“50%” of Japanese women do not have sex

Another day, another media article about sexlessness in Japan.

This time it was an article by Jiji that got republished on The Japan Times.

It focuses on a survey from last September by the Japan Family Planning Association about married couples.

It found that 49.3% of people said they had had no sex in the past month.

“There was a disparity in the sexes,” the article claims, though in fact the numbers are almost the same: 48.3% for men were sexless, 50.1% of women. So around half of people don’t have sex! Of course, it’s natural that married couples have sex less frequently than when they first got hitched, but worryingly both figures were up around 5% from the last survey two years ago.

The survey was not just for married people, though this was where sexlessness was getting worse.

36.2% of men reported having no sex, compared with 50.3% of women. Both figures have shown continuous growth since 2004. The combined total for 2014 was 44.6%.

Asked why, 21.3% of the married men said they were too tired after work, while 15.7% reported no particular reason but said they had become sexually inactive after their wives gave birth.

In all, 23.8% of married women reported having sex was bothersome, and 17.8% cited fatigue from work.

Surely a lack of privacy is one issue here, especially for families that now have one or more kids in an crowded apartment or house. Walls are thin in Japan, which discourages you from being playful with a partner.

Or are we witnessing the birth of a new generation of herbivore men?

17.9% of men said they had little or no interest in sex. Some even said they had an “extreme dislike” of it! Oh man, they need to read this blog more.

The distressing figure jumps to 20.3% for guys aged 25-29, which is a 2.5 increase from the 2008 number.

But wait. How many people are we talking about here? The survey apparently covered 3,000 people aged between 16 and 49. But from this, only a third gave responses that could be used (not sure how two-thirds could screw it up) — 1,134 people.

That’s only a small dent of the nearly 128 million people who populate Japan, so perhaps we should rest easy.