There's no evidence of any trend that young people in Japan have stopped having sex. That is what I was trying to point out: not being in an old-fashioned relationship, and not actually bearing children, does not any longer have any kind of direct relationship to how much sex you are having.

There may well be ongoing generational changes to reproductive and marriage/relationship behavior in Japan, as there is elsewhere (c.f. everywhere on Earth), but this article doesn't go there.

I look toward the prospects of women in Japan for an indication as to what's wrong. These are people who have grown up with dreams that society seems unwilling to support. For how many women in Japan is 'Maybe it's time to have a kid in the next few years' tantamount to "I must give up any dreams of having a career"?

And why not just more one night stands? Because they are short on commitment (feel alone and, thus, scared in the morning), caring, ..., children.

And just for passion, a good version requires the couple to have had a lot of time together and to care about each other -- e.g., for a man, the best result of passion is that, net, she smiles the rest of the evening, the next morning, and well into the next day, and that takes some mutual caring, practice, and effort.

Why so value the smiles? Because they promise 1000 more good evenings of passion instead of maybe 0, lots of good back rubs, a nice breakfast, lots of 'contact comfort' for, say, another 24 hours, etc.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

This doesn't fit the article:

> 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.

So A: the person asking the questions isn't a reporter, B: they aren't British, and C: they have every reason to figure out a way to get people to answer the questions honestly, i.e., not "cultural misunderstanding" where someone at a party lies about how much sex they have.

What your argument really boils down to is: "no measurement, real or otherwise, could ever possibly indicate that Japanese people are having less sex": i.e. your post is unfalsifiable, and your claim thusly ludicrous.

>There may well be ongoing generational changes to reproductive and marriage/relationship behavior in Japan [...] but this article doesn't go there.

Did you read it?

>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".

So we can correctly interpret your post: what precisely is "going there", if not this?

The article is also based on the opinions of two people who have been claiming to study Japanese sexual behavior: the therapist Ai Aoyama and the sociologist Nicholas Eberstadt. Certainly the opinion of two "experts" is not a conclusive analysis of a situation, but this is a pretty ordinary way of sourcing information for a news article. It isn't particularly "stupid" for this. Which is why statements like this:

>There's no evidence of any trend that young people in Japan have stopped having sex.

make you look dishonest in light of this:

http://www.ipss.go.jp/site-ad/index_english/nfs14/Nfs14_Sing...

http://www.durex.com/en-jp/sexualwellbeingsurvey/documents/g...

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20110906ad.html

You can dispute the strength of the evidence, but it isn't "no evidence".

I know plenty of western young people who have no interest in marriage, procreation or families. Maybe they're more interested in their work. Maybe they're more interested in rock-climbing. Maybe they're more interested in Pokemon.

More power to them, I say.

One of the most basic needs when planning for a future is the prospect that the future will be better than the past. It's now very difficult to arrange that independently of constant advancement at work and constant advancement at work requires tremendous amounts of effort.

People are getting squeezed from both sides. I feel this myself, and I'm doing quite well statistically; white, male, educated, highly skilled and gainfully employed.

It has lots to do with it.

Brazil for example has PLENTY of space and cheap places to live (unless you want to live in São Paulo... like where I am now, the prices here ARE fucked up)

Yet marriages are going down to the point of scare the government too.

The reason for it is simple (there has been lots of research, not only here, but on other countries with declining births to dangerous levels): women prefer their careers to motherhood...

Even the UN gender economic report, state that it thinks is a good thing women have less kids because they can get richer (yes, that is written in the report, specifically, the report consider that countries where women have less than 3 kids, are countries that are awesome because they are reaching gender equality, since women with less kids can work more)

For men, it is the invention of no-fault divorce, that keeps marriage pointless (the point of marriage historically, in cultures where divorce was forbidden by law or by custom or by religion, was to force women stay in the marriage, and indeed in countries with no-fault divorce, no matter where, they keep finding that 70% of the divorces with no reason where started by women)

Let me be clear: I'm not suggesting that women have any societal obligations.

But given that we're all here today we can infer historically that women (as a whole) have liked having children at least some amount. Did they never ACTUALLY like it but that was their only choice? Or do they (again as a whole) enjoy motherhood but socioeconomic life is now so treacherous that motherhood is a luxury few can afford? Perhaps something else entirely from the false dichotomy I've suggested?

