What happens to a country when its young people stop having sex? Japan is finding out… Abigail Haworth investigates
Japanese man and woman lean away from each other
Arm’s
length: 45% of Japanese women aged 16-24 are ‘not interested in or
despise sexual contact’. More than a quarter of men feel the same way.
Photograph: Eric Rechsteiner
Ai Aoyama is a sex and relationship
counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back
street. Her first name means "love" in Japanese, and is a keepsake from
her earlier days as a professional dominatrix. Back then, about 15
years ago, she was Queen Ai, or Queen Love, and she did "all the usual
things" like tying people up and dripping hot wax on their nipples. Her
work today, she says, is far more challenging. Aoyama, 52, is trying to
cure what Japan's media calls sekkusu shinai shokogun, or "celibacy
syndrome".
Japan's under-40s appear to be losing interest in
conventional relationships. Millions aren't even dating, and increasing
numbers can't be bothered with sex. For their government, "celibacy
syndrome" is part of a looming national catastrophe. Japan already has
one of the world's lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million,
which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a
further one-third by 2060. Aoyama believes the country is experiencing
"a flight from human intimacy" – and it's partly the government's fault.
The
sign outside her building says "Clinic". She greets me in yoga pants
and fluffy animal slippers, cradling a Pekingese dog whom she introduces
as Marilyn Monroe. In her business pamphlet, she offers up the
gloriously random confidence that she visited North Korea in the 1990s
and squeezed the testicles of a top army general. It doesn't say whether
she was invited there specifically for that purpose, but the message to
her clients is clear: she doesn't judge.
Inside, she takes me
upstairs to her "relaxation room" – a bedroom with no furniture except a
double futon. "It will be quiet in here," she says. Aoyama's first task
with most of her clients is encouraging them "to stop apologising for
their own physical existence".
The number of single people has
reached a record high. A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men
and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic
relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another
study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all.
(There are no figures for same-sex relationships.) Although there has
long been a pragmatic separation of love and sex in Japan – a country
mostly free of religious morals – sex fares no better. A survey earlier
this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45%
of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual
contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way.
Sex
counsellor Ai Aoyama with a client and her dog Learning to love: sex
counsellor Ai Aoyama, with one of her clients and her dog Marilyn.
Photograph: Eric Rechsteiner/Panos Picture
Many people who seek
her out, says Aoyama, are deeply confused. "Some want a partner, some
prefer being single, but few relate to normal love and marriage."
However, the pressure to conform to Japan's anachronistic family model
of salaryman husband and stay-at-home wife remains. "People don't know
where to turn. They're coming to me because they think that, by wanting
something different, there's something wrong with them."
Official
alarmism doesn't help. Fewer babies were born here in 2012 than any
year on record. (This was also the year, as the number of elderly people
shoots up, that adult incontinence pants outsold baby nappies in Japan
for the first time.) Kunio Kitamura, head of the JFPA, claims the
demographic crisis is so serious that Japan "might eventually perish
into extinction".
Japan's under-40s won't go forth and multiply
out of duty, as postwar generations did. The country is undergoing major
social transition after 20 years of economic stagnation. It is also
battling against the effects on its already nuclear-destruction-scarred
psyche of 2011's earthquake, tsunami and radioactive meltdown. There is
no going back. "Both men and women say to me they don't see the point of
love. They don't believe it can lead anywhere," says Aoyama.
"Relationships have become too hard."
Marriage has become a
minefield of unattractive choices. Japanese men have become less
career-driven, and less solvent, as lifetime job security has waned.
Japanese women have become more independent and ambitious. Yet
conservative attitudes in the home and workplace persist. Japan's
punishing corporate world makes it almost impossible for women to
combine a career and family, while children are unaffordable unless both
parents work. Cohabiting or unmarried parenthood is still unusual,
dogged by bureaucratic disapproval.
Aoyama says the sexes,
especially in Japan's giant cities, are "spiralling away from each
other". Lacking long-term shared goals, many are turning to what she
terms "Pot Noodle love" – easy or instant gratification, in the form of
casual sex, short-term trysts and the usual technological suspects:
online porn, virtual-reality "girlfriends", anime cartoons. Or else
they're opting out altogether and replacing love and sex with other
urban pastimes.
Some of Aoyama's clients are among the small
minority who have taken social withdrawal to a pathological extreme.
They are recovering hikikomori ("shut-ins" or recluses) taking the first
steps to rejoining the outside world, otaku (geeks), and long-term
parasaito shingurus (parasite singles) who have reached their mid-30s
without managing to move out of home. (Of the estimated 13 million
unmarried people in Japan who currently live with their parents, around
three million are over the age of 35.) "A few people can't relate to the
opposite sex physically or in any other way. They flinch if I touch
them," she says. "Most are men, but I'm starting to see more women."
