High schoolers in Japan are kissing and having sex less

A survey has found that the number of high school students who have never kissed someone had increased.

The numbers of high schoolers with experience of kissing or sex is now around half of what it was in the early 2000s.

The Japanese Association for Sex Education’s survey, which it carries out diligently every six years, investigates frequency of physical intimacy among high school students. The data sample was 12,562 students, including 4,321 high schoolers and 3,614 university students.

Only 22.8% of male high school students (roughly one in five) said they had kissed someone, which is a drop of 11.1% from the previous survey.

It was even worse with the girls, of whom 25.7% said they had kissed someone (the survey doesn’t specify if this was a boy or a fellow girl!), but this was a 13.6% decrease from 39.3% last time.

The pandemic is surely to blame in part for this, since the survey was conducted August last year to March. These high schoolers and college kids had to go through school remotely, masked, or with plastic screens between desks (though kissing through plastic panels is apparently a thing in Japan). It’s hardly the best scenario for inducing intimacy. How can you get past first base if you’re not even allowed to see each other’s faces?!

Screens may also be impacting intimacy, as is gradually becoming apparent worldwide. If you have instant access to porn on your phone, it might well make you less bothered about experiencing the real thing with a peer — since nothing can compete with your fantasies, and dating and seducing a partner is much harder work than simply pulling out your phone and your dick, and jerking off.

But perhaps we shouldn’t despair yet. The survey results are actually quite similar to how they were back in 1987. It seems that kissing rates climbed and eventually peaked in 2005 (at 45% for boys and 50% for girls). So perhaps the population is merely readjusting to regular levels of youth kissing?

It’s a similar story with sex. The results this time indicate a slight drop in the number of high schoolers who have had sex (12% of guys and 14.8% of girls), but the decrease is even more severe if we compare the numbers with 2005 — when a whopping 25% of male high schoolers and 30% of female high schoolers were having sex.

It begs the question: What happened in the mid-2000s to make Japanese students so horny?!

The full results of the survey will be published later in the autumn.