It sounds like an April's Fool but it's not: a group in a city in Gifu, central Japan, was preparing to give a sex education talk at an elementary school, when it was instructed by the school not to mention intercourse. How can you do sex education without mentioning, well, sex? The group, Kokoiku, is apparently used to such requests, and it employs a range of teaching tools, including dummies, to tell young people about how human bodies work, from menstruation to ejaculation and childbirth, but often has to leave out the answer to the most important question: Where do babies come ...

What's the best way to provide sex education for youngsters? At school? Through parents? From their peers? By encouraging them to do research online? It's pretty well known that sex ed in schools in Japan is somewhat lacking, and you certainly won't learn about contraception or consent from Japanese porn or TV shows. Well, a nonprofit has come up with a solution, of sorts: toilet paper! The Sowledge (yes, "sow knowledge") project seeks to teach kids about sex, sexual consent, abuse, and male and female anatomy by printing messages on toilet paper. So when these young Japanese ...

The Japan Times has published an interesting article about Pilcon, a safe sex organization started by a young Japanese woman. "Asuka Someya discovered she was pregnant at the age of 20 when she was a university student." This proved the fuel for her later founding of Pilcon in 2013. Now every two months it holds workshops and talks to make up for the shortcomings of sex education (or lack there of) in Japanese schools and families. It has also produced YouTube videos about safe sex, such as this one which has been viewed 1.5 million times since late 2012. It contains the quite awesome ...