eros to light the touchpaper.
Precarious as it sounds, it is compelling watching. All the more so for the unfamiliar shading it provides to Japanese society’s often black-and-white view of right and wrong. The first season was a global success, dominating Netflix’s rankings for weeks as the stars, drawn from the disdained margins of Japanese society, jousted and paired off in a more reflective and gentle way than their tattoos, acrylic talons and twilight-world territorialism implied. The second season has already done brilliantly.
But the opportunity to use the success of the show to address the nation’s deep-seated stinginess with second chances has been squandered by both the government and the wider country.
Badly in Love’s success derives from several linked factors. One is its originality. While Japan’s juvenile delinquent, yakuza and sex industry subcultures have been an endless obsession of fiction, the mainstream media has balked at being any kind of conduit or amplifier for the voices of these demimondes.
At worst, it has colluded in the pretence that Japanese society ends at the bottom of the respectable lower middle class. In presenting yankii voices through the filter of a dating show, Badly has delivered nuanced narratives of causation and regret: the often shattering accounts of received abuse or neglect, of the temptation of gang membership and of the crimes or self-destruction later carried out.
Another factor, and the most critical in establishing Badly’s importance beyond the Netflix rankings, is its explicit insistence on the possibility of rehabilitation, second chances and the capacity to deserve both. Japan, particularly in business, is painfully reluctant to give second chances. Failure, whatever the circumstances, is a ruthless ender of careers and social standing.
And to their credit, someone in Japan’s Ministry of Justice has taken notice. Between the airing of the first season last December and the second this month, the MoJ decided to work with Badly on a rehabilitation awareness campaign. The outcome was a government poster advertising the show, which featured a picture of the vaguely menacing cast and slogans like “Rehabilitation is great!!” and “Getting back on your feet is about love!”
In an accompanying press release, the MoJ, which has historically cultivated intense fear of punishment and public scepticism about rehabilitation, cooed that Badly is about atonement and friendship, and resonates with the idea that people can change. Absolutely right. Progressive stuff from an arm of government not usually linked with such sentiments.
But within a couple of weeks of the second series dropping, a segment of society long conditioned to condemn all that was up in arms. The show, railed a barrage of online commentary, glorified crime.
Whatever spark of courage had briefly burnt in the MoJ sputtered and the collaboration with Badly was abruptly cancelled. Some people can change but not those we have decided cannot.
The decision to cancel is dismal for three reasons. One is that it reveals a timid government too ready to abandon principle and mistake online backlash for public opinion. The second is that, in common with elsewhere, Japan’s biggest demographic crisis is not a low birth rate but a low rate of couple formation: the spectacle of young people investing against the odds in love should be resoundingly welcomed by any government.
The third is that, once again, it reveals paper-thin official support for the concept of second chances — a concept on which Japan’s future depends. In an economy running short of skills and people, and one that has allowed its taste for financial and commercial risk to atrophy, it is remarkable how large the absence of opportunities to give it another go still looms.
Nobody is asking Japan to love Ruru, Kazu-kun or Ali “the Buddha”, but it has to find a way to love the idea that their lives did not end before they hit their mid-twenties.
