Why are loveless marriages so common in Japan? That's the question that prolific bilingual YouTuber Nobita sets out to answer in a recent video. Note that he's not talking about sexless marriages per se. Obviously that's a factor here but his subject is marriages where love has faded, or even gone completely. That said, as he states at the start, the divorce rate in Japan is comparatively low, potentially meaning that many people are choosing to remain in a marriage with a partner they no longer love. He focuses in the first part of the video on the case of a friend called Yuka, who has ...

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In a series of brief yet enlightening street interviews, actual Japanese girls reveal their answers to the personal questions we all want to ask. How often do Japanese girls want to have sex? What are the signs that a Japanese girl wants to have sex with you? How much do you Japanese like having sex? How many dates do Japanese girls want to go on before having sex? How long do Japanese girls expect their male partners to last in bed? And what do Japanese girls think about having sex for the first time with a partner? So much for sexless Japanese! The interviews were ...

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A recent survey of 1,000 boys and girls in Japan aged between 17 and 19 revealed that only about a quarter had sexual experience, though more girls did than boys, but girls had more negative impressions of sex than their male counterparts. The survey was conducted by the Nippon Foundation, which put up a detailed write-up with graphs on its multilingual online journal, nippon.com. Overall, 23.6% of the respondents had sexual experience. A breakdown by gender found a 5% gap with 26.2% of girls and 21.2% of boys. When asked about what age they had their first sexual experience, the most ...

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Japanese actress and singer Erika Sawajiri was in the news recently after her drug bust in late 2019, the latest in a long line of scandals and ups and downs for the celebrity. The 33-year-old has officially retired from the industry after receiving a suspended sentence in February and we doubt we will be seeing her back any time soon, so taboo are drugs in Japan in spite of their prevalence in the entertainment world. At the time, Sawajiri was about to star in the annual Taiga drama on NHK, which would have been her biggest mainstream success since her comeback. Another intriguing ...

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As spotted on Twitter by Unseen Japan, a recently announced survey about sex had some troubling results for people in Japan. The survey asked "What's the most pleasurable thing for you?" and, not surprisingly, sex came out top in most countries, though "delicious food" was the top-ranked response in Japan. Any quick glance at the food porn that comprises most of the content of TV shows in the nation will confirm the veracity of this, perhaps, but is it a bad sign? Or rather, just what we already knew from previous research? Sex was bested in Japan by spending time with a loved one, holding ...

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The comedian Jim Jefferies recently came to Japan for his weekly Comedy Central show and made a clickbaity segment called "Japanese Millennials Aren't Having Sex?" (or, uncensored, "Why Aren't Japanese Millennials Fucking?"). We'll let you be the judge of how much this is just a case of "laughing at strange Asians" or taking a genuine if comic look at a social phenomenon. One of the interviewees included a maid, whose line of work was suggested as a reason that men don't want to have sex because the experience of a maid cafe and other fantasy-fulfillment services suppress actual desire. ...

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When all is said and done, the human race is driven by some pretty basic urges: eat, sleep, and fuck. Everything else is ultimately just window dressing for what we have come to call civilization and society. But of the three, which is the most important for people today in our nominally sophisticated age? Specifically, which do Japanese people value the most? Japanese survey site Sirabee set out to find the answer to this question by asking 1,781 men and women in Japan, aged between their teens and sixties. Which could you not live without? Food, sleep, or sex? Almost 54% of those ...

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We think we probably do more than enough damage to Brand Japan by our daily blog posts without perpetuating media myths about "sexless Japan." We see a lot of articles and coverage of this topic, which we feel is a real problem but nonetheless also exaggerated by sensational, mostly foreign reporting. Nonetheless, we like to share interesting twists on this familiar trope. Something like half of married couples are no longer having sex, the studies would have us believe. But this may start younger, since one survey apparently claimed the majority of college students are virgins. This is ...

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Oh, dear, another silly headline to start our day. Please indulge us once again... This time it's a survey by the Japanese Association for Sex Education, using 2017 data collected from Japanese college and university students that has been (no doubt selectively) parsed to produce a clickbaity sensational find. We first stumbled upon this in English on SoraNews24, though the original source is the Japanese news. Yes, most colleges kids are still virgins. Well, college starts at 18 (same age as the lovely Nana Asakawa, pictured above), so is it a particular shock? Let's take a ...

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The results are predictable and messy. Along comes a journalist in the West who fancies tackleing the thorny old saw that is sexlessness in Japan, or a perceived problem of sexlessness, and blunders around making generalizations based on some Google searches. This time it's well-known writer Julie Burchill in the British right-leaning weekly magazine The Spectator, who provocatively asks "Why do the Japanese despise sex?" Her rationale seems to be that it all comes down to hikikomori -- acute social withdrawal syndrome -- which affects, the article claims, some half a million male ...

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