A thirtysomething single Japanese woman who calls herself “Bocco,” who's slim, elegant and attractive, wakes up in her minimalist-chic Sapporo apartment. She immediately sets about systematically preparing her breakfast and the lunch she'll take with her to the office—that’s the half of her breakfast she didn't eat. Relaxing piano music—it sounds like Eric Satie—plays in the background as Bocco grills mackerel on a stove-top grill, makes egg drop soup, and then scrambles some eggs with spinach and oyster sauce.
Bocco has a YouTube channel called “That Single Japanese Gal Vlog.” Her morning cooking session’s part of her hitorigurashi (in Japanese, “single living”) video entitled, “I went to a Sapporo beer garden and somehow ended up dancing” that garnered 110,000 views. Like almost all YouTube videos of this genre, the narration’s done via closed captions. The beer garden she’s going to is an annual major event held in Odori Park. Before leaving for work at her tech job, the only thing Bocco appears to do for her appearance is tie back her hair. It's nearly impossible to discern Bocco’s emotions. She walks to her office with the same dour face she maintains throughout all her videos.
Beer is one of Bocco's passions. At the beer festival, she sits alone, “in the quietest corner” at the end of a large table. No men approach this pretty woman clad in loose-fitting garments. In the five or six of her videos I've watched, she's never indicated a desire to be in a relationship. But she's hardly someone to pity.
Bocco quaffs a large Asahi “Super Dry” draft beer, offering a stiff toast to the camera with a face that looks like she's being held hostage. Moving on to the “German Village,” Bocco orders the “eisbein”—pickled pork knuckle—a glass of dunkel and glass of weisse beer. Both beers are at least 20 ounces. When an entertainer starts singing, Bocco says, "I'd feel bad for the singer if looked totally unenthusiastic right in front of her, so I properly join in and dance.” Properly? Her dancing consists of standing stiffly while moving her beer glass back and forth in front of her. It comes as a shock when she breaks out into a five-second smile, or what she thinks of as a smile. Bocco's on the stiff side.
The video ends with Bocco returning home for a snack and a shower before turning in. The last thing she says is, “I'm really glad my dream of stopping by a beer garden after work came through today.” There's a heartbreaking element to hearing a young woman speaking like this. Her “dream” was fulfilled by walking to a beer garden after work and drinking alone? I think that's part of the appeal of the hitorigurashi genre. As the above description reveals, nothing really happens in them. But among all of the variety of entertainment options out there, how many of them offer this kind of insider glimpse into a life lived alone, without complaint? And Bocco’s no sad sack to be pitied. She does all sorts of things—camping, paddleboarding, etc.—and seems to be having a good time.
Bocco produces her videos in a format typical of hitorigurashi genre: a single person in a small apartment filming their day from waking up, going to work, and then either returning home to cook dinner or going out and hitting a few drinking spots. The narration’s minimal, the soundtrack's soothing, and the pace is slow and meditative, in contrast to the energy of most YouTube videos focusing on one person. The pace is slow, with the camera often focusing on mundane tasks. Japanese people recognize that aesthetic while, judging by the popularity of this genre, the rest of the world is enchanted by it. Almost all the comments are in English. My guess is that people caught up in hectic lives find them soothing just like they used to when watching Bob Ross, the host of the PBS show, The Joy of Painting, paint.
Around 40 percent of Japanese households are occupied by a single person, so Japan’s fertile ground for these videos. A 55-year-old man who calls himself “Uncle Isekai” has a tiny place in Tokyo in which he documents his solitary evenings. It's a shoebox, but does have a spectacular view of the nighttime skyline. Uncle’s evening routine starts with walking to the Hanamasa grocery store, which is a good opportunity to showcase the tremendous variety of food for sale in these stores, most impressively the seafood. He buys a package of pre-cooked eel because “it's said to supply energy and stamina,” a 0.5 percent alcohol beer, a canned “cassis and orange” cocktail, and other grocery items. Back in his tiny room, Uncle's able to put together a tasty-looking meal with minimal effort. He warms up the eel, which he accompanies with cold tofu and pickled vegetables from the store. There's no frozen pizza in a hitorigurashi video.
Not much of anything happens in Uncle’s video. As one commenter put it, “I have no idea why I finished watching this video, but it was the real deal.” There were over 200,000 other people who felt the same way. Viewers like getting a glimpse into a calm, controlled environment in which the focus is being in the moment.
It's hard to predict which hitorigurashi video will become popular. A vlogger who calls himself “Samurai Daddy” documented his loneliness after his wife left him (another of his videos is called “My wife is insane”) in a video that attracted 560,000 views called “I'm struggling at work and am addicted to alcohol.” Samurai Daddy’s a victim of Japanese corporate burnout. He doesn't show his face, and the amount of alcohol he shows himself drinking is far from extreme. I'm guessing empathetic viewers are lured in by his plaintive, wistful tone. “I want to be Italian,” he tells them. “Every time I see Italians they seem to be having so much fun.”
Sometimes a hitorigurashi is revelatory. A beautiful 29-year-old Chinese woman named Ting Ting, who’s barely dated in four years, made a video (2.5 million views) documenting her visit to a "marriage market” in Shenzhen, China out of desperation. When she got there, she saw hundreds of documents on a wall, each containing the vital information of men seeking partners—job, salary, height, weight, education, and more. Strangely enough, there were no photos. Turned off by the entire impersonal selection process, Ting Ting leaves without participating.
One could interpret the hitorigurashi phenomenon as sad evidence of the rampant loneliness in Japanese (and Chinese) society, where marriage as an institution is in decline and young people don't date much, but viewed from another angle, they're a documentation of successful single living from the sort of young people who used to live with their parents until they got married. In this sense, they're about freedom and independence.
Several young and single Japanese women make videos about not worrying if they don't have a date on Saturday night. They refuse to allow their single status to turn them into weekend recluses. Japanese societal norms make this an option, whereas a woman in the U.S. might find solo bar hopping difficult to pull off. In this regard, single American women who can't get a friend to go out with them are more prisoners in their homes than Japanese women are.