David Foster Wallace would probably theorize that “the samizdat” is responsible for this. What else besides death by entertainment could create that level of sexual apathy?
And don’t tell me the economy, because in my generation half the people had sex before they ever even looked for a job. And I know sexual mores are more conservative in Japan, but we’re talking about “42 percent of men and 44.2 percent of women in the 18-34 age bracket” saying they are virgins.
I guess saying they are and actually are being 2 different things is important. It’s quite possible that social pressure makes people say they are virgins even if they’re not. I don’t know Japanese culture well enough to say if that’s a possibility or not.
My guess based on my sense of other cultures is that, when sex is easily available and not that big a deal, there are a substantial number of people who don’t see the point. In a culture that doesn’t support the married life and in which sex is not that big a deal, what propels people to have sex?
When I first came to Japan, almost 25 years ago, it was like Mad Men Season One, 1960 America on the eve of the Kennedy Election. Two young Japanese women I knew would wear white gloves while driving the family car on Sunday, and eat their fast food hamburgers without removing the burger from its paper holder. It was like watching Doris Day and Rock Hudson on a date.
Over the years, I heard the same story repeated often enough: An easy going Englishman, neither geeky nor handsome, nor sexually inexperienced finding out that his stunning 28 year old office worker Japanese girlfriend was a virgin revealed during their first coupling. For some reason, all that Far East Asian exotic sensuousness is like so many Christmas packages under the tree that people from underdeveloped countries must think that all Americans are filthy rich because movies like “Home Alone” are international block busters that portray that illusory wealth. Sexually liberated men and women from Europe and North America assume that it’s a flesh farm here in Asia. Hey, public bath houses, kimonos, sex hotels with hourly rates for quick in and outs at lunch time, and full on body tattoos! Funny. My friend John the college professor can’t go to a public bath nor hot spring because he has a tattoo of Bugs Bunny on his ass, compliments of a drunken bachelor party in Bradford, England back in 1994, and tattooed skin is verboten at public baths and hot springs because tattoos are for the criminal underworld, the dreaded Yakuza,and not respectable people. There’s a whole lot of conservatism in Japan just below the surface. The mistake we make is that it’s an unbelievably sexy place because of beautiful women in long black silky flowing hair. As Cole Porter’s sweet, provocative show tune goes, “The things that you’re libel, to read in the Bible, aint necessarily so. “
Do you live there now? Do you speak Japanese? At what level?
I am interested because your very interesting description of Japan 25 years ago must be somewhat different today. We are all familiar with the “salary-man” stereotype, in which the man works 12 hours at the job, goes to the bars to watch strippers for 3 hours after work, and goes home at 8 PM to return at 6 AM the next morning. Is this still a common pattern?
And what proportion of women work outside the home?
Finally, what is the reaction of young people to this pattern?
I traveled to Japan 2-3 times a year for 7 years in the 90’s.
The folks I met were always polite but rarely friendly and always somewhere on the xenophobic and chauvinistic scale. Even the men who had worked in the US fell back into at least superficially sexist habits when they returned.
Other surveys have shown that the overall level of sexual frequency in Japan is quite low. But that could be attributable in part to the higher age of population. One other factor is that women using oral birth control was illegal until 1999 I believe and relatively few Japanese women use.
My guess is that the rate of virginity is actually higher and that some of the respondents have responded to the survey in a politically correct way.
On family planning, Japan went a different way. Probably more effective in limiting the numbers of unwanted children. Japan’s way avoided the post WWII – 1950s baby boom:
Considering how everybody hates on boomers, maybe Japan did have the better idea.
You don’t think that the perspective of the winners vs losers might have something to do with it? Or that the economy of Japan was terrible post-WWII, while the US was historically the best? As a boomer, many people I knew came from families of 5, 6, 7 (my own family had 7), and that was war-related. Also remember that birth control via the pill came along in 1964. My birth family had 6 of 7 kids before birth control via the pill was available. Of course, that’s not the whole deal – my wife, of the same cohort, was a single kid because her mom did not want more than 1 kid.
Economies always play a role in how many children people have but so too does biology.
