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Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

This is a stupid article, and young people in Japan have not stopped having sex.

What westerners might call 'casual sex' -- sex without the framework of a relationships that implies various other promieses/committments -- is normal, and also not likely to be spoken about frankly, especially to a reporter, and much less a British one.

Sometimes I'll witness a young woman asked about it at a social gathering (as people have a few drinks and speak more freely). "I don't have anybody... I can't remember the last time I slept with somebody," she might say. What she means is that she doesn't have a steady boyfriend, and thus it is certainly none of your business who she's fucking.

Or I will see a guy asked about it. "Well, romance is too complicated with all I've got going on... I've learned to live without it," he might say, with just the right amount of sheepishness. What he means is that he is seeking only sex that doesn't come with implied commitments and hassle.

These two people might very well end up leaving together.

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Why is it stupid? Obviously they don't mean every single Japanese young person hasn't stopped having sex. What the author means is that as a trend, they've stopped having sex, as evidenced by the declining population, the lack of young people in relationships, etc. From the data they cited from the surveys, it seems pretty incontrovertible that there is some sort of problem, despite your own personal anecdotes.

Neither "declining population" nor "lack of young people in relationships" indicates people not having sex. It only indicates people not wanting families or kids.

Right, but those aren't the only two signs we're talking about. If people are having lots of sex but don't want kids, we might see that in booming contraceptive sales. If people are having lots of sex but not using contraception and not having kids, well that would show up in wider culture too (e.g. gay dating sites would proliferate). Sex on a personal level is a very private thing for many people in many cultures, but trends can always been seen because there is always a commercial side.

Indeed, people not having procreative sex would be more correct.

It's stupid because they have multiplied a couple anecdotes, conflated decreased reproductive output and formalized relationships with a decrease in actual sex, and gotten all breathless and hyperbolic about it.

There's no evidence of any trend that young people in Japan have stopped having sex. That is what I was trying to point out: not being in an old-fashioned relationship, and not actually bearing children, does not any longer have any kind of direct relationship to how much sex you are having.

There may well be ongoing generational changes to reproductive and marriage/relationship behavior in Japan, as there is elsewhere (c.f. everywhere on Earth), but this article doesn't go there.

Is this really that surprising? Just look at the Hikikomori increasing.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

I have upvoted this not because I agree, but because you have provided a basis for your statement about why you don't buy this line of reasoning.

I look toward the prospects of women in Japan for an indication as to what's wrong. These are people who have grown up with dreams that society seems unwilling to support. For how many women in Japan is 'Maybe it's time to have a kid in the next few years' tantamount to "I must give up any dreams of having a career"?

Calm down: Not having sex is for that article mostly just an exaggeration for a catchy headline. Of course they are having sex but likely less sex and less in love with commitment, caring, affection, intimacy, passion, joining of lives, vows, romance, trust, respect, responsiveness, supportive families (e.g., he gets a job in her father's business), collection of activities, memories, and traditions like, don't want to lose, can't get anywhere else, and that cause 'lock in', homes ("where the heart is, where you are loved even when you are wrong"), and children ("the most rewarding thing we did").

And why not just more one night stands? Because they are short on commitment (feel alone and, thus, scared in the morning), caring, ..., children.

And just for passion, a good version requires the couple to have had a lot of time together and to care about each other -- e.g., for a man, the best result of passion is that, net, she smiles the rest of the evening, the next morning, and well into the next day, and that takes some mutual caring, practice, and effort.

Why so value the smiles? Because they promise 1000 more good evenings of passion instead of maybe 0, lots of good back rubs, a nice breakfast, lots of 'contact comfort' for, say, another 24 hours, etc.

>It's stupid because they have multiplied a couple anecdotes, conflated decreased reproductive output and formalized relationships with a decrease in actual sex, and gotten all breathless and hyperbolic about it.

This doesn't fit the article:

> 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.

So A: the person asking the questions isn't a reporter, B: they aren't British, and C: they have every reason to figure out a way to get people to answer the questions honestly, i.e., not "cultural misunderstanding" where someone at a party lies about how much sex they have.

What your argument really boils down to is: "no measurement, real or otherwise, could ever possibly indicate that Japanese people are having less sex": i.e. your post is unfalsifiable, and your claim thusly ludicrous.

>There may well be ongoing generational changes to reproductive and marriage/relationship behavior in Japan [...] but this article doesn't go there.

Did you read it?

>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".

So we can correctly interpret your post: what precisely is "going there", if not this?

