Overview

Hā-Rì-Zú (哈日族) is a Chinese-language term for young people in the Chinese-speaking world — mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau — who take an interest in contemporary Japanese popular culture. In plain terms, it describes the Chinese-speaking equivalent of a Japan-obsessed fan: someone drawn to anime, street fashion, J-pop, and Japanese consumer electronics.

The word originated in Taiwan and later spread to Hong Kong, mainland China, Macau, and other Chinese-speaking communities. It is also used as a substitute for “pro-Japanese,” describing a person who holds favorable feelings toward Japan. Over time, the scope of what counts as hā rì has widened from pop culture and clothing to include traditional Japanese culture and performing arts. When a person becomes absorbed in some Japanese thing, they are said to be “very hā rì” (很哈日).

In Taiwan, the term specifically refers to young people, not to the older benshengren generation that grew up with Japanese-language education during the period of Japanese rule. The Taiwanese magazine The Journalist has reported on the flow of Japanese culture into the island.

What the Term Names

The compound is built from hā — a rendering of the English word “hot” into Taiwanese Hokkien — and rì, meaning Japan. Zú means a group or tribe. Together the phrase marks out a demographic defined less by age than by appetite: mostly young, slightly more female than male, well educated, concentrated in northern Taiwan, and skewing toward students, service workers, and office employees from higher-income households.

A 1997 audience survey cited in the ICP Marketing Yearbook found that where 13.3 percent of the general population named J-pop as a favorite music genre, 38.7 percent of hā rì zú did. A magazine called Dong Nao summarized the group’s habits from Oriental Advertising’s market research: frequent visitors to manga rental shops, heavy consumers of entertainment news, devoted viewers of Japanese dramas who also watched more American television than average, brand-conscious, advertisement-attentive, and careful about makeup when going out.

The phrase was coined by the Taiwanese manga artist Hā Rì Xingzi, whose books carried it into wider circulation. She described the condition it names — hā rì zhèng, or “Japan-love syndrome” — as a life organized entirely around Japanese things: Japanese food at every meal, Japanese dramas and films and books, Japanese songs, Japanese-made goods, conversation that circles back to Japan, and hours spent wandering Japanese department stores. Anything less, in her account, felt unbearable.

A deeper variant exists. Those with more committed involvement are called zhī rì pài — the Japan-knowledgeable — and their Japanese ability tends to be high; they study Japanese politics and economics, read Japanese books and newspapers, and travel to Japan regularly to soak in hot springs. A parallel coinage, hā měi zú, applies the same construction to Chinese-speaking admirers of the United States.

The Videotape Years

Taiwan’s appetite for Japanese culture did not begin with the word that later named it. It began with occupation. Under Japanese colonial rule, Japanese culture carried enormous influence across the island, and that influence outlasted the administration that produced it. When the Kuomintang government arrived after the war and governed under martial law, it banned the screening of Japanese television dramas and films. Books and manga were another matter, and they kept reaching the island’s youth regardless of what the regulations said.

The photographic record from that period tells its own story. A gallery of images of Taipei taken shortly after the war by a photographer for the Mainichi Shimbun in 1951 shows how strongly Japanese coloring persisted in the city despite the Kuomintang’s restrictions.

Forty-Six Percent

By the 1980s, Japanese culture was officially regulated in Taiwan: broadcasting Japanese television programs and selling popular Japanese songs were both prohibited. The prohibition held on paper. It did not hold in practice. Sumo, professional wrestling, and the NHK Kōhaku Uta Gassen circulated as videotapes through rental shops across the island. Specialty stores handling Japanese music tapes appeared starting in 1982, and posters and photographs of Japanese idols circulated widely alongside them.

Illegal cable television spread in Taiwan from the early 1980s, and the programming it carried was overwhelmingly Japanese. Broken down by country of production, Japanese programs accounted for 46 percent of what early cable television aired, against 27 percent from Europe and the United States, 16 percent from Hong Kong, and 11 percent from Taiwan.

The Ban Comes Down

Hong Kong stars began appearing in Japanese trend dramas from 1992, and those dramas found audiences. Terrestrial broadcasters, watching their ratings slip, pressed for the ban on Japanese programming to be lifted. It was lifted in early 1994. The dramas came first, and Oshin, broadcast that year, set a new ratings record for the drama category.

The commercial side moved on its own schedule. Sony entered Taiwan’s music market in July 1993, and a stream of Japanese entertainers began visiting the island.

Antennas

Democratization under Lee Teng-hui followed the lifting of martial law, and in 1988 the installation of parabolic antennas was permitted. Reception of NHK satellite broadcasts opened the door, and Japanese films and television dramas followed. Becoming Hā-Rì-Zú grew easier with each of these turns.

The Sanctum and the Queue

Ximending became the Hā-Rì-Zú’s holy site, the place where devotees bought clothing, accessories, and mobile phone straps in bulk, studied Japanese fashion magazines, and learned Japanese approaches to makeup.

