Survivor Series: Japanese Attitudes Towards Sex and Implications for the Future

Hey all you crazy anime addicts out there, its me coming at you once again, the most interesting man on the AAA network, Devil Survivor. I have an extremely interesting, yet disturbing, and maybe humorous topic for you today. Recently, a survey was commissioned by the Japanese government on the attitudes of Japanese men and women aged 16-49 towards sex. So let’s take a look at the results of this study. Starting with the men 16-19, 36.1 percent said that have little interest in sex or even despised it altogether. Wow, I’m shocked that a teenage boy would ever say he hates sex, its like a Republican politician saying he hates  cheating on his wife then claiming he is a family values candidate. That figure is almost double the figure reported in a 2008 survey. This survey, which was conducted in September of 2010, also found that 83.7 percent of Japanese men that are turning 20 this year are not dating anyone, and a further 49.3 percent said they have never had a girlfriend. The findings for girls in the same age group unfortunately are no better; 59 percent of them felt similarly like the young men about sex, which was up 12 percent from 2008.

So what does this all mean, you might ask. Well according to Kunio Kitamura head of the clinic of the Japanese Family Planning Association says it seems to confirm  the notion that Japanese younger men are becoming ” herbivores” meaning men who do not actively seek out women or sex. What we are seeing here I think is the collision of two social phenomena  at play in Japanese society creating a tsunami of sexual apathy. Women in Japan have been gaining empowerment in society in the past couple decades  making more money and getting higher on the professional ladder, and this has caused Japanese women to raise their expectations of what their potential husband should make at his job. This has in turn caused Japanese men to believe that the expectations of women are too unrealistic and they cannot possible make enough money in their jobs. So more and more men are turning other means of romantic engagement such as dating sims, anime character figures, sex dolls, and other such things.  Add to this the already extremely low birth rate in Japan and the high average age of the population, which is 44.8 years old, and things are not looking good for the future of Japan.

Some other findings from the survey that are of note; 40.8 percent of married couples answered that they had not had sex in the last month, up from 36.5 percent in 2008. Almost 50 percent married couples older than 40 also reported that they had not had sex in the last month. Thus confirming the widely held belief that getting married kills an otherwise healthy sexual desire haha.

This is a major social problem for Japan in a number of ways. In terms of the workforce and having a ready a supply of new young workers it would be disastrous as the birth rate is well below replacement. National defense would also be compromised as its hard to maintain an armed forces without young people to fill out the ranks. The population is projected to shrink to about 95 million by 2050 and this would cause the Japanese economy to suffer worse than anything before. Correcting this isn’t easy will probably take a generation or so to see signs of change.

Here’s the original article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/14/japanese-men-losing-sex-d_n_809271.html

Cheers,

Devil