The Yasai Zoku versus the Grass-Eating Ladyboys meets the Revenge of the Vegansexuals

Because of the problems of pronouncing Vegan in Japan correctly, I was thinking of another alternative. How about …

The Yasai-Zoku*

We are ‘The Crazy Vegetable Tribe’ … motto: “We are What we Eat”. Everyone has to have a gang tattoo† to prove how hardcore real vegans are (or I am just having flashbacks of my misspent youth as a kaminari-zoku?)††. Sadly, the other alternative ‘soshokukei’, meaning herbivores, was recently utterly wasted by the boss of a fashion marketing and PR company, and the many underpaid, imagination-less hacks who re-cycle ‘Whacky Japan’ media stories.

Coined by columnist Maki Fukasawa, the term soshokukei, or soshoku-danshi (herbivorous males), became one of those buzzwords which hijacks the Japanese media every other years. Fukasawa estimated some 20 percent of Japanese men are herbivorous and their attitudes are influencing others.

With its implied disdain for vegans and vegetarians males as being asexual “grass-eating” ladyboys, the term was then popularised in a bestselling book called “Soshokukei Danshi Ojo-man Ga Nippon wo Kaeru” (そうしょくけいだんし or 草食系男子 … Herbivorous Lady-like Men Are Changing Japan) by Megumi Ushikubo.

I’d love to introduce her to some vegan anarchist or vegan bodybuilding friends of mine.

Presumably Maki and Megumi, like all the other 30s and 40s Japanese professional women who still live at home with their parents, are just not getting laid enough. Either that or they expecting financial backhanders and contracts from MAFF or the Meat industry.

According to them, herbivore males …

are not competitively minded

eat sparingly so they stay thin and fit into tight clothes

are chummy with their mums and often go shopping together

are not interested in dating girls, having relationships, or even having sex (choosing sex toys instead)

often carry supermarket “point cards” around, and

cannot go out of their house if their hair doesn’t look perfect. “They have also told me that their self-esteem goes up when their nails look nice,” she claims.

Well, yes, at least that last one is true … I knew a few punks and rockers who hid away when they suffered from bad hair days!

“Grass-eating males” are also likely to have a sweet tooth and “an ardent interest in food” … what, like thinking where it comes from and the ethics of its production!?!

Like the re-cycled crap most of this is, the story has then been sprinkle like manure in the Western media, who enjoy kicking a good vegan when he is down just as much as they do publishing all the other idiotic, racist and uninformed nonsense written about Japan. Just a month ago or so, The Times of England’s Richard Lloyd Parry wrote, the “Girly men of Japan just want to have fun“. 3 full years after it happened here.

Listen people. Society has been working itself into a froth about androgynous males and sexual ambiguity since, if not just David Bowie in the 70s, the Hwarang of the 10th Century and the Ancient Greeks 2,000 years ago … Let us face, forever. And it forever will.

Except, itt gets worse too. Dr Annie Potts, co-director of the New Zealand Centre for Human and Animal Studies at Canterbury University in New Zealand, has gone on to coin the word “vegansexuals”.

Alongside not eating meat, vegansexuals are also choosing not to be sexually intimate with non-vegan partners whose bodies, they say, are made up of dead animals. Her research was into the lives of “cruelty-free consumers in New Zealand”.

Dr Anne, whose other speciality unsurprisingly include erectile dysfunction, articles read like a script of double-entendres from a “Carry on” movie; ‘Think soy’s sexy?’ ‘Vegans are dead against it’, ‘No sex, please, you’re a carnivore’, ‘Meat-eaters off the menu for vegans seeking love’ and ‘Vegansexuals do it with each other’. Wink, wink …

Needless to point out, the New Zealand economy derives $3.8 billion from meat exports, more than 50% of all New Zealand exports, and is targeting the Japan’s consumer market currently dominated by American animal products. New Zealand’s economy was built upon meat and dairy products.

‘New Zealand Meat Products’ spent $260 million in marketing and distribution costs, the nation’s Government allocating funds to the Board, so this is a story likely to roll around the media for a while. In the last 90s, as much as $5 million per year was being spent by New Zealand specifically on marketing and promotion in “the higher value markets of Asia” … such as Japan … to 30% increases.

Vegansexuals are well-educated and politically active but are squeamish about having sexual contact with meat eaters who struggle with the idea of swopping bodily fluids with carnivore, reported The Washington Post’s Emil Steiner in a piece entitled, “No Sex Please, We’re Vegans”. She too portrayed vegans as fools making “open-minded” meat-eaters laugh. It is not necessary to point out NZ Meat marketing board’s long term connections in Washington DC, is it?

I couldn’t think of kissing lips that allow dead animal pieces to pass between them.

- an anonymous vegan

But we are the Crazy Vegetable Tribe. The post-war corporate samurais of Japan are carnivorous dinosaurs, and doomed. We will chemically castrate all alpha-males with estrogen-rich, high-sugar soya desserts so they die off like those obese American beef munchers. Expect to read about vegan dietary terrorism in the Asahi Shimbun headlines soon.

You can find us rampaging wildly down supermarket aisles examining the labels on food products … aggressively scouring menus for vegetable options at restaurants … and running around in suicidally hungry gangs at around eleven pm at night, surrounded by dark clouds of despair, when we realize that there is NOTHING for us to eat ANYWHERE in town and calling out like pale, hungry ghosts …

“Nooooooo, not onigiri at Lawsons again … !!!”
(A hungry ghost, not a vegan).

* Please note that there is no word as Yasai-Zoku in Japanese (at least not yet …) and using will likely elicit blank stares and quizzical looks from any Japanese speaker. It is a play on words from yasai, which does mean vegetables, and zoku meaning tribe, as in “bosozoku”.

† Unfortunately tattoos in Japan, even pretty ‘Yanki-style’ tattoos, are still not cool in many hot baths (not that it seems to concern the old boys with no little fingers down my local cento too much). If you want to purify yourself in Japan’s many special onsen baths, don’t get inked up or be happy to take a bath with the cleanest gangsters in the world.

Slipping into the deep end of onsens is an experience not worth sacrificing for the sake of shallow vanity.

†† ‘Kaminari-zoku’, literally the “Lightning Tribe”. Precusors to Japan’s noisy motorcycling hoodlums, the bosozoku, but motorcycling hoodlums who could actually ride their bikes fast and go round corners.

Main photo by http://www.jeremysuttonhibbert.com