23% of Japanese couples have sex on first date

… is the implication we can draw from data recently released by Hakuhodo as part of its Seikatsu Teiten project, an overview of survey data collected biennially on households on a range of questions.

The results show some trends and changes in the national psyche, though interestingly this one, responding to the statement “I don’t mind having sex on the first date if our feelings match”, has hardly changed.

It is now a solid 23.4%, up only 0.9% since the data started being collected in 1994. I guess attitudes towards sex on a first date are pretty established now.

The highest proportion of people who said they would have sex on a first date was men in their thirties and in general men were higher than women. The lowest was women in their sixties, though we can imagine they aren’t so desperate to hop into bed as the younger guys. Interestingly, there was almost no difference between the regions (usually Tokyo’s data is much more “liberal” than other places), indicating this may be a fully national trend.

We wonder, how does this compare with America or Europe?

Attitudes have clearly changed since the mid-1990’s, with now nearly 28% saying they have no objection to marrying a foreigner — up 7.7% But perhaps some people are becoming more conservative. 26.2% of people said that they had no objection to talking about sex with members of the opposite gender — but this is down nearly 6% since the data began.

And adultery — despite the success of the TV drama “Hirugao” and Ashley Madison — is less acceptable, it seems, with “only” 10.7% of people saying it was fine to have an affair with someone, down over 7%.