The article is also based on the opinions of two people who have been claiming to study Japanese sexual behavior: the therapist Ai Aoyama and the sociologist Nicholas Eberstadt. Certainly the opinion of two "experts" is not a conclusive analysis of a situation, but this is a pretty ordinary way of sourcing information for a news article. It isn't particularly "stupid" for this. Which is why statements like this:

>There's no evidence of any trend that young people in Japan have stopped having sex.

make you look dishonest in light of this:

http://www.ipss.go.jp/site-ad/index_english/nfs14/Nfs14_Sing...

http://www.durex.com/en-jp/sexualwellbeingsurvey/documents/g...

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20110906ad.html

You can dispute the strength of the evidence, but it isn't "no evidence".

This certainly isn't a phenomenon exclusive to Japan either.

I know plenty of western young people who have no interest in marriage, procreation or families. Maybe they're more interested in their work. Maybe they're more interested in rock-climbing. Maybe they're more interested in Pokemon.

More power to them, I say.

I think it's a bigger more existential problem that young people these days have.

Maybe they have too many electronic substitutes. There's nothing in the human makeup that says "will procreate even in the presence of unlimited sexual gratification elsewhere". Its certainly something to be studied and understood.

Anecdotally, this is directly correlated to the price of real-estate, and other parts of the world are only now catching up to Japan in this regards.

A lot of people are looking at the utter destruction of freedom that raising a family is today, and choosing not to. It's not just the price of real estate, it's inflation too. Roll into that the lack of job security and negative real interest rates and it's no wonder people can't think about a future.

One of the most basic needs when planning for a future is the prospect that the future will be better than the past. It's now very difficult to arrange that independently of constant advancement at work and constant advancement at work requires tremendous amounts of effort.

People are getting squeezed from both sides. I feel this myself, and I'm doing quite well statistically; white, male, educated, highly skilled and gainfully employed.

You people are forgetting feminism.

It has lots to do with it.

Brazil for example has PLENTY of space and cheap places to live (unless you want to live in São Paulo... like where I am now, the prices here ARE fucked up)

Yet marriages are going down to the point of scare the government too.

The reason for it is simple (there has been lots of research, not only here, but on other countries with declining births to dangerous levels): women prefer their careers to motherhood...

Even the UN gender economic report, state that it thinks is a good thing women have less kids because they can get richer (yes, that is written in the report, specifically, the report consider that countries where women have less than 3 kids, are countries that are awesome because they are reaching gender equality, since women with less kids can work more)

For men, it is the invention of no-fault divorce, that keeps marriage pointless (the point of marriage historically, in cultures where divorce was forbidden by law or by custom or by religion, was to force women stay in the marriage, and indeed in countries with no-fault divorce, no matter where, they keep finding that 70% of the divorces with no reason where started by women)

I wonder if they ACTUALLY prefer careers or if they THINK they do and thus never try. Remember that it's at least an 18 year commitment (probably longer) so that if you've got any doubts it's really easy to talk yourself out of it.

Let me be clear: I'm not suggesting that women have any societal obligations.

But given that we're all here today we can infer historically that women (as a whole) have liked having children at least some amount. Did they never ACTUALLY like it but that was their only choice? Or do they (again as a whole) enjoy motherhood but socioeconomic life is now so treacherous that motherhood is a luxury few can afford? Perhaps something else entirely from the false dichotomy I've suggested?

EDIT: I've accepted your premise at face value, but I'm not sure I should. I don't know how to properly caveat this comment.

This is not fully clear yet, as we need more.20 years or so in this situation to be sure, but seemly women are being convinced that they want careers, and they regret it later... Right now the numbers of 50 year old childless women due to feminism is still low, but many of those few are drifting to be against feminism.instead and attempt to convince younger women to not repeat their mistakes. Mostly because when you are a 50 year old childless rich women, you realize that now you still have 30 years to live, nothing to do, and few people to love and care for you.

Since when does feminism promote childlessness?

It promotes the emancipation of women. When men care about children as much, there is no problem in having kids and a career for women (and men).

Feminism is about empowerment and choices. Being empowered to choose not to get married and have kids as I read it, considering that in the Western world that was "a woman's role" for probably centuries. At least as long as we've had patriarchy, which is quite a while.

Once women have the freedom to choose not to get married, have kids, etc it seems likely that some choose not to and thus the rise of feminism is roughly correlated with a decline in birthrates.

I've tidied this up in a nice little causal package but it's quite likely not so clear cut. But it certainly does seem that way at a glance. Which is why the notion gets such good traction amongst some.

