The media narratives about Japan typically conform to a handful of familiar tropes: Japan is a sexless, childless hellscape, or Japan is a kinky, weird land of bountiful sexual fetishes.
Of course, neither is true. Japan is just Japan, with all shades and colors.
But it is a fact that the population is declining and people are having fewer children. The number of babies born in Japan dropped below 800,000 last year, the first time this has happened since records began in 1899.
The reasons for this are manifold -- and we think they are primarily economic -- don't rush to assume it's because ...
A new survey has found that an increasing number of people in Japan aged 18-34 don't expect to get married.
The results of the government-affiliated National Institute of Population and Social Security's 2021 survey of 7,862 people, published earlier this month, show that 17.3% of men and 14.6% of women aged between 18 and 34 claimed to have no intention of marrying.
This is the highest such figure since the questionnaire was first conducted in 1982.
Back in the mid-1980s, at the peak of the confident bubble economy years, the numbers were just 2.3% for men and 4.1% for women.
The ...
The latest survey about sex and romance in Japan to grab the headlines claims that 40% of single men in their twenties have never been on a date.
The results of the government survey also suggest that this problem isn't just men either. About 25% of young single women too also said they had never had a date with another person.
The numbers get a bit complicated, because 5% of married men and women in their twenties also said they had never been on a date, though this may mean they met their partner through a spouse introduction service and don't count their pre-marital meetings as "dates." ...
We already know that young people and sexuality claims that they are becoming less interested in sex. A new book, though, attempts to get behind the sensational headlines and probe the real reasons and implications of this.
Drawing on data from the six-yearly surveys conducted by the Japanese Association for Sex Education since 1974 -- in particular, the most recent survey in 2017 -- the book notes that sexual experience among high schoolers and college students was active until 2005, when it peaked for both male and females with 26.2% male high school students having sexual experience, ...
Why are loveless marriages so common in Japan? That's the question that prolific bilingual YouTuber Nobita sets out to answer in a recent video.
Note that he's not talking about sexless marriages per se. Obviously that's a factor here but his subject is marriages where love has faded, or even gone completely. That said, as he states at the start, the divorce rate in Japan is comparatively low, potentially meaning that many people are choosing to remain in a marriage with a partner they no longer love.
He focuses in the first part of the video on the case of a friend called Yuka, who has ...
In a series of brief yet enlightening street interviews, actual Japanese girls reveal their answers to the personal questions we all want to ask.
How often do Japanese girls want to have sex?
What are the signs that a Japanese girl wants to have sex with you?
How much do you Japanese like having sex?
How many dates do Japanese girls want to go on before having sex?
How long do Japanese girls expect their male partners to last in bed?
And what do Japanese girls think about having sex for the first time with a partner?
So much for sexless Japanese!
The interviews were ...
A recent survey of 1,000 boys and girls in Japan aged between 17 and 19 revealed that only about a quarter had sexual experience, though more girls did than boys, but girls had more negative impressions of sex than their male counterparts.
The survey was conducted by the Nippon Foundation, which put up a detailed write-up with graphs on its multilingual online journal, nippon.com.
Overall, 23.6% of the respondents had sexual experience. A breakdown by gender found a 5% gap with 26.2% of girls and 21.2% of boys. When asked about what age they had their first sexual experience, the most ...
Japanese actress and singer Erika Sawajiri was in the news recently after her drug bust in late 2019, the latest in a long line of scandals and ups and downs for the celebrity.
The 33-year-old has officially retired from the industry after receiving a suspended sentence in February and we doubt we will be seeing her back any time soon, so taboo are drugs in Japan in spite of their prevalence in the entertainment world. At the time, Sawajiri was about to star in the annual Taiga drama on NHK, which would have been her biggest mainstream success since her comeback.
Another intriguing ...
As spotted on Twitter by Unseen Japan, a recently announced survey about sex had some troubling results for people in Japan.
The survey asked "What's the most pleasurable thing for you?" and, not surprisingly, sex came out top in most countries, though "delicious food" was the top-ranked response in Japan. Any quick glance at the food porn that comprises most of the content of TV shows in the nation will confirm the veracity of this, perhaps, but is it a bad sign? Or rather, just what we already knew from previous research?
Sex was bested in Japan by spending time with a loved one, holding ...
The comedian Jim Jefferies recently came to Japan for his weekly Comedy Central show and made a clickbaity segment called "Japanese Millennials Aren't Having Sex?" (or, uncensored, "Why Aren't Japanese Millennials Fucking?").
We'll let you be the judge of how much this is just a case of "laughing at strange Asians" or taking a genuine if comic look at a social phenomenon.
One of the interviewees included a maid, whose line of work was suggested as a reason that men don't want to have sex because the experience of a maid cafe and other fantasy-fulfillment services suppress actual desire. ...
