From romancing women to teaching men: an analysis of vulnerability and entrepreneurial masculinity on Japanese YouTube in <i>The Roland Show</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes a recent Japanese reality-based web series on YouTube entitled The Roland Show, which portrays the daily life of a male host named Roland. Roland is a media personality who found stardom in the world of host clubs, establishments where a mostly female clientele patronizes male nightlife workers who offer an idealized version of masculinity and romance. Interestingly, Roland has remarked upon his channel’s overwhelmingly male audience. Although his vocation as host is to embody an ideal man for women clients, he has found an audience in the media largely comprised of men rather than women.In this article, I highlight the homosocial aspects of what other scholars have called entrepreneurial masculinity which refers to how male workers in the host industry in Japan perform an idealized version of masculinity to appeal to female clients. I contextualize entrepreneurial masculinity in Japan in light of the long-standing connection between masculinity and labor dating back to the origins of modern Japanese culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.I use scholarship about YouTube as a medium by Martin Roth and Takinami Yūki to analyze how the performers and viewers of The Roland Show interact with Takeyama’s term entrepreneurial masculinity. Roland’s popularity with male viewers is due to his ability to teach them how to be a better man and perform entrepreneurial masculinity. I argue that, for The Roland Show, entrepreneurial masculinity is above all pedagogical: it must be taught to other men. For Roland, the skill of teaching other men is itself an important aspect of what it means to be an ideal man.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".