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The Three Cs: The Men Japan Says You Should Avoid Dating

Unseen Japan
4 min readJan 14, 2025

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Why should you never date a man who makes his own curry roux from scratch?

Pictures: buritora / PIXTA(ピクスタ); Canva

Every culture and society has its rules of the road for dating. One of those rules of the road in Japan for heterosexual women is the “three C men” (3C男; san-shee otoko).

The three Cs are men who aren’t necessarily dangerous or who ought to be avoided at all costs. But under no circumstances, the rule says, should you consider dating them. Why? The advice says these men are unusually picky and fastidious in ways that spell doom and gloom for your relationship.

To their credit, many of the pieces in Japanese on the three Cs admit that there are men in each category who defy the stereotype. Still, these columnists say, you should proceed with caution and only date such a man if they exhibit behavior that breaks the mold.

Here are the men who fall into this disastrous category:

C-1: Photographer

Picture: kikuo / PIXTA(ピクスタ)

Japanese: カメラマン (kameraman)

A photographer, the story goes, spend a lot of time around fashion models and is going to have an overly high standard for…

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Unseen Japan
Unseen Japan

Written by Unseen Japan

The Japan you don’t learn about in anime. A selection of popular stories from our website.

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