EDIT: I've accepted your premise at face value, but I'm not sure I should. I don't know how to properly caveat this comment.

It promotes the emancipation of women. When men care about children as much, there is no problem in having kids and a career for women (and men).

Once women have the freedom to choose not to get married, have kids, etc it seems likely that some choose not to and thus the rise of feminism is roughly correlated with a decline in birthrates.

I've tidied this up in a nice little causal package but it's quite likely not so clear cut. But it certainly does seem that way at a glance. Which is why the notion gets such good traction amongst some.

The UN report on gender equality in economy, writes explictly that countries where women have fertility of less than 3 is good, because research shows that women with high education has few kids, and thus it concludes that a country with not much kids mean that country has educated women, that from the point of the view of the report is a good thing.

If your "70% of no-fault divorces were started by women" statistic holds true, it could be because the greater economic power wielded by men made them pretty shitty husbands, and so when the opportunity arose, their wives divorced them.

Not only about their sex lives, but just about all manner of private things. This is a culture where when you buy a book at a bookstore, they wrap it in a cover for you so that people around you won't know what you are reading.

Many drug stores have extra-opaque dark bags that you can request when you buy stuff you would rather keep private -- don't want the person next to you on the train knowing you have tampons or -- heaven forbid -- hemmhoroid creme. (Of course a small subset of those train riders won't feel any special compunction to hide their 800-page comic book featuring anthropomorphized household appliances coming live at night and raping strangely compliant schoolgirls, but those people are the exception that proves my rule.)

I think the Japanese would be about the least open about the intimate details of their sex lives than basically any modern advanced democratic population.

(The shyness comes from that in a large fraction of quarrels someone(s) will be carried away, in pieces. You don't cause offense without very good reason. Not sober, anyway.)

Also, while the title is certainly link-baity, I think the point of the article is more about the lack of desire to cultivate meaningful intimate relationships that turn into families.

japanese are particularly good at keeping different segments of their identity separate.

1. Increasing number of Japanese have just casual sex.

2. Increasing number of Japanese don't have sex (with other human) at all.

There is statistical data from several surveys backing this up.

But, of course, the article really might be just pure fantasy with invented statistics.

(I have no idea. Since it is easily testable, any fact checkers at the magazine would find out quickly. But maybe only NYTimes have them, these days.)

Edit: Grammar fix. ferongr, I wrote condom and VD sales like that, since they obviously play off each others -- we do talk about short term affairs... (Ok, gaius did note the third case -- pregnancies/abortions :-) Also supports my points, the amount of sex is easy to measure.)

The OP post here discrediting the situation in Japan claiming cultural differences is not understanding that shit DID went downhill.

(by the way, even before the earthquake, there was already numerous article and blog posts written by western reporters but also japanese women complaining that young japanese women cannot convince grasseaters to fuck them... there was even some people that went to reveal their personal anecdotes of forcing men to sleep naked with them, and the guy just... slept, and no matter how much the women caressed him, he just would not have sex)

Or it could mean that Japanese people have more unprotected sex and that they value personal hygiene and health more, resulting in lower condom sales and V.D. rates per capita.

Also note the additional obvious problems: Other birth control sales, just like condoms, are easy to find statistically -- and environmental factors ought to be obvious among people trying to get kids.

It doesn't claim that. It says that 25% of young men and 45% of young women are repulsed by sexual contact. That means that 75% of men and 55% of women are still open to it (and, presumably, having it).

I'd bet that if you looked at an American college campus, you'd find similar behavioral statistics, due to the declining ability of young Americans to form intimate relationships (which may not be their fault). Casual sex doesn't fit most people. Many people (including most men) can't get it and many (including most women) don't want it. Only about 50-60% participate in the casual market even once, and half of those end up wishing they hadn't.

Still, a 35% sexlessness rate among people in their 20s means that something is wrong. It doesn't mean that people have stopped having sex (65% are) but it's still a sign of something unhealthy. I don't take those numbers (which are probably not very different from those in the West) to indicate voluntary disinterest, but artifacts of undue stress.

When the cause of the sexlessness (which is not just a Japanese problem) is unnecessary corporate stress, it's worth looking for solutions.

  Casual sex doesn't fit most people. Many people (including
  most men) can't get it and many (including most women) don't
  want it. Only about 50-60% participate in the casual market
  even once, and half of those end up wishing they hadn't.

http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/resources/FAQ.html#frequency