Why is Japan suddenly obsessed with… reincarnation?

Claire Heginbotham
5 min readAug 13, 2021
Photo by Ryan Miguel Capili from Pexels

This article’s not about religious reincarnation.

It’s about a movement. A movement led by young office workers. A movement led by people wandering across the hopeless, desolate landscape of corporate life in your 20s and 30s. It's about the solution to a society so depressing, all we want is to escape it.

This article is about the fantasy of reincarnation.

Back in 2005, I was starting my troubled teendom. My parents sucked, my hair was frizzy, and I didn’t really know why I had to wear a bra all of a sudden. Lame.

In my desperation to escape, I lost myself in fantasy books. Garth Nix, C.S Lewis, Terry Pratchett, JK Rowling— I was like a drowning person trying to keep myself afloat with words. Then, in came Naruto and I dove down into a whirlpool of fighting anime, girly anime, food anime, romance anime, slice of life anime, any anime. I bounced from episode to episode, hoping it would rescue me from the darkness.

More than anything, I wished I could enter these fantastical worlds myself. I wished I could escape.

The reincarnation storyline

We meet the main character — a man or woman ages 15–29 — in the normal world. They are unhappy with their current life. It’s almost like they are…

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Claire Heginbotham

Tech and travel copywriter who writes content, kickass websites, and emails that convert. Low key Star Trek fan.