Japan has begun a trial roll-out of the morning-after pill, finally bringing availability of emergency contraception in line with most other industrialized nations. To the chagrin of condom manufacturers (of whom Japan has some of the best in the world), a lot -- if not most -- sex in Japan is unprotected, resulting in a lot of unwanted pregnancies or fears of conception (not to mention, an explosion of syphilis cases). Sometimes it seems that every celebrity marriage is the result of the woman in the partnership getting pregnant, which is hardly the best example to set (and, let's be ...

Everything changes, except the avant-garde, or so the saying goes. Now in Japan, perhaps it's rather nothing changes, except for sexual mores. For years, Japan seemed to lag behind other major nations in the Global North in terms of access to emergency birth control or even use of contraception. Basically, people just don't use condoms, inspired by the Fuji-sized mountains of porn they consume in which condoms are never seen (but generally are used), leading to lots of shotgun weddings (it seems like most celebrities seem to marry this way) and a STDs/STIs crisis, especially syphilis -- in ...

For years it has been notoriously difficult to get hold of: the morning-after pill. In Japan, for a woman to receive emergency contraception, she has to go to a doctor and get a prescription. And it's expensive, too. But women have been campaigning for years to remove the barriers blocking easy access to the morning-after pill, which is surely one of the reasons for so many shotgun weddings in Japan (including among many prominent celebrities). The current system is condemned as shaming and discriminatory, and is particularly a problem for victims of sexual assault, whose treatment by ...