Bah, humbug! Why some Japanese men who are ‘losers with women’ hate Christmas
The men belong to a Communist-inspired group of singletons that has held past marches to denounce imported Western holidays, including Valentine’s Day
It’s become a bit of a holiday tradition in Japan: groups of angry, unloved men taking to the streets to protest society’s discrimination against their single status and the commercialisation of Christmas.
About two dozen men from the protest group, Losers with Women, which is a faction of the Revolutionary Losers’ League, paraded through Tokyo’s Shibuya district on the weekend chanting against the injustices of capitalism. Their demands were all too often drowned out by Christmas songs blaring out from shops and restaurants.
Others protesters wielded banners, one of which read “Smash Christmas,” as they passed couples and families going about their preparations for the festive season largely oblivious of the demonstration.
It was, however, unclear whether the protesters were more angered at capitalism and consumerism or their failure to find a girlfriend for the gift-giving time of year.
“In this world, money is extracted from people in love and happy people support capitalism,” the leader of the group, who goes by the pseudonym MarkWater, told AFP.
“Unpopular men, who do not have a girlfriend or are not married, are discriminated against,” he added. “We want to break this barrier.”
Christmas, along with Valentine’s Day, are red-letter days for an organisation that claims its roots are in the Marxist struggle. Many of the league’s members wear helmets and scarves concealing the lower halves of their faces that were worn by student demonstrators in violent protests against the presence of the US military in Japan in the 1960s.
The organisation was founded in 2006 by Katsuhiro Furusawa, who started reading the Communist manifesto after being dumped by his girlfriend shortly before Christmas - and swiftly concluded that not being popular with the opposite sex is a class issue.
Furusawa was forced to step down from the group last year, however, after fellow members questioned his Marxist credentials when he purchased a Mercedes.
