Discussions are underway regarding a review of the Prostitution Prevention Law, including the possibility of penalties for those who pay for sex services. According to a report in the Asahi Shimbun on March 31, the discussions draw on data from a large-scale survey of 8,000 people revealing that approximately 48% of men living in Japan have used sex industry services at least once in their lives.
The survey was undertaken by a team including researchers from the University of Tokyo. It was conducted online in July 2022, targeting 8,000 people (4,000 men and 4,000 women) aged 20-49. Its main ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
