Sexless partnerships account for as much as 64% of marriages in Japan, according to one report by JEX Japan Sex Survey in 2024.
The lack of intimacy can be attributed to a range of factor, especially long working hours, small homes with thin walls, and the common custom of all the family sleeping in the same room on futons.
Abema Times recently interviewed some couples to find out more. The streamer spoke to people for whom sex is not an indispensable part of a marriage.
In fact, one woman in her thirties who has been married for six years has never had sex with her husband. They never ...
Tech is going to solve all our problems, right? Tech -- and especially AI -- is the Band-Aid, the panacea. Or so we are led to believe, and so the government certainly seems to believe.
We wrote before that the Japanese government is turning to artificial intelligence to fix the chronically declining birth rate, and that many prefectures are now involved with matchmaking services in a desperate bid to reverse the drop in marriages and, more importantly, babies.
While we personally think the issue is much more about the work culture in Japan and (like in other countries) the dilemma women ...
Every two or so months, we seem to stumble upon yet another news story about sexlessness in Japan. And with perfect timing, here's the latest, following the claim that two in three marriages in Japan are sexless that we wrote about in January.
As always, these assertions are based on surveys with dubiously small samples. First published in the Japan Times, this latest story states that nearly half of married couples don't have sex. (And if you're now feeling déjà vu, you're not alone: an almost identical article appeared in 2017.)
The first question mark about this is the definition of ...
Another month, another damning survey that says Japanese couples are sexless.
The latest, conducted with 4,000 married people, concludes that two in three marriages in Japan are sexless.
The survey asked people in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties (500 men and women from each age group).
The results show that 68.2% engage in little or no sexual intercourse: 43.9% of respondents said they had fully "sexless" marriages, while 24.3% were "nearly sexless."
Of course, like with all surveys, there are issues here, not least how they define "sexless" (zero sexual contact, ...
A new survey has found that a third of unmarried Japanese adults in their twenties, thirties, and forties have never been in a relationship.
As reported by Kyodo News:
At 34.1 percent, the ratio of single men and women who have never had a romantic relationship was at a record high since Recruit Holdings Co., a staffing service group, began conducting surveys on people's views on marriage in 2017.
The figure of 25.6 percent for people not seeking marriage nearly matches the finding in last year's gender equality survey by the Japanese government, which has been struggling to deal with the ...
A survey has found that 46% of unmarried Japanese men in their twenties have never dated a member of the opposite sex.
The figure is a record high, representing a significant increase from 34.2% in the last survey two years ago.
The survey by Recruit Bridal Research Institute found a slight drop in the numbers of men in their forties who have never dated (down from 27.1% to 22.9%), but a rise in the numbers of men in their thirties (up from 35.4% to 41.2%).
Just 26.7% of men in their twenties said they currently had a partner.
On average, 43.5% of men said they wanted to get married in ...
With the exception of some high-profile series on Netflix, which almost seem to be trying to attract viewers precisely because they are explicit, most Japanese TV dramas have pretty tame sex scenes.
Some of the late-night ones, especially if they are shown on a streamer like Abema, can be pretty erotic, but rarely do not show actual nudity. They tease and titillate, then pull back from putting breasts on screen.
The TV drama Kusuburi Onna to Sundome Onna on TV Tokyo is a case in point, featuring a sex scene between a married couple that doesn't show any nudity.
But it caught our interest ...
Over four years ago, the media in Japan and globally went bananas about a Japanese man who "married" a virtual character.
These stories are catnip to editors who love "sexless Japan" and "wacky Japan" content. The tale of Akihiko Kondo and his love for popular Vocaloid idol Hatsune Miku was too much to resist, and the world lapped it up.
For little discernible reason, Kondo (who is now 40) is back in the news.
The Mainichi Shimbun sat down for a fresh interview with him and find out how his "marriage" is going. (The newspaper also published a follow-up story in January 2022.) Apparently, ...
The media narratives about Japan typically conform to a handful of familiar tropes: Japan is a sexless, childless hellscape, or Japan is a kinky, weird land of bountiful sexual fetishes.
Of course, neither is true. Japan is just Japan, with all shades and colors.
But it is a fact that the population is declining and people are having fewer children. The number of babies born in Japan dropped below 800,000 last year, the first time this has happened since records began in 1899.
The reasons for this are manifold -- and we think they are primarily economic -- don't rush to assume it's because ...
A new survey has found that an increasing number of people in Japan aged 18-34 don't expect to get married.
The results of the government-affiliated National Institute of Population and Social Security's 2021 survey of 7,862 people, published earlier this month, show that 17.3% of men and 14.6% of women aged between 18 and 34 claimed to have no intention of marrying.
This is the highest such figure since the questionnaire was first conducted in 1982.
Back in the mid-1980s, at the peak of the confident bubble economy years, the numbers were just 2.3% for men and 4.1% for women.
The ...
