Survey says half of young Japanese men and women are virgins

Yet another article is claiming Japan is a sexless wasteland of virgins and singletons.

In this case, the bold claim is that “almost half of young men and women are virgins”.

These articles are perennials, loved by editors and journalists — but treated with some disdain by old hands. The other common trope is that is a kinky wonderland, full of very fetish and craziness imaginable. Perhaps the two myths are not as incompatible as they sound.

Personally, we sit on the fence with this one.

A survey of Japanese people aged 18 to 34 found that almost 70% of unmarried men and 60% of unmarried women are not in a relationship.

Moreover, many of them have never got close and cuddly. Around 42% of the men and 44.2% of the women admitted they were virgins.

The government won’t be pleased that sexlessness is becoming as Japanese as sumo and sake. The administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has talked up boosting the birthrate through support for child care, but until the nation bones up on bedroom gymnastics there’ll be no medals to hand out.

Far from getting together and getting it on, the sexes are growing apart. There are now many more virgins than in 2010, when the last study was conducted and when only 36.2% of men and 38.7% of women said they had never had sex.

Hmm… if this accurately reflects the state of the nation, perhaps we had better think about emigrating.

Perhaps we can take home that it was only completed by 8,754 single people and 6,598 married couples? We would like to know where these young virgins live. Our experiences in central Tokyo suggest that women are certainly on the look-out for sexual partners.

The survey was conducted last June by National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, which has done the same survey every five years since 1987. It doesn’t count same-sex partners because Japan is only interested in making babies, not romance. (Others have pointed out further “missing” demographics from the survey that complicate its findings, not to mention the overseas media’s sensationalization of them.)

The institute said the increase in singles was particularly sharp for people in their late 20s, the age at which science tells us women are most fertile.

Asked about their hopes for the future, there seemed to be recognition that families are what humans are destined for. Nearly 90 percent of the respondents said they want to get married “sometime in the future.”

But 30% of the 2,706 men sampled and 26 percent of the 2,570 female respondents said they were not currently looking for a relationship.

The current fertility rate in Japan languishes at 1.4. Perhaps the government will resort to extreme tactics like banning porn so men are so horny they start screwing all the girls they see. But porn is prohibited in South Korea and they still have a similar demographic crisis looming.