In February 2025, I wrote an article called How to Tell if a Japanese Person Likes You.

I listed several possible signs. They might invite you somewhere alone, message you frequently, give you small gifts, ask about your future plans or become more relaxed around you.

At the time, I approached it mainly as a question about Japanese communication. If people are less likely to express romantic feelings directly, perhaps there are other signals we can learn to recognize.

Looking at the article again, I became curious about something more basic.

How reliable are those signals in the first place?

If someone messages me often, does that mean they like me? If they invite me somewhere alone, is it a date? If they become more comfortable around me, is that attraction or simply friendship?

And there is another complication I hadn’t really considered.

What if I already like them?

Seeing what we hope to see

It seems reasonable to think that we can notice when someone is attracted to us.

We watch how they behave. We notice whether they seek us out, how often they contact us and whether they seem interested in spending time together.

The problem is that we aren’t neutral observers.

Research into romantic perception shows that people have some ability to recognize how others feel, but our own feelings can influence what we think we see.

That makes sense when I think about it.

If someone I have no romantic interest in sends me a message, I may simply read the message.

If someone I am attracted to sends exactly the same message, I might wonder why they sent it, how quickly they replied, what a particular emoji means or whether there is something behind the words.

The message hasn’t changed.

I have.

Attraction makes interpretation harder

Speed-dating research makes this even more interesting.

Researchers have studied whether people can accurately judge how attracted another person is to them after meeting.

People aren’t completely clueless. There is information in behavior that can be picked up.

But their own attraction can also affect their judgment of the other person’s attraction.

In other words, the person I am trying to understand is not the only variable.

I am one too.

That creates a strange problem.

The more I want a particular interpretation to be true, the less certain I can be that I am simply observing what is happening.

A smile can become a sign.

A message can become a sign.

An invitation can become a sign.

Before long, I may have assembled several pieces of evidence for something that the other person never intended to communicate.

What about Japan?

That brought me back to my original question.

Perhaps Japanese communication makes romantic interest particularly difficult to recognize.

There are certainly cultural conventions worth understanding. People don’t communicate in a vacuum, and the way affection, politeness and relationships are expressed can differ between societies and between individuals.

But I couldn’t find evidence for the simple idea that Japanese romantic interest can be decoded through a particular collection of signs.

In fact, Japanese research has found the same basic problem of people overestimating another person’s romantic or sexual interest.

So culture may change some of the signals, but it doesn’t remove the uncertainty.

That makes my old list look different.

A Japanese person inviting someone out alone could be showing romantic interest.

But so could someone anywhere.

And they could also just want company.

The same sign can mean different things

This became the biggest weakness I could see in my original article.

Almost everything I listed can have another explanation.

Frequent messages can indicate attraction, friendship or simply someone who likes messaging.

A gift can be affectionate, romantic or an ordinary social gesture.

Asking about someone’s plans can show interest in a shared future, or it can just be conversation.

Becoming more relaxed around someone may indicate growing intimacy, but intimacy isn’t necessarily romantic.

Even wanting to spend time alone together doesn’t settle the question.

All of these behaviors are compatible with attraction.

That isn’t the same as proving it.

The distinction sounds obvious once I write it down, but it changes the question considerably.

Instead of asking, “What are the signs that someone likes me?”

Perhaps I should ask, “What else could this mean?”

Honne and tatemae don’t solve it either

In my original article, I also brought up the Japanese concepts of honne and tatemae.

I described tatemae as the public face someone presents and honne as their true feelings, suggesting that someone revealing more of their real personality might be a sign that they like you.

I would be more careful with that explanation now.

Someone becoming more comfortable around me probably does tell me something about the relationship. Perhaps they trust me more. Perhaps they no longer feel the need to be formal. Perhaps we have simply become friends.

But that doesn’t give me access to a hidden romantic intention.

A person can genuinely be polite.

They can genuinely be reserved.

And the more relaxed person I eventually get to know isn’t necessarily more “real” than the person I met at the beginning.

People behave differently in different relationships and situations.

That seems more useful to me than dividing their behavior into a public version and a true version.

Living alone doesn’t tell me either

There was another assumption in my old article that bothered me once I looked at it more carefully.

I referred to Japan’s large number of single-person households and connected this with people preferring the freedom of being single.

But a single-person household only tells me that one person lives there.

It doesn’t tell me whether they have a partner.

It doesn’t tell me whether they want one.

And it certainly doesn’t tell me why a particular person might or might not be interested in a relationship.

Japan’s National Fertility Survey paints a much more complicated picture. Many unmarried young adults say they eventually want to marry, while a substantial proportion also say they currently don’t want a romantic relationship.

Both can be true.

Someone can imagine marriage someday without wanting a relationship now.

Once again, a simple statistic doesn’t reveal what an individual person feels.

Maybe the uncertainty is unavoidable

After investigating all of this, I started wondering whether my original question had a problem built into it.

“How can I tell if someone likes me?” assumes there must be enough signs to eventually know.

Perhaps there aren’t.

I can notice patterns.

I can learn cultural conventions.

I can become better at reading situations.

But none of those things lets me see inside another person’s mind.

And trying too hard to decode every signal may actually make things worse, especially when my own feelings are influencing the interpretation.

There is, however, another possibility.

I can communicate.

From decoding to discovering

Interestingly, my old article ended with advice that I still agree with.

Ask them out.

I would phrase it a little differently now.

Rather than collecting enough clues until I feel certain that someone likes me, I can create an opportunity to discover what happens next.

I can invite them somewhere.

I can express my own interest.

I can give them room to respond without pressure.

That response still needs to be understood carefully. Someone agreeing to coffee has agreed to coffee. It doesn’t automatically mean they want a relationship.

But communication gradually replaces guessing with information.

Perhaps that is the part I was missing when I wrote the original article.

I was looking for signs that would tell me what another person was feeling.

Now I think the more interesting question is what happens inside me while I’m looking for those signs.

Sometimes the hardest person to read isn’t the person I like. It is myself.

Sources

• My original article: How to Tell if a Japanese Person Likes You (February 15, 2025).
  https://karltschoppnavarat.com/2025/02/15/how-to-tell-if-a-japanese-person-likes-you/
• LaBuda & Gere (2023), A meta-analytic review of accuracy and bias in romantic partner perceptions.
  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38713750/
• The Role of Emotion Projection, Sexual Desire, and Self-Rated Attractiveness in the Sexual Overperception Bias (2021).
  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8416843/
• Hiraishi et al. (2016), Sexual and Romantic Overperception among a Japanese young sample: A Replication of Haselton (2003).
  https://doi.org/10.5178/lebs.2016.47
• Koenig, Kirkpatrick & Ketelaar (2007), Misperception of sexual and romantic interests in opposite-sex friendships: Four hypotheses.
  https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6811.2007.00163.x
• National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 16th Japanese National Fertility Survey (2021).
  https://www.ipss.go.jp/ps-doukou/e/doukou16/Nfs16_gaiyoEng.html