“Money Buys Everything” Sparks Debate on 5ch — “You Can Buy Class Too”

Background and Key Points

5ch is the successor to the old 2channel, Japan’s largest anonymous message-board network, and Nanimo Jikkyou (なんJ) is one of its most-read subforums — originally built for live sports commentary but long since drifted into general chat dominated by young, mostly male posters trading deadpan, often self-deprecating banter. The “Leorio” reference nods to Hunter x Hunter, whose money-obsessed character is nanJ shorthand for exactly this argument; invoking him signals the poster expects to be mocked, which is part of the board’s house style. The debate itself sits against three decades of flat real wages and a widening gap between secure “regular” employees and irregular, precarious workers in Japan — the kind of backdrop that makes “just buy an S&P 500 position and stop working” read as aspirational rather than abstract to this audience.

The thread doesn’t actually split over whether money buys most things — nearly everyone agrees it buys comfort, deference, and escape from labor. The real fault line is over hinkaku, “class” or refinement: one side treats it as an innate trait money can’t touch, the other insists it’s just another purchasable trapping, buyable by literally acquiring a title (company president, hospital director) the way status was bought in earlier eras.

What’s easy to miss reading this in English is that no one in the thread invokes any actual data — no Gini coefficient, no wage statistics, nothing about Japan’s comparatively narrow income inequality relative to the US. It’s a purely rhetorical, meme-driven exercise, not a policy discussion, and its cynicism is a genre convention of the board rather than a demographic survey of Japanese attitudes toward wealth.