Example of Feminism mixed with childlessness:

The UN report on gender equality in economy, writes explictly that countries where women have fertility of less than 3 is good, because research shows that women with high education has few kids, and thus it concludes that a country with not much kids mean that country has educated women, that from the point of the view of the report is a good thing.

I'm pretty skeptical of your claim that the point of marriage historically was to force women to stay in the marriage. Evolutionary sociobiology holds the opposite: that marriage evolved to get men to stick around. A woman already has an evolutionary incentive to provide for her offspring: she's invested far more in them (having provided the egg and nurtured them inside her for 9 months) than her partner has. A man's evolutionary incentive is to spread his seed across more women, because he can have many children while his wife can only have one per year. But since society benefits from not having all the violence and uncertainty that results from men porking each others' wives and being unsure whether the children they were raising were actually their own children, marriage evolved.

If your "70% of no-fault divorces were started by women" statistic holds true, it could be because the greater economic power wielded by men made them pretty shitty husbands, and so when the opportunity arose, their wives divorced them.

Women are hipergamous, they stay only with one person at time, but they switch to what they perceive as better ones. Most divorces are early in the marriage, when the woman is still young enough to have her first kids, or more kids beyond her first or second kid, and thus they can still find another man. Also there is research that found out that divorce rates drop when a woman has male children ( but not female, and noone knows why )

I am definitely more interested in Pokemon.

Your two fictional quotes are vague enough for subtext to creep in, but the quotes in the article are quite plain and clear. Speaking to reporters (especially foreign ones) is one of the few cases where Japanese people feel free to speak frankly, because there is a significantly reduced feeling of social judgment. They generally won't talk within their social circle about causal sex because it will lead to talk (or more likely implication) of marriage, which is an uncomfortable subject nowadays, for reasons outlined in the article.

Do you think that the Japanese would be less inclined to speak frankly about their sex lives with foreign reporters or pollsters than, say, Koreans, Italians or Americans?

Haha. They can't resist hormones and desire. Platonic love forever is lying. Japanese could do better as they have highly advanced porn and sexual industry.

Japanese are less inclined to speak frankly about anything to anyone. A western reporter is probably more likely to take what they say at face value, without understanding the subtlety of their response and then report it as truth, especially when it supports a click-bait headline.

Yes. Japanese culture has an extreme level of politeness that you don't see in Italy or America (I don't know enough about Korea to comment). Even the British are more open.

Yeah, the British are partly the way they are (reserved, standoffish, polite) because they are a small, crowded, island nation. Japan is the same but more so.

Hmmmm, somebody's never been out in town on a Friday night.

I always heard it described that Japanese are shy to a large part for the same reason Scandinavian/Nordic people are shy -- a very violent society, which isn't violent anymore. The shyness is a historic anacronism.

(The shyness comes from that in a large fraction of quarrels someone(s) will be carried away, in pieces. You don't cause offense without very good reason. Not sober, anyway.)

Korea is similar to Japan, but not as extreme. They also have a very hierarchical society, but people are more open about their emotions. Whereas the Japanese will go to great lengths to avoid conflict, the Koreans have a breaking point that you can often see reached in public.

That explain why their parliament sometimes comes to physical fights (where in Japan it does not...)

Yes, I do think just that.

Not only about their sex lives, but just about all manner of private things. This is a culture where when you buy a book at a bookstore, they wrap it in a cover for you so that people around you won't know what you are reading.

Many drug stores have extra-opaque dark bags that you can request when you buy stuff you would rather keep private -- don't want the person next to you on the train knowing you have tampons or -- heaven forbid -- hemmhoroid creme. (Of course a small subset of those train riders won't feel any special compunction to hide their 800-page comic book featuring anthropomorphized household appliances coming live at night and raping strangely compliant schoolgirls, but those people are the exception that proves my rule.)

I think the Japanese would be about the least open about the intimate details of their sex lives than basically any modern advanced democratic population.

None of that accounts for the change seen, or explains why they would be more forthcoming with forgeiners than surveyists.

The title is linkbait, to be sure, but I think that in focusing on the hyperbolic linkbaiting, you miss the ultimate point of the article, which to me is to describe a growing cultural shift in relationships, which is having major social and economic repercussions.

And speaking with the sex therapist, who also acknowledges the shift in young peoples' cultural approach to sex? Should we disregard that as well?

Also, while the title is certainly link-baity, I think the point of the article is more about the lack of desire to cultivate meaningful intimate relationships that turn into families.

