Reisho

Reishō (冷笑), also romanized as Reisho, means laughing at someone with contempt or derision. It is an old word of Chinese origin, used in phrases such as reishō o ukaberu ("to wear a contemptuous smile"). Online, it often refers to an attitude of coolly making fun of other people's sincere views and passions from on high.

People who take this attitude are called reishō-kei (冷笑系), literally "reishō types." As a group, they are also sometimes called the reishō kaiwai (冷笑界隈), roughly "the reishō scene." Reishō-kei is said to be used more often as a label for criticizing others than as a name people give themselves. Among junior high and high school girls, however, it has also caught on as a term for keeping one's distance: instinctively stepping back when someone is deeply absorbed in something.

A playful trend is also said to have emerged around 2025, in which the stock phrases used for reishō become the joke themselves.

The word reishō has been around for a long time, and its meaning itself has not changed.

However, one trend that has grown since the 2020s, influenced by the internet, is that it is often used to make fun of people who are trying hard.

A Word of Chinese Origin

Reishō is a word of Chinese origin that also appears in the Chinese classics, and the kanji dictionary Jitsū cites an example from the History of the Northern Dynasties, one of China's dynastic histories. In Japan, the line "冷笑人間万事非" appears in Kūgeshū (around 1359 to 1368), a collection of poetry and prose written in Chinese by Gidō Shūshin, a Zen monk of the Nanboku-chō period. Of the examples listed in the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten dictionary, this is the oldest.

The word also turns up in a sharebon (a genre of Edo-period popular fiction) from 1756. For the adjectival form reishōteki (冷笑的), the oldest example given in the same dictionary is Natsume Sōseki's novel Light and Darkness (Meian, 1916).

Reishō-kei Online

It is unclear when, and by whom, the word reishō-kei was first used. Online irony itself has been discussed since the message board era. In 2005, sociologist Akihiro Kitada examined the irony found on the anonymous message board 2channel in his book Warau Nihon no "Nationalism" (roughly "Japan's Sneering 'Nationalism'").

In December 2019, Shōtarō Tsuda, then a professor at Hosei University, wrote about reishō shugi (冷笑主義), literally "reishō-ism," in Gendai Business, a web outlet run by the publisher Kodansha. Tsuda describes it as an attitude of always trying to interpret other people's words and actions in terms of selfish motives.

A June 2020 article in Forbes JAPAN applied the term reishō-kei to people who dismiss political views and social activism as self-righteous and scoff at them with a condescending air. The month before, in May, a hashtag meaning "I protest the proposed amendment to the Public Prosecutor's Office Act" had spread on Twitter (now X). As an example, the article cited the cold reactions aimed at celebrities who had backed the protest.

Reishō Becomes a Meme

From around 2025, a reishō pattern that adds the sweat-smile emoji 😅 to a short stock phrase is said to have started circulating as a joke. It takes the form of a one-line reply to someone's earnest post, such as "uo w😅" (uo being an exclamation like "whoa"), "kakkē w😅" (slangy "so cool"), or "soko made w😅" ("going that far"). The w is Japanese internet shorthand for laughter, similar to "lol." Of these, "uo w" is said to have originated in live-stream comment sections, but there are several theories about its source.

Reishō-kei placed third in the Words category of the JC・JK Ryūkōgo Taishō buzzword ranking for the first half of 2026, announced in June 2026 by the private companies AMF and Skyfall. JC and JK are slang abbreviations for junior high and high school girls, and the ranking is based on a survey of about 1,000 such girls across Japan.

Reishō, Chōshō, and Shisshō

Reishō, chōshō (嘲笑, ridicule or mockery), and seserawarai (せせら笑い, scornful laughter) all describe laughing at someone while looking down on them. The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten defines reishō as "laughing in contempt" and chōshō as "laughing in mockery; laughing to make fun of someone." The two definitions differ in emphasis: reishō leans toward contempt, while chōshō leans toward teasing.

Shisshō (失笑) originally means bursting out laughing despite oneself, and carries no sense of looking down on anyone. In the Agency for Cultural Affairs' fiscal 2023 "Public Opinion Survey on the Japanese Language," only 26.4% of respondents chose this original meaning. As many as 67.0% chose "to be so appalled one cannot even laugh."

Reishō and the English Word Cynic

Reishō shugi is used as the Japanese translation of the English word cynicism. The word cynic goes back to the Cynics, a school of ancient Greek philosophy. Their name, rendered in Japanese as kenju-ha ("dog scholars"), is said to come from the Greek kynikos, meaning "doglike."

There are two theories about why they were called dogs. One holds that the name comes from the Cynosarges, the gymnasium where the school's founder Antisthenes taught. The other holds that it was a contemptuous nickname for their way of life, which rejected convention.

The core of English cynicism is distrust of other people's motives. The reishō shugi that Tsuda discussed overlaps with this, in that it regards those motives as selfish. Online, reishō-kei refers less to doubting motives and more to the behavior of laughing at sincerity. As an act, reishō is close to the English sneer.

Criticism of Reishō-kei

Articles in Forbes JAPAN and Newsweek Japan have taken a critical look at reishō aimed at people who speak up on social and political issues. The problem, as it is framed, is that people look down on and laugh at whoever is making the argument instead of responding to its substance.