Cambridge graduate Hannah Vassallo spent time embedded with five Japanese fathers and families for her chapter on Ikumen in Cool Japanese Men. Although the men she interviewed on the whole disliked the term, regarding it more as a marketing device, all were happy with their increased role in family life – despite some suffering significant abuse or condemnation from bosses and colleagues.

She said: “On resigning his job to take a more active role in the home one man received comments such as ‘What? A man child-rearing?’ and was criticised by his superiors who felt that he had wasted their time spent training him. His parents were similarly unsympathetic.”

Vassallo believes the fathers she interviewed are setting a promising precedent, especially given Ikumen’s visibility in the media and their own communities. Significantly, though, many aspects of the fathers’ lifestyles continue to be consistent with the post-war salaryman model, relegating most childcare and housework tasks to mothers.

Magazine articles and posters promoting Ikumen often portray such fathers as superheroes – hypermasculine icons who serve the nation through protecting the weak (children and mothers); and frame their roles more in terms of ‘support’, ‘consideration’ and ‘understanding’ for their wives – a somewhat passive fathering model that helps to reinforce existing stereotypes and leaves the gendered division of labour largely intact.

Elsewhere in the book, PhD candidates Christopher Tso and Nanase Shirota discuss Japanese self-help literature which explores the need for men to become better listeners, as well as grooming rituals for Japanese businessmen which include eyebrow plucking and facials as well as hair removal, face slimming and aromatherapy – in direct contrast to the old guard of salarymen who have been described as ‘hairy-bodied, shitty old geezers’.

While body odour has always been a big issue in Japan, it was sometimes seen as a badge of honour for hard-working men. That is no longer the case: Konica have recently released an app that claims to be able to detect the exact type of body odour one might be suffering from, including the dreaded ‘old-age smell’ so terrifying to the modern Japanese businessman.