# Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex?
Ai Aoyama is a sex and relationship counsellor who works out of her
narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back street. Her first name means
"love" in Japanese, and is a keepsake from her earlier days as a
professional dominatrix. Back then, about 15 years ago, she was Queen
Ai, or Queen Love, and she did "all the usual things" like tying
people up and dripping hot wax on their nipples. Her work today, she
says, is far more challenging. Aoyama, 52, is trying to cure what
Japan's media calls sekkusu shinai shokogun, or "celibacy syndrome".
Japan's under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional
relationships. Millions aren't even dating, and increasing numbers
can't be bothered with sex. For their government, "celibacy syndrome"
is part of a looming national catastrophe. Japan already has one of
the world's lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which
has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a
further one-third by 2060. Aoyama believes the country is experiencing
"a flight from human intimacy" -- and it's partly the government's
fault.
The sign outside her building says "Clinic". She greets me in yoga
pants and fluffy animal slippers, cradling a Pekingese dog whom she
introduces as Marilyn Monroe. In her business pamphlet, she offers up
the gloriously random confidence that she visited North Korea in the
1990s and squeezed the testicles of a top army general. It doesn't say
whether she was invited there specifically for that purpose, but the
message to her clients is clear: she doesn't judge.
Inside, she takes me upstairs to her "relaxation room" -- a bedroom
with no furniture except a double futon. "It will be quiet in here,"
she says. Aoyama's first task with most of her clients is encouraging
them "to stop apologising for their own physical existence".
The number of single people has reached a record high. A survey in
2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were
not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from
five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under
30 had never dated at all. (There are no figures for same-sex
relationships.) Although there has long been a pragmatic separation of
love and sex in Japan -- a country mostly free of religious morals --
sex fares no better. A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family
Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were
not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of
men felt the same way.
Many people who seek her out, says Aoyama, are deeply confused. "Some
want a partner, some prefer being single, but few relate to normal
love and marriage." However, the pressure to conform to Japan's
anachronistic family model of salaryman husband and stay-at-home wife
remains. "People don't know where to turn. They're coming to me
because they think that, by wanting something different, there's
something wrong with them."
Official alarmism doesn't help. Fewer babies were born here in 2012
than any year on record. (This was also the year, as the number of
elderly people shoots up, that adult incontinence pants outsold baby
nappies in Japan for the first time.) Kunio Kitamura, head of the
JFPA, claims the demographic crisis is so serious that Japan "might
eventually perish into extinction".
Japan's under-40s won't go forth and multiply out of duty, as postwar
generations did. The country is undergoing major social transition
after 20 years of economic stagnation. It is also battling against the
effects on its already nuclear-destruction-scarred psyche of 2011's
earthquake, tsunami and radioactive meltdown. There is no going
back. "Both men and women say to me they don't see the point of
love. They don't believe it can lead anywhere," says
Aoyama. "Relationships have become too hard."
Marriage has become a minefield of unattractive choices. Japanese men
have become less career-driven, and less solvent, as lifetime job
security has waned. Japanese women have become more independent and
ambitious. Yet conservative attitudes in the home and workplace
persist. Japan's punishing corporate world makes it almost impossible
for women to combine a career and family, while children are
unaffordable unless both parents work. Cohabiting or unmarried
parenthood is still unusual, dogged by bureaucratic disapproval.
Aoyama says the sexes, especially in Japan's giant cities, are
"spiralling away from each other". Lacking long-term shared goals,
many are turning to what she terms "Pot Noodle love" -- easy or
instant gratification, in the form of casual sex, short-term trysts
and the usual technological suspects: online porn, virtual-reality
"girlfriends", anime cartoons. Or else they're opting out altogether
and replacing love and sex with other urban pastimes.
Some of Aoyama's clients are among the small minority who have taken
social withdrawal to a pathological extreme. They are recovering
hikikomori ("shut-ins" or recluses) taking the first steps to
rejoining the outside world, otaku (geeks), and long-term parasaito
shingurus (parasite singles) who have reached their mid-30s without
managing to move out of home. (Of the estimated 13 million unmarried
people in Japan who currently live with their parents, around three
million are over the age of 35.) "A few people can't relate to the
opposite sex physically or in any other way. They flinch if I touch
them," she says. "Most are men, but I'm starting to see more women."
Aoyama cites one man in his early 30s, a virgin, who can't get
sexually aroused unless he watches female robots on a game similar to
Power Rangers. "I use therapies, such as yoga and hypnosis, to relax
him and help him to understand the way that real human bodies work."
Sometimes, for an extra fee, she gets naked with her male clients --
"strictly no intercourse" -- to physically guide them around the
female form. Keen to see her nation thrive, she likens her role in
these cases to that of the Edo period courtesans, or oiran, who used
to initiate samurai sons into the art of erotic pleasure.
Aversion to marriage and intimacy in modern life is not unique to
Japan. Nor is growing preoccupation with digital technology. But what
endless Japanese committees have failed to grasp when they stew over
the country's procreation-shy youth is that, thanks to official
shortsightedness, the decision to stay single often makes perfect
sense. This is true for both sexes, but it's especially true for
women. "Marriage is a woman's grave," goes an old Japanese saying that
refers to wives being ignored in favour of mistresses. For Japanese
women today, marriage is the grave of their hard-won careers.
I meet Eri Tomita, 32, over Saturday morning coffee in the smart Tokyo
district of Ebisu. Tomita has a job she loves in the human resources
department of a French-owned bank. A fluent French speaker with two
university degrees, she avoids romantic attachments so she can focus
on work. "A boyfriend proposed to me three years ago. I turned him
down when I realised I cared more about my job. After that, I lost
interest in dating. It became awkward when the question of the future
came up."
Tomita says a woman's chances of promotion in Japan stop dead as soon
as she marries. "The bosses assume you will get pregnant." Once a
woman does have a child, she adds, the long, inflexible hours become
unmanageable. "You have to resign. You end up being a housewife with
no independent income. It's not an option for women like me."
Around 70% of Japanese women leave their jobs after their first
child. The World Economic Forum consistently ranks Japan as one of the
world's worst nations for gender equality at work. Social attitudes
don't help. Married working women are sometimes demonised as oniyome,
or "devil wives". In a telling Japanese ballet production of Bizet's
Carmen a few years ago, Carmen was portrayed as a career woman who
stole company secrets to get ahead and then framed her lowly
security-guard lover Jos�. Her end was not pretty.
Prime minister Shinzo Abe recently trumpeted long-overdue plans to
increase female economic participation by improving conditions and
daycare, but Tomita says things would have to improve "dramatically"
to compel her to become a working wife and mother. "I have a great
life. I go out with my girl friends -- career women like me -- to
French and Italian restaurants. I buy stylish clothes and go on nice
holidays. I love my independence."
Tomita sometimes has one-night stands with men she meets in bars, but
she says sex is not a priority, either. "I often get asked out by
married men in the office who want an affair. They assume I'm
desperate because I'm single." She grimaces, then
shrugs. "Mendokusai."
Mendokusai translates loosely as "Too troublesome" or "I can't be
bothered". It's the word I hear both sexes use most often when they
talk about their relationship phobia. Romantic commitment seems to
represent burden and drudgery, from the exorbitant costs of buying
property in Japan to the uncertain expectations of a spouse and
in-laws. And the centuries-old belief that the purpose of marriage is
to produce children endures. Japan's Institute of Population and
Social Security reports an astonishing 90% of young women believe that
staying single is "preferable to what they imagine marriage to be
like".
The sense of crushing obligation affects men just as much. Satoru
Kishino, 31, belongs to a large tribe of men under 40 who are engaging
in a kind of passive rebellion against traditional Japanese
masculinity. Amid the recession and unsteady wages, men like Kishino
feel that the pressure on them to be breadwinning economic warriors
for a wife and family is unrealistic. They are rejecting the pursuit
of both career and romantic success.
"It's too troublesome," says Kishino, when I ask why he's not
interested in having a girlfriend. "I don't earn a huge salary to go
on dates and I don't want the responsibility of a woman hoping it
might lead to marriage." Japan's media, which has a name for every
social kink, refers to men like Kishino as "herbivores" or soshoku
danshi (literally, "grass-eating men"). Kishino says he doesn't mind
the label because it's become so commonplace. He defines it as "a
heterosexual man for whom relationships and sex are unimportant".
The phenomenon emerged a few years ago with the airing of a Japanese
manga-turned-TV show. The lead character in Otomen ("Girly Men") was a
tall martial arts champion, the king of tough-guy cool. Secretly, he
loved baking cakes, collecting "pink sparkly things" and knitting
clothes for his stuffed animals. To the tooth-sucking horror of
Japan's corporate elders, the show struck a powerful chord with the
generation they spawned.
Kishino, who works at a fashion accessories company as a designer and
manager, doesn't knit. But he does like cooking and cycling, and
platonic friendships. "I find some of my female friends attractive but
I've learned to live without sex. Emotional entanglements are too
complicated," he says. "I can't be bothered."
Romantic apathy aside, Kishino, like Tomita, says he enjoys his active
single life. Ironically, the salaryman system that produced such
segregated marital roles -- wives inside the home, husbands at work
for 20 hours a day -- also created an ideal environment for solo
living. Japan's cities are full of conveniences made for one, from
stand-up noodle bars to capsule hotels to the ubiquitous konbini
(convenience stores), with their shelves of individually wrapped rice
balls and disposable underwear. These things originally evolved for
salarymen on the go, but there are now female-only caf�s, hotel
floors and even the odd apartment block. And Japan's cities are
extraordinarily crime-free.
Some experts believe the flight from marriage is not merely a
rejection of outdated norms and gender roles. It could be a long-term
state of affairs. "Remaining single was once the ultimate personal
failure," says Tomomi Yamaguchi, a Japanese-born assistant professor
of anthropology at Montana State University in America. "But more
people are finding they prefer it." Being single by choice is
becoming, she believes, "a new reality".
Is Japan providing a glimpse of all our futures? Many of the shifts
there are occurring in other advanced nations, too. Across urban Asia,
Europe and America, people are marrying later or not at all, birth
rates are falling, single-occupant households are on the rise and, in
countries where economic recession is worst, young people are living
at home. But demographer Nicholas Eberstadt argues that a distinctive
set of factors is accelerating these trends in Japan. These factors
include the lack of a religious authority that ordains marriage and
family, the country's precarious earthquake-prone ecology that
engenders feelings of futility, and the high cost of living and
raising children.
"Gradually but relentlessly, Japan is evolving into a type of society
whose contours and workings have only been contemplated in science
fiction," Eberstadt wrote last year. With a vast army of older people
and an ever-dwindling younger generation, Japan may become a "pioneer
people" where individuals who never marry exist in significant
numbers, he said.
Japan's 20-somethings are the age group to watch. Most are still too
young to have concrete future plans, but projections for them are
already laid out. According to the government's population institute,
women in their early 20s today have a one-in-four chance of never
marrying. Their chances of remaining childless are even higher: almost
40%.
They don't seem concerned. Emi Kuwahata, 23, and her friend, Eri
Asada, 22, meet me in the shopping district of Shibuya. The
caf� they choose is beneath an art gallery near the train
station, wedged in an alley between pachinko pinball parlours and
adult video shops. Kuwahata, a fashion graduate, is in a casual
relationship with a man 13 years her senior. "We meet once a week to
go clubbing," she says. "I don't have time for a regular
boyfriend. I'm trying to become a fashion designer." Asada, who
studied economics, has no interest in love. "I gave up dating three
years ago. I don't miss boyfriends or sex. I don't even like holding
hands."
Asada insists nothing happened to put her off physical contact. She
just doesn't want a relationship and casual sex is not a good option,
she says, because "girls can't have flings without being
judged". Although Japan is sexually permissive, the current fantasy
ideal for women under 25 is impossibly cute and virginal. Double
standards abound.
In the Japan Family Planning Association's 2013 study on sex among
young people, there was far more data on men than women. I asked the
association's head, Kunio Kitamura, why. "Sexual drive comes from
males," said the man who advises the government. "Females do not
experience the same levels of desire."
Over iced tea served by skinny-jeaned boys with meticulously tousled
hair, Asada and Kuwahata say they share the usual singleton passions
of clothes, music and shopping, and have hectic social lives. But,
smart phones in hand, they also admit they spend far more time
communicating with their friends via online social networks than
seeing them in the flesh. Asada adds she's spent "the past two years"
obsessed with a virtual game that lets her act as a manager of a sweet
shop.
Japanese-American author Roland Kelts, who writes about Japan's youth,
says it's inevitable that the future of Japanese relationships will be
largely technology driven. "Japan has developed incredibly
sophisticated virtual worlds and online communication systems. Its
smart phone apps are the world's most imaginative." Kelts says the
need to escape into private, virtual worlds in Japan stems from the
fact that it's an overcrowded nation with limited physical space. But
he also believes the rest of the world is not far behind.
Getting back to basics, former dominatrix Ai Aoyama -- Queen Love --
is determined to educate her clients on the value of "skin-to-skin,
heart-to-heart" intimacy. She accepts that technology will shape the
future, but says society must ensure it doesn't take over. "It's not
healthy that people are becoming so physically disconnected from each
other," she says. "Sex with another person is a human need that
produces feel-good hormones and helps people to function better in
their daily lives."
Aoyama says she sees daily that people crave human warmth, even if
they don't want the hassle of marriage or a long-term
relationship. She berates the government for "making it hard for
single people to live however they want" and for "whipping up fear
about the falling birth rate". Whipping up fear in people, she says,
doesn't help anyone. And that's from a woman who knows a bit about
whipping.
