Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. I can tell you all about how big of sex fiends Japanese men are and all the dirty shit that goes on in the bedroom in Japan from personal experience dating in Japan. However, the now 19-26 age group is not a group that I have experience with. But I’ve heard about this phenomena. My ex, Ken, once called his younger brother a soshoku danshi, “herbivore man”, and told me that it’s a “big Japanese problem” with younger guys.
But sex in Japan, especially in Tokyo, is widely free flowing and non committal, at least with people in my generation and older. I know a lot of people in their thirties that have no intention of getting married and still want to date and play and focus on their work and their hobbies in their free time. And in marriage, typically sex is something that is seen as a means for procreation and that’s why there’s that statistic that Japanese married couples only have sex twice a year. One of my exs, for example, feels so pressured to have a baby with his wife, who his company won’t allow to live with him because he has to move back and forth between Southeast Asia a lot, that when he talks about his wife, all he talks about is how he needs to get her pregnant. I told him to just enjoy sex with her and move in with her if he wants a baby but he can’t even really fathom that. It’s interesting because I had a lot of really kinky, crazy sex with him but I realize that there are still very traditional roles in marriage in Japan and that things change when a couple gets married
So sex in the home only happens for the purpose of procreation in many circumstances, but that doesn’t mean that sex isn’t happening— it just happens outside the home and not between married couples. The sex trade is flourishing, like soap world (pretty much like drive through blow jobs) and hostess bars (where the girls who are just there to “talk” sometimes use it to make call girl connections and make a lot of money fast). Sometimes sex can also be tired to business and work. If you boss gives you a prostitute or says, “Let’s go to the hostess bar,” the guy takes the prostitute or goes to the bar because it’s a way to fraternize and do business. One of my exs switched companies and went from having a very serious, strict, workaholic boss to a boss that liked to party (this was after we broke up). The 24/7 serious salary all of a sudden started going out and picking up girls with his boss and cheating on his girlfriend with random women because his boss expected him to do it.
If you ride the train in Japan, you see men reading porn, the sex trade is out in the open, I mean, I find it hard to believe that sex isn’t happening in Japan…like I said, it may not be happening between married couples but it’s happening and it’s still as kinky and weird and bizarre as the rumors make it out to be..
Another thing this article doesn’t take into consideration is abortion. There’s a reason teen pregnancy is so low in Japan— it’s because abortion is considered an acceptable form of birth control. Although interestingly enough, it’s difficult for Japanese women to get birth control from the gynecologist because of the declining birth rate.
I’m always skeptical of articles that I read like that because “sex” and “love” in Japan are a lot more complicated than a simple, newspaper article. I think the biggest problem is getting couples to get married and have children, not sex not happening.
Eventually, I’m going to write a sort of Sex in the City book about sex and dating in Japan once I self publish the story I’m working on now to give my perspective on sex in Japan ;)
Thanks very much for shedding more light on this subject!
