A sweet romance or a queasy tale of grooming?
The July 31 edition of Abema's Women Who Can't Keep Quiet (season 3) featured a love story in which a former music idol pursued her high school homeroom teacher for three years, eventually leading to marriage.
There is a 16-year age gap between 25-year-old Aki and the 41-year-old Shinichi, though they are now happily married and have a child together.
The unusual story has attracted widespread reporting from news outlets and social media.
Aki pursued him relentlessly, even going so as to write "I love you, Teach" in the class attendance ...
Lady Gaga sang of bad romance. Was she singing about Japan?
For the fourth consecutive year, Japan's "romantic satisfaction" rate has ranked among lowest in an international poll.
According to a survey by the Paris-based Ipsos, 51% of people in Japan are satisfied with "feeling loved," significantly lower than the 29-country average of 77%.
Only 33% of Japanese respondents were satisfied with their romantic and sex lives, a 6-point decrease from 2025 -- and the lowest satisfaction rate among the 29 countries (the 29-country average was 60%). Only 6% of respondents in Japan said they were ...
The model Nana Suzuki has made a big confession to the whole nation: she hasn't had sex since her divorce four years ago.
In fact, since couples are generally not intimate with each other in the period leading up to a breakup, perhaps especially a divorce, she's probably been celibate for even longer.
She made the confession on a TV show, My Love Hell, on January 29 in which she chatted with former porn star Mihiro and model (and close friend) Tsubasa Masuwaka -- all divorcees.
When Mihiro said she had had only one romance since her divorce seven years ago, Suzuki suddenly went further. ...
Marriage counseling company Presia found that 70% of married Japanese women regret marrying their husbands, according to results in a survey report announced on January 7.
And the reason they regret their marriages? It's not what you might immediately think: appearance and fashion actually came in as the top results when polled on things they were willing to compromise on when selecting their partner. So if they didn't really mind too much what hubby looks like, why do they now regret marrying him?
Low income. This ranked by far the highest among the results when women were asked what they ...
Over 90% of married women are happy, according to recently published survey results.
The survey was carried out online in January with 200 adult men and women (100 each). Hardly a big sample size, though the results were surprisingly uniform.
Of the 100 women, 94 said that they were happy after marrying. This isn't quite the same as saying they were happy in or with their marriage (as in, the specific conditions of their marriage or their spouse), nor do we have data for how long these women had been married. Inevitably, the shine does come off and the daily toil of working long hours, ...
A survey recently announced results from research asking Japanese men to choose the professions they wanted their future wife to do.
In other words, these are the jobs that Japanese men apparently think make a woman more attractive as a possible wife.
Minna no Ranking's online poll was hardly extensive, collecting online responses from just 765 men, who could assign points to a list of occupations.
There are some surprises and conventional results, which you can also find summarized in English in more detail on SoraNews24.
In descending order, the top five were: chef, ...
Oh no. One of those surveys has appeared.
Despite our best efforts to celebrate the diverse and exciting sexual landscape in Japan, these perennial surveys reporting on sexlessness in the country get lots more attention and tarnish the reputation (probably made worse by our own regurgitation of them on these digital pages).
Of course, decline in sexual activities between long-term partners is common across the world and so is a decline in dating and sex among the young, though the reporting on it in Japan tends to veer toward the orientalist.
This latest survey is a bit different, because ...
How to deal with depopulation in rural areas? This question has been haunting Japanese regional governments for decades now.
Above all, not only do they need to encourage the people who move away to major urban centers for work to return, they really need to target younger people with families. Because above all, these areas need young people.
The central government's policy when it comes to urgent matters is typically to launch a PR campaign -- in terms of the climate crisis, it's mostly about promoting the UN SDGs -- or throw money at it.
For the issue of depopulation, they have resorted ...
