This is the start of an article in today’s Guardian newspaper. It is penned by a writer who talked about Japan’s drift away from sexual relationahips in a BBC documentary “No Sex Please, We’re Japanese”, a play on the title of a popular 1970s British farce.The grounds of Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park have been colonised by beautiful youth: women and men beneath the cherry blossoms surrounded by bottles of wine, sake and shochu, cases of beer and plastic bags stuffed with finger foods – drinking, playing games and sharing smartphone screens as the buds bloom and fall.
Hanami (flower-viewing) parties are a centuries-old rite of spring, a national symbol of life’s beauty and brevity. But as I walk by them this month, I can’t help but wonder if any of the pink-faced revellers are hooking up, or even care enough to try.
Bolstered by a plummeting birth rate and an ageing population (leading to dire predictions of a future Japan devoid of Japanese), this portrait of the nation’s celibate society has been further enhanced by a paradox: Japan’s cultural imagination is embedded with erotic imagery, from 17th-century shunga woodblock prints to what non-Japanese today often mistakenly call hentai (perverse) pornographic manga and anime. The sex lives of the Japanese, the story goes, have been almost entirely sublimated.
He writes that in the University of Tokyo’s 2015 Survey of Japan’s “virginity crisis”, one in four young adults are not interested in sex.
He adds that recent reports from the US, the UK and Germany also show dampening sex drives among with young, with the primary inactives being men.What is striking is the comparatively high number of young adult Japanese who, well into their 30s, have had some sex but gave it up, and now have no interest in finding an intimate partner at all.
.All of which may still make Japan the perfect storm of our sexless futures, where physical contact and face-to-face intimacy are fluttering to the ground like so many cherry petals
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... sical-love