Japan’s Relationship Status: It’s Complicated

Vice covers Japan’s “relationship replacement services”:

According to Abigail Haworth, the country isn’t getting much real romance as of late:

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.

Carl Scott throws some cold water:

[T]he late wunderkind Japanese-translator blogger Ampontan (Bill Sakovich) utterly debunked one of the three studies the Guardian story relies upon, the one making the particular claim that 45% of women aged 16-24 (and a quarter of the men) “were not interested in or despised sexual contact,” when these claims first surfaced a couple years ago. Here’s the money graf:

In other words, the Internet was agog over a report that 22 males and 38 females aged 16-19 said either that they had no interest in sex or despised it. When the Huffington Post spun this story as “a third of the nation’s youth” disliking sex, they were basing it on the response of 60 self-selected people. The HuffPo also thinks 38 girls is a “whopping” number.

Yes, another survey the Guardian article links to is much better than that, with a sample near 10,000, but as far as I can tell by skimming the report, it deals with fairly different questions, while as a whole it supports the overall trend reported of less effort being put into pursuing love relationships and marriages.

Katy Waldman is fascinated by Japan’s falling marriage and fertility rates, which have more solid data to back them up:

The article tries to put Japan in a larger context: “Across urban Asia, Europe and America,” Haworth writes, “people are marrying later or not at all, birth rates are falling, single-occupant households are on the rise.” But the sense of romantic futility and disillusionment in Japan feels distinct.

Trapped by outdated gender roles and crunched for both time and money, the young people in the story seem to be throwing up their hands in surrender. It would be one thing—new, but not tragic—if all the virtual wonderlands and stimulating careers and electric urban pastimes were diverting attention away from couplehood and even sex. But, at least in this article, the ebbing of human intimacy seems to come from a place of disenchantment and frustration. I can’t make this historical husband-wife arrangement thing work, so I’m giving up altogether.

Fisher focuses on the economic consequences of Japan’s demographic decline:

[T]his is more than a story about Japan and its cultural quirks: It’s a story about the global economy. Japan is the world’s third-largest economy, a crucial link in global trade and a significant factor everyone else’s economic well-being. It owns almost as much U.S. debt as does China. It’s a top trading partner of the U.S., China and lots of other countries. The Japanese economy is in serious enough trouble that it could set the rest of us back. And the biggest source of that trouble is demographic: Japanese people aren’t having enough kids to sustain a healthy economy. One big reason they’re having fewer kids is that they’re not as interested in dating or marrying one another, in part because they’re less interested in sex.

Keating wants us to stop picking on Japan: