The Japanese have long been tagged with the strangest of reputations, stretching from both extremes of tentacle porn to a sexless conservatism like no other culture has seen. Every other article I read on the subject deals with one or the other, looking at Japanese love from just a single perspective and often focusing on the symptoms, not the root. So much so that, in a 2017 article in The Japan Times, Kaori Shoji tried to plea for a deeper analysis of “Japanese love”, explaining that Japanese society prioritises ceremony or face value modern traditions, rather than ‘Eros’, or romantic love. She sums this up by saying: