World Japan: Why have young people stopped having sex?

tom_mai78101

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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.

Read more here.

Japan is repeating history.
 

tom_mai78101

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Yeah, so many technological advances in that civilization, yet they outright discourage settling down as a family.
 

Accname

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Thats not the kind of sex lusting crazy techno-babble sci-fy future I was expecting to see when I grow older. Come on asia, get your shit together. I want space ships, I want prostitutes with 3 nipples and I want rampaging killer robots.
 

tom_mai78101

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Thats not the kind of sex lusting crazy techno-babble sci-fy future I was expecting to see when I grow older. Come on asia, get your shit together. I want space ships, I want prostitutes with 3 nipples and I want rampaging killer robots.
Spaceships?
ikaros.jpg

Prostitutes with 3 nipples?
article-2174916-1417A805000005DC-300_634x983.jpg

Killer robots? This or this.
 

FireCat

Oh Shi.. Don't wake the tiger!
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LOL Maybe they're Just more interested in something else? What's so bad about it?
 

BlueMirage

Trust, but doubt.
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Being a sexually abstinent person myself, I can relate to their position. A lot of people get very surprised when I say that I don't want to have a boy/girlfriend, some even outright not understanding why anyone wouldn't want to have sex. Not only was I missing something wonderful, I must have been in some sort of denial for it to make sense for them. When I met those people, I got the impression that getting a partner was an essential need in order to complete the checklist of life. If you never had one, you had somehow failed.
 

tom_mai78101

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With some countries not wanting to have girls due to inheritance problems, I doubt there will be more women for us. Unless women became the more dominant gender of the human race.
 

Slapshot136

Divide et impera
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well, with the way they work there.. im not surprised - they just value a promotion more than a relationship
 
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