Why Have Young People In Japan Stopped Having Sex?
Japanese people under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships.
For their government, "celibacy syndrome" is part of a looming national catastrophe.
Japan already has one of the world’s lowest birth rates. 45% of Japanese women aged 16-24 are “not interested in or despise sexual contact”.
More than a quarter of men feel the same way. Is Japan providing a glimpse of all our futures?
Many of the shifts there are occurring in other advanced nations, too.
Across urban Asia, Europe and America, people are marrying later or not at all, birth rates are falling, single-occupant households are on the rise and, in countries where economic recession is worst, young people are living at home.
Ai Aoyama is a sex and relationship counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back street… she did “all the usual things” like tying people up and dripping hot wax on their nipples.
Her work today, she says, is far more challenging. Aoyama, 52, is trying to cure what Japan’s media calls sekkusu shinai shokogun, or “celibacy syndrome”.
Japan's population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060.
Aoyama believes the country is experiencing “a flight from human intimacy” – and it’s partly the government’s fault.
The number of single people has reached a record high. A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier.
Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all. There are no figures for same-sex relationships.
Although there has long been a pragmatic separation of love and sex in Japan – a country mostly free of religious morals – sex fares no better.
A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 “were not interested in or despised sexual contact”.
More than a quarter of men felt the same way. Official alarmism doesn’t help.
Fewer babies were born here in 2012 than any year on record.
This was also the year, as the number of elderly people shoots up, that adult incontinence pants outsold baby nappies in Japan for the first time.
Kunio Kitamura, head of the JFPA, claims the demographic crisis is so serious that Japan “might eventually perish into extinction”.