I have to say, this is the kind of thing I was thinking while reading the entire article. One of the things I remember most about working in Japan is the different manners in which people would answer questions. Everything did seem so extremely indirect, yet not necessarily dishonest.

are we just being "gaijin" by taking the article at face value.

japanese are particularly good at keeping different segments of their identity separate.

This is not stupid article. The journalist in question used these few people just to add human interest in a story full of statistics.

1. Increasing number of Japanese have just casual sex.

2. Increasing number of Japanese don't have sex (with other human) at all.

There is statistical data from several surveys backing this up.

I think what the parent is saying (and is reiterated by several other posts here) is that premise of young Japanese people not having sex is based on a lack of understanding in the cultural subtexts implied by the way those young people are answering the questions. The reporter is taking their answers at face value, when in fact they shouldn't be at all.

You missed the claim that it is well documented that the Japanese young have less sex. A quick check of condom sales (and/or VD statistics) can verify if people have less sex.

But, of course, the article really might be just pure fantasy with invented statistics.

(I have no idea. Since it is easily testable, any fact checkers at the magazine would find out quickly. But maybe only NYTimes have them, these days.)

Edit: Grammar fix. ferongr, I wrote condom and VD sales like that, since they obviously play off each others -- we do talk about short term affairs... (Ok, gaius did note the third case -- pregnancies/abortions :-) Also supports my points, the amount of sex is easy to measure.)

>A quick check of condom sales (and/or VD statistics) can verify if people have less sex.

Or it could mean that Japanese people have more unprotected sex and that they value personal hygiene and health more, resulting in lower condom sales and V.D. rates per capita.

IF fewer children are being born AND sales of contraceptives are not up THEN less sex is being had. I don't see how it is possible to argue against that.

Hormonal birth control? Environmental factors reducing births?

Again: We talk about short term affairs -- both of these cases would be visible in VD statistics.

Also note the additional obvious problems: Other birth control sales, just like condoms, are easy to find statistically -- and environmental factors ought to be obvious among people trying to get kids.

It really strains credulity to think that Japanese people are going at it like bunnies but are simply light years ahead of everybody else on the planet in terms of sexual sophistication (to the point where unprotected anonymous sex is actually safe sex).

There was a survey made by the Japanese Government this year, where they found that about 55% of marriages had been having sex less than 1 time every 3 months.

The OP post here discrediting the situation in Japan claiming cultural differences is not understanding that shit DID went downhill.

(by the way, even before the earthquake, there was already numerous article and blog posts written by western reporters but also japanese women complaining that young japanese women cannot convince grasseaters to fuck them... there was even some people that went to reveal their personal anecdotes of forcing men to sleep naked with them, and the guy just... slept, and no matter how much the women caressed him, he just would not have sex)

This is a stupid article, and young people in Japan have not stopped having sex.

It doesn't claim that. It says that 25% of young men and 45% of young women are repulsed by sexual contact. That means that 75% of men and 55% of women are still open to it (and, presumably, having it).

I'd bet that if you looked at an American college campus, you'd find similar behavioral statistics, due to the declining ability of young Americans to form intimate relationships (which may not be their fault). Casual sex doesn't fit most people. Many people (including most men) can't get it and many (including most women) don't want it. Only about 50-60% participate in the casual market even once, and half of those end up wishing they hadn't.

Still, a 35% sexlessness rate among people in their 20s means that something is wrong. It doesn't mean that people have stopped having sex (65% are) but it's still a sign of something unhealthy. I don't take those numbers (which are probably not very different from those in the West) to indicate voluntary disinterest, but artifacts of undue stress.

When the cause of the sexlessness (which is not just a Japanese problem) is unnecessary corporate stress, it's worth looking for solutions.

I would argue that it's not so much that most women "don't want" casual sex, but that they are judged more harshly for having it. I believe women's sex drives are quite a bit higher than is reported, mainly because women are ashamed to admit their strictly sexual desires.

I agree. You just need to witness hordes of Swedish women when they're travelling :)

  Casual sex doesn't fit most people. Many people (including
  most men) can't get it and many (including most women) don't
  want it. Only about 50-60% participate in the casual market
  even once, and half of those end up wishing they hadn't.

I'd like to read about that in more depth. Can you cite that gender breakdown and participation/satisfaction stat to a specific set of published research?

I don't know where the parent's source is but the kinsey institute has super interesting stats on similar questions.

http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/resources/FAQ.html#frequency

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