Don’t believe a baby boom after a major war is limited to the winners. But the survival rate of those babies is probably higher for the winners.
There were three recessions in the first dozen years after WWII. There were many factors that came into play in those years that impacted both the economy and birth rate. One, the federal government PR that pushed women to leave the work force in favor of marriage and children. Thus, freeing up jobs for the men. The 1930s baby bust that reduced the numbers of young adults that the economy needed to absorb. Continued high rate of military service. GI bill for housing. Limited birth control options. and on and on.
Japanese don’t start work at six o’clock a.m. That’s unheard of these days. They go in at eight thirty or nine o’clock generally. They do stay around the office until eight in the evening at all the major companies. This causes a lot of problems with the multinationals. I worked on translating at Mazda when Ford was their over-lord. My Japanese is at academic/university level, mostly in engineering and business topics. I lecture in Japanese.
The Ford engineers from Detroit who were on three year stints in Japan came in very early from six to seven in the morning, and wanted to leave at five pm so they could spend quality time with their families. Ford’s current CEO Mark Fields who was Mazda’s president back in the late 90’s had to deal with this issue because his Japanese colleagues wanted the American workers to start at eight thirty, and to stick around until about nine o’clock pm. Ford Credit workers followed this schedule because the finance guys were for the most part workaholics, and they had to stay late to monitor the London and New York markets for credit shifts (huge time zone differences). The Ford engineers were a scrappy lot because they insisted on a U.S. work schedule. I admired them because these highly skilled, highly intelligent automotive engineers had a passion for all kinds of bike sports. It seemed ironic to me because Ford’s SUV’s were horrible on gas mileage and chewing up the nation’s asphalt, and here were these eco-friendly engineers whose real passion was mountain and racing biking. At any rate, I left Ford/Mazda to teach on the university level back in 2002, so I’m not sure how the work scheduling problem was eventually resolved.
As for Japanese society appearing to be different 25 years down the line: yes and no. There’s still a tremendous amount of immature chauvinism with hostile attitudes towards women. Quite a few women with families are returning to work in the service industries. The economy has been so lackluster the last twenty five years, that household incomes need support. The wage for women service workers is about eighteen hundred dollars a month. It’s paltry, but that income is used to pay for university education for their two to three kids, and to augment mortgage costs. Undergrad tuition is about 15,000-20,000 a year at the private schools, and heavily subsidized for the public universities. I’m tired! That’s all for now.
Thanks for your comments. It’s unusual to have someone with enough language to lecture (even on a specialized technical level) in that language.
I have an odd question: How many Japanese words for shades of “red” do you know? That is my informal test for language knowledge. I know German at about the B1 level (you are probably at C2 or higher in the Berlize classification; do you have certification in Japanese). In German, I know 3 words for red – red, dark red, and light red. I’m not clear about pink, carnelian, scarlet, and the various modifiers, like “pastel” or “metallic”.
What about my comment about “cute” below? Does that seem reasonable?
Thanks for your response, BTW. Very interesting indeed.
Hmm, I thought foreigners sometimes got a pass for that even at bath houses. The new crackdown on tattoos by the government has produced some complaints by the legal tattoo industry and it’s a shame that a burgeoning artform and livelihood for younger Japanese gets shut down like that. And this from someone who hates tattoos.
Anyhow, I am pretty deep into the Japanese expat youtube community, that is westerners regularly blog about living in Japan, several women I follow have married Japanese men of whom two are fairly easy going (both met the girls when they went to college in the US) though one seems quite conservative. It’s a place a like a lot of other places but also unique in its own way.
Childbirth used to be a complete career killer for Japanese women. Wonder if addressing that cultural taboo will improve things.
It can be a career killer here as well and it can put your life on the edge of poverty ( and it can impact young men as well ) and there goes a college education. That is not so in all cases but it is still a reality for many. And there is a clear taboo about it. I don’t know if Japan is like that.
My understanding is that this has been an issue in japan for quite some time.
Decades of stagflation will do that to a population.
Aren’t we seeing low birthrates in our millennials? Low marriage rates? Later-age pregnancies?