Young
women shopping in Tokyo No sex in the city: (from left) friends Emi
Kuwahata, 23, and Eri Asada, 22, shopping in Tokyo. Photograph: Eric
Rechsteiner/Panos Pictures
Aoyama cites one man in his early 30s,
a virgin, who can't get sexually aroused unless he watches female
robots on a game similar to Power Rangers. "I use therapies, such as
yoga and hypnosis, to relax him and help him to understand the way that
real human bodies work." Sometimes, for an extra fee, she gets naked
with her male clients – "strictly no intercourse" – to physically guide
them around the female form. Keen to see her nation thrive, she likens
her role in these cases to that of the Edo period courtesans, or oiran,
who used to initiate samurai sons into the art of erotic pleasure.
Aversion
to marriage and intimacy in modern life is not unique to Japan. Nor is
growing preoccupation with digital technology. But what endless Japanese
committees have failed to grasp when they stew over the country's
procreation-shy youth is that, thanks to official shortsightedness, the
decision to stay single often makes perfect sense. This is true for both
sexes, but it's especially true for women. "Marriage is a woman's
grave," goes an old Japanese saying that refers to wives being ignored
in favour of mistresses. For Japanese women today, marriage is the grave
of their hard-won careers.
I meet Eri Tomita, 32, over Saturday
morning coffee in the smart Tokyo district of Ebisu. Tomita has a job
she loves in the human resources department of a French-owned bank. A
fluent French speaker with two university degrees, she avoids romantic
attachments so she can focus on work. "A boyfriend proposed to me three
years ago. I turned him down when I realised I cared more about my job.
After that, I lost interest in dating. It became awkward when the
question of the future came up."
Tomita says a woman's chances of
promotion in Japan stop dead as soon as she marries. "The bosses assume
you will get pregnant." Once a woman does have a child, she adds, the
long, inflexible hours become unmanageable. "You have to resign. You end
up being a housewife with no independent income. It's not an option for
women like me."
Around 70% of Japanese women leave their jobs
after their first child. The World Economic Forum consistently ranks
Japan as one of the world's worst nations for gender equality at work.
Social attitudes don't help. Married working women are sometimes
demonised as oniyome, or "devil wives". In a telling Japanese ballet
production of Bizet's Carmen a few years ago, Carmen was portrayed as a
career woman who stole company secrets to get ahead and then framed her
lowly security-guard lover José. Her end was not pretty.
Prime
minister Shinzo Abe recently trumpeted long-overdue plans to increase
female economic participation by improving conditions and daycare, but
Tomita says things would have to improve "dramatically" to compel her to
become a working wife and mother. "I have a great life. I go out with
my girl friends – career women like me – to French and Italian
restaurants. I buy stylish clothes and go on nice holidays. I love my
independence."
Tomita sometimes has one-night stands with men she
meets in bars, but she says sex is not a priority, either. "I often get
asked out by married men in the office who want an affair. They assume
I'm desperate because I'm single." She grimaces, then shrugs.
"Mendokusai."
Mendokusai translates loosely as "Too troublesome"
or "I can't be bothered". It's the word I hear both sexes use most often
when they talk about their relationship phobia. Romantic commitment
seems to represent burden and drudgery, from the exorbitant costs of
buying property in Japan to the uncertain expectations of a spouse and
in-laws. And the centuries-old belief that the purpose of marriage is to
produce children endures. Japan's Institute of Population and Social
Security reports an astonishing 90% of young women believe that staying
single is "preferable to what they imagine marriage to be like".
Eri
Tomita, 32, office worker in Tokyo 'I often get asked out by married men
in the office who want an affair as I am single. But I can’t be
bothered': Eri Tomita, 32. Photograph: Eric Rechsteiner/Panos Pictures
The
sense of crushing obligation affects men just as much. Satoru Kishino,
31, belongs to a large tribe of men under 40 who are engaging in a kind
of passive rebellion against traditional Japanese masculinity. Amid the
recession and unsteady wages, men like Kishino feel that the pressure on
them to be breadwinning economic warriors for a wife and family is
unrealistic. They are rejecting the pursuit of both career and romantic
success.
"It's too troublesome," says Kishino, when I ask why
he's not interested in having a girlfriend. "I don't earn a huge salary
to go on dates and I don't want the responsibility of a woman hoping it
might lead to marriage." Japan's media, which has a name for every
social kink, refers to men like Kishino as "herbivores" or soshoku
danshi (literally, "grass-eating men"). Kishino says he doesn't mind the
label because it's become so commonplace. He defines it as "a
heterosexual man for whom relationships and sex are unimportant".
The
phenomenon emerged a few years ago with the airing of a Japanese
manga-turned-TV show. The lead character in Otomen ("Girly Men") was a
tall martial arts champion, the king of tough-guy cool. Secretly, he
loved baking cakes, collecting "pink sparkly things" and knitting
clothes for his stuffed animals. To the tooth-sucking horror of Japan's
corporate elders, the show struck a powerful chord with the generation
they spawned.
