AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to over 30 million articles from top publications available through your library.
Create a link to this page
Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:
Loser Dog Nation.
Byline: Kay Itoi
This may be the year of monkey, but Japanese will remember 2004 as the Year of Loser Dogs, thanks to an ongoing national debate.
It started with Junko Sakai's book, "Loser Dogs Barking," out since October. Single and childless women in their 30s or older are makeinu , the author declared. It doesn't matter how successful, beautiful or happy they might be. They're all "loser dogs."
How rude, you might say. But Sakai, 37, has a disarming defense. She's one, too. Japan's loser dogs, she says, go around barking about how fine they are without a husband--all the while obsessing about getting married. Their problem is that they just don't have a clue how to do it. Instead of going out to meet a guy, they adopt a prized Persian cat. Instead of dating an available, "nice" (meaning boring) man, they go for the dangerously attractive married one. The result: hordes of loser-dog girls packing Tokyo's finest restaurants, yapping about how they totally identify with Carrie in "Sex and the City." (Japan being a couple of seasons behind, they haven't seen the series' happy ending.)
It's an issue close to my heart. Single until very recently, I'm still half-caught in loser-dogdom, along with my dearest friends. I particularly resent the Japanese government's blaming falling birthrates on the fact that women are marrying increasingly later in life, if at all. Yes, nearly a third of Tokyo's female thirtysomethings are single. But the figure is 44 percent for men. (Loser dawgs?) Yet nobody blames them. Why?
Sakai's book has sold 150,000 copies--a big hit. In offices, cafes and sushi bars, as well as on the Net and in the media, women debate if loser dogs are really losers, and if so whether it's too late to find happiness. Not long ago I overheard a group of women in their early 20s separating "cool" loser dogs, ...
- Women wrest spending; Ad force: Marketers race to target schoolgirls, loser...
- Magazine article from: Advertising Age Madden, Normandy September 19, 2005 700+ words
Byline: Normandy Madden Traditionally, men have been the powerful force in Japan, but now it is women's time in the sun. Not only are Japanese schoolgirls influencing cultural trends around the world, the country's growing number of stay-at-home single women and affluent divorcees are now an
- Women hold the key to the Japanese market.(wine industry, consumer behavior)
- Magazine article from: Wines & Vines Shoji, Sandra November 1, 2004 700+ words
...single women in their 30s, who love to shop and eat out. They've been labeled "Loser Dogs," after Junko Sakai's best seller, The Barking of Loser Dogs. In the book, Sakai describes Japan's well-educated career women as independent...
- The Gucci-wielding moms.
- Magazine article from: Advertising Age McCaughan, Dave November 13, 2006 700+ words
...couple of years ago, there was a best-selling book in Japan called "The Howl of the Make-inu'' (or "Howl of the Loser Dogs'') that described 30-something women who had yet to obtain their own children and families. The author suggested that...
- Changing society.(Japan)
- Magazine article from: Advertising Age September 19, 2005 700+ words
...women in their 30s who would rather have a successful career than children call themselves makeinu, the Japanese word for a "loser dog.'' The point? If traditionalists see them as losers for rejecting the role of wife and mother, they may as well revel...
- Love match developed as commoner courted royal at tennis games.
- Newspaper article from: Yomiuri Shimbun (Toyko, Japan) January 4, 2005 700+ words
...since this is a matter of romance," Kuroda told a close friend. In the best-seller "Makeinu no toboe" ("Howling of Loser Dogs"), Junko Sakai branded women older than 30 who were unmarried as losers. Sakai wrote that Princess Nori was the "last...
Source: HighBeam Research, Loser Dog Nation.