.@aespa_official’s "LEMONADE" streams on Spotify Counter:
Day 19: 1,235,239
Day 20: 1,316,708 (+81,469)
— Only 4th gen song to receive +1M daily streams yesterday.
Total: 33,101,179
Tbh is good for Japan to finally have modern male icons who can be exported outside of Japan.
You have someone like Ohtani, and now maybe Keito Nakamura too.
But the thing is they shouldn’t just be exceptions. Japan needs a real exportable ecosystem that can actually promote Japanese masculinity globally.
Japan mostly exports kawaii culture, anime,manga,games, and fictional worlds.
Japan also exported the image of Japanese women way more than Japanese men often in a very sexualized way,sometimes to an extreme degree.
When it comes to Japanese men, the image has always felt more fragmented. You have the calm, reserved samurai type, the genius manga artist like Toriyama or Eiichiro Oda,you have athletes like Ohtan and you have the quiet, reserved Japanese man stereotype/anime characters.
All of these are strong images, but they don’t really create a romantic or desirable global image of Japanese men.
So yeah, Japan has individual male icons. But what it doesn’t really have yet is a whole system that exports Japanese men as modern, romantic, attractive figures on a global scale.