Japan has begun a trial roll-out of the morning-after pill, finally bringing availability of emergency contraception in line with most other industrialized nations.
To the chagrin of condom manufacturers (of whom Japan has some of the best in the world), a lot -- if not most -- sex in Japan is unprotected, resulting in a lot of unwanted pregnancies or fears of conception (not to mention, an explosion of syphilis cases).
Sometimes it seems that every celebrity marriage is the result of the woman in the partnership getting pregnant, which is hardly the best example to set (and, let's be ...
Everything changes, except the avant-garde, or so the saying goes. Now in Japan, perhaps it's rather nothing changes, except for sexual mores.
For years, Japan seemed to lag behind other major nations in the Global North in terms of access to emergency birth control or even use of contraception.
Basically, people just don't use condoms, inspired by the Fuji-sized mountains of porn they consume in which condoms are never seen (but generally are used), leading to lots of shotgun weddings (it seems like most celebrities seem to marry this way) and a STDs/STIs crisis, especially syphilis -- in ...
After much legal wrangling and media speculation, Japan is apparently set to approve the abortion pill, but it would still require women to seek their partner's consent beforehand.
We have to be careful here to draw a distinction between the morning-after pill (which is already available in Japan, but a prescription from a doctor is needed and it's expensive) and the abortion pill.
The latter is reportedly to become available in Japan (as a two-drug combo, Mifepristone and Misoprostol, made by British pharmaceutical firm Linepharma International), though decades after women have had access ...
Japanese celebrity Dewi Sukarno (pictured) recently made the astonishing assertion on a TV show that "the foremost cause of infertility is abortion."
Though abortion is relatively common in Japan, it still carries a stigma and the social structures are not in place that you might expect, as Sukarno's ignorance demonstrates.
As Nikkei reported this month, rape survivors must get consent from their sexual predator to have an abortion.
One woman who was assaulted by an acquaintance was told by hospital after hospital that they could not proceed with an abortion without consent from the ...
What is the solution to Japan's declining birth rate?
Banning abortions.
That's according to Seiko Noda, a spokeswoman for the governing Liberal Democrat Party.
There are said to be two hundred thousand abortions per year in Japan
Noda, who is divorced from another LDP politician and famously gave birth at the age of fifty after receiving donor eggs in America (this is not possible in Japan), married again recently to a man who used to run an adult website. The man changed his name to Noda's to preserve her family name, so we can guess who calls the shots in their ...
