I have absolutely no confidence in my looks, and I only have about ¥1 million to my name. But I can sing my heart out. I’m not a singer or anything—I’m just an otaku middle-aged guy. Would a woman still find someone like me attractive?

If you’re talented at singing, you can upload your work to social media, YouTube, and other platforms these days and get discovered even if you’re unknown. So if no one has discovered you, it’s reasonable to assume that you either lack talent or simply don’t have enough appeal.

For certain types of women, it would probably be easy to get a man like the person asking this question to hand over the entire 1 million yen. All she’d have to do is compliment his singing and lead him into genuinely falling for her. The key is to: 1. Never directly ask him for money. 2. Repeatedly emphasize that she’s struggling financially, but still working hard without giving up on her dreams. It’s probably easier to take the full 1 million yen from someone who only has 1 million yen than to get 1 million yen from someone with 100 million. And the less attractive the man is, the higher her chances of making him genuinely fall for her. To put it another way, she’s like a beautiful vampire—someone who can only feel fulfilled by driving her partner to ruin. It would probably be safer to get away from her as soon as possible. But once he moves somewhere safe, away from that cliff, will the person asking this question really be happy? Will he be able to forget the beautiful flower blooming on the edge of the cliff? It’s his money, so whether he throws it off the cliff toward that beautiful flower is entirely up to him.

Is this a troll question? I think it might help to consider whether you’d find that kind of man attractive if you were a woman. If you think you would, then that’s fine. And regardless of how people see you, I don’t think it changes the way you choose to live. A beginning elementary school teacher’s salary in the early Showa era was 50 yen, while today it’s around 200,000 yen. By that logic, 1 million yen back then would be about 4 billion yen today, so there may well be women who find the amount of money he has attractive. Wait—does that mean someone from the early Showa era has traveled through time to ask this question?

“Women” probably won’t find you attractive. There may be women who do find you attractive.