Satoru Kishino, 31 ‘I find women attractive but I’ve
learned to live without sex. Emotional entanglements are too
complicated’: Satoru Kishino, 31. Photograph: Eric Rechsteiner/Panos
Pictures
Kishino, who works at a fashion accessories company as a
designer and manager, doesn't knit. But he does like cooking and
cycling, and platonic friendships. "I find some of my female friends
attractive but I've learned to live without sex. Emotional entanglements
are too complicated," he says. "I can't be bothered."
Romantic
apathy aside, Kishino, like Tomita, says he enjoys his active single
life. Ironically, the salaryman system that produced such segregated
marital roles – wives inside the home, husbands at work for 20 hours a
day – also created an ideal environment for solo living. Japan's cities
are full of conveniences made for one, from stand-up noodle bars to
capsule hotels to the ubiquitous konbini (convenience stores), with
their shelves of individually wrapped rice balls and disposable
underwear. These things originally evolved for salarymen on the go, but
there are now female-only cafés, hotel floors and even the odd apartment
block. And Japan's cities are extraordinarily crime-free.
Some
experts believe the flight from marriage is not merely a rejection of
outdated norms and gender roles. It could be a long-term state of
affairs. "Remaining single was once the ultimate personal failure," says
Tomomi Yamaguchi, a Japanese-born assistant professor of anthropology
at Montana State University in America. "But more people are finding
they prefer it." Being single by choice is becoming, she believes, "a
new reality".
Is Japan providing a glimpse of all our futures?
Many of the shifts there are occurring in other advanced nations, too.
Across urban Asia, Europe and America, people are marrying later or not
at all, birth rates are falling, single-occupant households are on the
rise and, in countries where economic recession is worst, young people
are living at home. But demographer Nicholas Eberstadt argues that a
distinctive set of factors is accelerating these trends in Japan. These
factors include the lack of a religious authority that ordains marriage
and family, the country's precarious earthquake-prone ecology that
engenders feelings of futility, and the high cost of living and raising
children.
"Gradually but relentlessly, Japan is evolving into a
type of society whose contours and workings have only been contemplated
in science fiction," Eberstadt wrote last year. With a vast army of
older people and an ever-dwindling younger generation, Japan may become a
"pioneer people" where individuals who never marry exist in significant
numbers, he said.
Japan's 20-somethings are the age group to
watch. Most are still too young to have concrete future plans, but
projections for them are already laid out. According to the government's
population institute, women in their early 20s today have a one-in-four
chance of never marrying. Their chances of remaining childless are even
higher: almost 40%.
They don't seem concerned. Emi Kuwahata, 23,
and her friend, Eri Asada, 22, meet me in the shopping district of
Shibuya. The café they choose is beneath an art gallery near the train
station, wedged in an alley between pachinko pinball parlours and adult
video shops. Kuwahata, a fashion graduate, is in a casual relationship
with a man 13 years her senior. "We meet once a week to go clubbing,"
she says. "I don't have time for a regular boyfriend. I'm trying to
become a fashion designer." Asada, who studied economics, has no
interest in love. "I gave up dating three years ago. I don't miss
boyfriends or sex. I don't even like holding hands."
Asada
insists nothing happened to put her off physical contact. She just
doesn't want a relationship and casual sex is not a good option, she
says, because "girls can't have flings without being judged". Although
Japan is sexually permissive, the current fantasy ideal for women under
25 is impossibly cute and virginal. Double standards abound.
In
the Japan Family Planning Association's 2013 study on sex among young
people, there was far more data on men than women. I asked the
association's head, Kunio Kitamura, why. "Sexual drive comes from
males," said the man who advises the government. "Females do not
experience the same levels of desire."
Over iced tea served by
skinny-jeaned boys with meticulously tousled hair, Asada and Kuwahata
say they share the usual singleton passions of clothes, music and
shopping, and have hectic social lives. But, smart phones in hand, they
also admit they spend far more time communicating with their friends via
online social networks than seeing them in the flesh. Asada adds she's
spent "the past two years" obsessed with a virtual game that lets her
act as a manager of a sweet shop.
Japanese-American author Roland
Kelts, who writes about Japan's youth, says it's inevitable that the
future of Japanese relationships will be largely technology driven.
"Japan has developed incredibly sophisticated virtual worlds and online
communication systems. Its smart phone apps are the world's most
imaginative." Kelts says the need to escape into private, virtual worlds
in Japan stems from the fact that it's an overcrowded nation with
limited physical space. But he also believes the rest of the world is
not far behind.
Getting back to basics, former dominatrix Ai
Aoyama – Queen Love – is determined to educate her clients on the value
of "skin-to-skin, heart-to-heart" intimacy. She accepts that technology
will shape the future, but says society must ensure it doesn't take
over. "It's not healthy that people are becoming so physically
disconnected from each other," she says. "Sex with another person is a
human need that produces feel-good hormones and helps people to function
better in their daily lives."
Aoyama says she sees daily that
people crave human warmth, even if they don't want the hassle of
marriage or a long-term relationship. She berates the government for
"making it hard for single people to live however they want" and for
"whipping up fear about the falling birth rate". Whipping up fear in
people, she says, doesn't help anyone. And that's from a woman who knows
a bit about whipping.