The clearest measure of how far the current ran came in the summer of 1999, when Hello Kitty swept Taiwan and the “Hello Kitty riots” broke out at McDonald’s outlets across the island. Each store sold four types of Hello Kitty figurines over the course of a month. The price was 69 New Taiwan dollars with a McDonald’s set, or 119 New Taiwan dollars for the figurine alone. Customers began lining up in the middle of the night before opening. The 500,000 figurines McDonald’s had prepared sold out almost the instant the doors opened, and stores changed their sales start time to noon in response. Each week thereafter, the stock sold out nearly as soon as it went on sale, and violence broke out among people waiting in line.

Hello Kitty’s popularity ran especially high across Asia. McDonald’s outlets in Hong Kong sold the figurines in July 1999, and all 2.5 million of them were gone in three days. At Harmonyland, Hong Kong visitors made up 80 percent of foreign tourists in 1998, and Taiwanese visitors made up 70 percent in 1999.

What the Statistics Showed

Taiwan required review by the Government Information Office for book imports and exports, and that requirement produced detailed statistics on import volume by language. Books in Japanese accounted for 5 percent of all imported books in 1990. By 1997 that share had reached 10.1 percent. Among imported magazines, the Japanese share climbed from 15.7 percent in 1990 to 22.1 percent in 1997. In the 1997 bestseller ranking of magazines at the Caves Books chain, non-no placed sixth.

A market survey of residents across Taiwan, published in the 1997 ICP Marketing Yearbook, asked respondents which music they liked best. Japanese enka barely moved across the survey years: 4.0 percent in 1991, 5.3 percent in 1993, 4.8 percent in 1996. J-pop told a different story. It rose from 7.3 percent in 1991 to 9.3 percent in 1993 to 12.8 percent in 1996, a steady increase that appears connected to the popularity of Japanese trend dramas on Taiwanese satellite channels from around 1994.

The Objection from Outside

Even in Taiwan, an island generally described as friendly toward Japan, hostility to Japanese culture existed, and it came most sharply from waishengren — mainlanders who had moved to Taiwan after the war. One such critic put the complaint plainly: Japanese products were everywhere, Hello Kitty, Melody, Tarepanda, Dango San Kyōdai, until the island looked Japanese enough that the writer wondered who was left to care about Taiwanese culture. The same writer asked whether Hā-Rì-Zú had ever studied history, and suggested that their behavior amounted to telling the Japanese government it was welcome to invade again.

What the Commentators Argued

The United Daily News carried a similar line of opinion around the time of the 1997 killing of a young child by a middle school student in Kobe. The paper’s argument conceded a point: adult videos and manga circulating in Taiwan were almost entirely Japanese, and low-grade Japanese culture was indeed flowing in freely. The cause, it proposed, lay in the cultural similarity between Taiwan and Japan and in the island’s comparatively strict domestic regulation.

Named critics pressed the case on different grounds. Li Qinan argued that Taiwanese culture was being broken apart by imported consumer culture — Japanese Tamagotchi and Hello Kitty, Hong Kong’s put chai ko, American McDonald’s, Australian koalas — and that if the process continued, a distinct Taiwanese culture would be lost; the remedy was cultural policy. Li Yongchi pointed out that Japanese culture was not the only popular culture in circulation, yet Taiwan adopted Japanese pop culture faster than any other, and argued that the island needed a perspective of exchange rather than one-way importation. Lin Shuifu held that young Taiwanese were learning only the shallow parts of Japanese culture: what took hold in Taiwan was idols and adult videos, the low end, while none of Japan’s strengths came over. Hā-Rì-Zú, on this reading, did not necessarily involve deep understanding of Japanese culture, and the phenomenon was better explained as surface-level fashion-following than as a dimension of pro-Japan or anti-Japan sentiment.

The Questionnaire

Su Suchui analyzed the attributes of Hā-Rì-Zú through a survey of high school and university students. The findings cut against the assumption that the term marked political alignment. Young people’s preference for Japanese popular culture showed no relationship to ethnic background — waishengren or benshengren — which indicated that being Hā-Rì-Zú stood apart from the pro-Japan/anti-Japan axis entirely. Two traits did hold: youth, and brand orientation.

Where the Term Went

Hā-Rì-Zú began as Taiwanese usage and spread outward. Hong Kong adopted it, and it became current in mainland China, Macau, and other Chinese-speaking communities as well. Its reach expanded past fashion and pop into traditional Japanese culture and traditional performing arts. The phrase also settled into a second life as a substitute for “pro-Japanese,” available to describe anyone who holds favorable feelings toward Japan. A sentence that began as a cartoonist’s coinage for a specific consumer type has since been applied to a far wider set of people, and in that widening it absorbed every debate the island was already having about itself.