【 以下文字转载自 Military 讨论区 】
发信人: brihand (brihand), 信区: Military
标 题: 日本牛大发了:年轻人对sex没兴趣了
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Mon Oct 28 12:42:37 2013, 美东)
Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex?
What happens to a country when its young people stop having sex? Japan is
finding out… Abigail Haworth investigates
Japanese man and woman lean away from each other
Arm’s length: 45% of Japanese women aged 16-24 are ‘not interested in or
despise sexual contact’. More than a quarter of men feel the same way.
Photograph: Eric Rechsteiner
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
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.
Sex counsellor Ai Aoyama with a client and her dog Learning to love: sex
counsellor Ai Aoyama, with one of her clients and her dog Marilyn.
Photograph: Eric Rechsteiner/Panos Picture
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."
Young women shopping in Tokyo No sex in the city: (from left) friends Emi
Kuwahata, 23, and Eri Asada, 22, shopping in Tokyo. Photograph: Eric
Rechsteiner/Panos Pictures
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 José. 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".
Eri Tomita, 32, office worker in Tokyo 'I often get asked out by married men
in the office who want an affair as I am single. But I can’t be bothered':
Eri Tomita, 32. Photograph: Eric Rechsteiner/Panos Pictures
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.
Satoru Kishino, 31 ‘I find women attractive but I’ve learned to live
without sex. Emotional entanglements are too complicated’: Satoru Kishino,
31. Photograph: Eric Rechsteiner/Panos Pictures
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
cafés, 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 café 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.
