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Comment by BlameKaneda | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to me that the Japanese words in the table, "bushido", "katana", and "yakuza" are more known to (this dataset of) men than women. The fashion-related words (taffeta, chignon, espadrille, etc) being known more to women makes sense to me, but I'm not sure why the three Japanese words are more known to men.

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My guess is that their martial link is why more men know of them, rather than the fact that the words are Japanese. I would suspect that the same would hold true for martial words of non-Japanese origin as well.

Like "Howitzer" (~85/~55).

A code of honor, a sword, and a mob. These are stereotypically masculine topics, and also words that appear in video games and movies, sometimes as the title itself.

japanese cultural appreciation is heavily indexed on nerd culture and that's heavily men. just an additional audience to skew the metrics.

Weird Al should have a yakuza-themed album with about half nerdcore and half alternately shouting and squealing in Japanese.

Sounds like the rappers from Snow Crash.

For the closest real-world analogue, check out m-flo.

Cool.

I was just thinking there ought to be an AI chat agent that can recommend music based on themes and mood, perhaps with a periodic, paradoxically-opposite sense of humor.

The biggest weebs I knew in college were women. Sailor Moon is woefully underestimated in terms of how much it contributed to redressing the nerd gender balance. I won't say that it's completely redressed, but female anime fans and japanophiles are considerably more prevalent now than in decades past.

Now, the bits of culture that concern swords and warrior codes of honor? Yeah, those are boy things, mainly.

yeah that reminds me its something I’ve noticed too.

although I encountered something similar, in my schools they were a very distinct subculture defined by their affinity to Japanese culture, whereas what I see now amongst younger people is that many more attractive popular well adjusted women (people in general) are ok with or into anime, that style, and non-US cinema at all. I like this outcome.

It's interesting to me that the Japanese words in the table, "bushido", "katana", and "yakuza" are more known to (this dataset of) men than women.

Those three words in particular feature heavily in lots of video games and films. That could explain some of it.

The Yakuza were in a season 8 episode of The Simpsons in 1997. That would help make it a perfectly cromulent word for a lot of people.

I'm skeptical about the result for katana, though. Women are almost as likely to know "boson" as "katana"?

I doubt that particular word (katana) would be quite so permanently stuck in my head if not for watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles a lot as a kid. That was a show that was for-sure aimed at boys.

The other places I could imagine having encountered it enough for it to have stuck are action video games and Japanese or Japanese-influenced action cinema & anime. I have some very confident guesses at how male and female interest rates in those would break down.

The word 'boson' was in the news quite a lot for the last decade or so, due to CERN. The word 'katana', not so much.

An intersection of military history, video games, and weeb-dom. 'Yakuza' is notably a popular and long-running video game series

I would think, given your username, that you would have a feeling that these male words are more 'badass'?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the gender ratio of "people who have seen Akira" is probably 10:1 male:female

come on, I made sure every girlfriend I ever had learned all about it shortly before breaking up with me!

Dudes are all secretly gangsta OGs working up the food chain to be a baws someday.

Oh, the fast food chain, you mean.

If those jobs haven't been automated yet. Brought to you by Carl's Jr.

https://shiftwa.org/fast-food-chains-announce-automation-pla...

I'd be curious to see the skew among native Japanese speakers - I'm assuming the test in the link was run on Americans.

English speakers. If you look at the original study they have a similar breakdown for US vs. UK, which is almost more interesting.

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