We already wrote about this story back in September but now the mainstream foreign media is starting to pick up the survey by the Japanese Association for Sex Education, which examines the rate of sex and other forms of intimacy among junior and senior high school students.
Perhaps prompted by the publication of the full version of the survey and new reports about it in the Japanese media, liberal bastion the Guardian recently ran an article bemoaning the falling numbers of male Japanese school students who had never kissed.
As noted in September, the survey results indicate that only one in five boys in high school have kissed, which is the lowest number since the first survey in 1974. The surveys are held every five years and more than 12,500 students were surveyed.
But these numbers are part of a long-term downward trend since a peak in 2005, when it seems kids in Japan were horny, confident, or both — with half of high schoolers claiming to have locked lips.
The numbers of students who had had sex is also declining (down to 12% of boys and 14.8% of girls).
Despite this being a longer-term trend, the association blamed the pandemic. “Limited contact with others during the coronavirus outbreak may have lowered the rate of sexual activity among junior and senior high school students,” it said.
On the other hand, masturbating is on the rise — possibly thanks to the better self-awareness through online information and easier access to porn or other forms of sexual content on a phone, which pretty much any high schooler (and probably junior high schooler) owns.
Yusuke Hayashi, a sociology professor at Musashi University quoted by the Mainichi Shimbun (and then the Guardian), agrees that the uptick in masturbation “may be due to increased exposure to [sexual imagery] in manga and other media, rather than as a substitute for interpersonal sexual behavior.”
Another sociologist, Tamaki Kawasaki, sounded alarm bells. “It shows that the trend is for people to move away from real, physical sexual activity, even at a time when it’s natural for them to be sexually active,” Kawasaki wrote in a column quoted by the Guardian.
“Instead, there is a stronger tendency for them to stay home and watch sexual content alone. If teens, who represent the country’s future, continue like this then it is hard to see any improvement in the declining birthrate.”
In fact, the shift away from physical intimacy is not unique to Japan and evident in many industrialized nations, including the United States and France. The pandemic and prevalence of screens (with access to porn, including extreme porn) are often blamed, but the increase in phones also means instant access to dating apps and opportunities to meet people. So what gives?
Economic problems are also another factor that isn’t discussed enough in Japan, with the media (especially the foreign media) reaching for easy narratives of strange sexless Japan drowning in a deluge of porn.
If younger people have no money, they can’t go on dates or out to clubs to hook up. And if this continues well into their twenties and thirties, they won’t be getting married and starting families either.