I am talking about virginity here.
My first girlfriend and I didn’t really discuss stagflation much.
Well, now about this finding? Technologically-induced ineptness? High school experimentation over here ends and nothing human replaces it? If men are the initiators of sex.
http://theweek.com/articles/640671/why-millennials-arent-having-sex
Your interesting link led me to Tinder and the Dawn of the “Dating Apocalypse”. Crikey. Those poor people.
Uh, yeah, about that.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/images/databriefs/51-100/db89_fig1.png
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/files/2014/10/iL2HBPq.jpg
Long story short: marriage and teenage pregnancy rates spiked during the most prosperous economic periods of American history. And they were low before that — hell, because white life expectancy was 10-15 years lower before the New Deal got into full swing, the marriage and pregnancy rates beforehand would look even worse controlling for that factor.
Not that birth and marriage rates are irrelevant here, but I am talking about virginity.
I am talking about 34 year old virgins.
While you can hypothesize several confounding factors that would make pre-Sexual Revolution teen pregnancy rates not actually sync up with rates of sexual activity (i.e. during this period of time, it was more likely for one woman to have several male partners as opposed to the standard assumption of roughly equal male and female pair-ups) in absence of such a confounding factor you still need an explanation as to why people were having more or at least later reproductive sex in the 50s-70s as opposed to earlier decades. Until you do that, the only explanations you have are:
A.) People in the 50s-70s were hornier than surrounding decades. This seems unlikely given the historical stereotypes of sexual mores — unless you want to claim they’re counterproductive.
B.) Some other societal factor that was true during the 50s-70s but specifically NOT true during the surrounding decades. And note that this must boolean; if the strength of the intensity forms a gradient over the three periods of time rather than a gap or apogee, the factor fails immediately.
The only thing I can think of (besides free-floating horniness) that satisfies this explanation is economic inequality. Every other factor is uncorrelated or has some additional confounding factor mentioned above such as contraceptive access. That is, crime rates, life expectancy, immigration-%, sexual mores, religiosity, sexism, sugar consumption, urbanization, and even my favorite explanation of lead poisoning fails to account for this.
Teenage sex rates haven’t changed much in the US. They just use contraception (of all kinds) a lot more. That part is very different from Japan. Actually, probably more people have sex first now than when Boo was a teen because the first job comes a lot later.
I have no idea but the rate of teen virgins in the US is about 41%
http://www.cdc.gov/HealthyYouth/Sexualbehaviors/
Read that backwards. Thats rate of non virgins. 59% have had sexual activity.
Dammit I give up re my typoes. Virgin rate almost 60%
Kind of getting vibes your mocking people for being adult virgins.
There is this whole Japanese thing about “cute”. Hello kitty and all that stuff. My daughter (30 YO, virgin, recently came out as lesbian) is somewhat into that. In many ways, I think there is a certain timidness or fear of the other sex in some kids, my daughter included. And sex is not cute. There is a certain amount of that, but you need to go away from cute to do sex. “Cute” is a kind of idealization or infantalization of other, in that cute requires a glossy vernier that no real person has. “Cute” does not have bad breath, nose hairs, fart, make weird noises, make unexpected demands.
It may have something to do with younger women in Japan being more selective in who they’re willing to have sex with. Slackers need not apply.
Marriage rates in Japan have also declined:
As with technology and sluggish economy, Japan might be ahead of the world in sex trends as well. Give it two decades for the West to catch up.
My experience in Greece (limited as it was) tells that women are more selective in bad economy. That makes biological, evolutionary sense: female pickiness ensures correlation with available resources for baby upbringing. Correspondingly, men are generally more dejected, less assertive in limited economy – thus a lot of slackiness signals everywhere.
Japan is an island, thus has a long history of subtly dealing with environmental limitations. In particular, population was not growing for most of the rather prosperous but self-isolated Edo era. The official concern of low birth rates might be just a public story as ever.
link
what else? – that they have a culture that’s not interested in sex and the women prefer autonomy to the patriarchal marriage norm. love the valentine protest