Japanese people still aren't having sex. And nobody knows why | Hacker News Reader

Japanese people still aren't having sex. And nobody knows why

sciencefocus.com

43 pointsbaranul129 comments

The potential speculations already listed in the article sound like enough reasons.

How about you corelate this with cost of living, financial independece, and decreasing socialisation? We are seeing similar trends in european countries.

When my generation was growing up, and reaching adulthood, in the late 90s early 2000s while our own teens didn't have places where to get intimate, outdoor sex was way more common than it is today!

Who in their right mind would do so today when you can't even pick your nose without being caught by some random outside camera or mobile phone.

Maybe think radically and enforce the opposit of curfews whereas old parents living with their young adults are forced to hang outside at bars/clubs from 10pm to 9am to give their youth some breathing room :))

Maybe make it illegal to publish a video of someone without their consent.

That will stop it surely

That doesn't work, at the very least, for two simple reasons.

First that you can't attest who filmed something without a lot of effort that law enforcement for sure won't bother with.

In many countries caught doing such activities in public spaces falls under public indecent exposure, if not something more draconian that puts you on a sex offender list. Morally people will feel obliged to report it there.

Can't attest who murdered someone or stole something or drew graffiti either, but making it illegal makes it happen a lot less, because of the chance that someone actually can attest it.

For example if you post it to Instagram or YouTube they'd know it was you, and you could go to jail.

So you go have a shag in an alley and I'll stumble upon you and your partner with my camera. How will you know I published it and where? Maybe I'll just upload it to some seedy website that you never visit.

I don't think "if you can't do it perfectly, always, you shouldn't even try" is a very good argument against nearly anything, and it certainly isn't engaging with the substance of the discussion.

It's almost like there's a spectrum of things. Some that you'll never catch and some that you will with reasonable effort. Where the above falls in this spectrum is clear, and should be thought about accordingly.

If I never find out, I care a lot less, this law just makes it your problem if it manages to impact my life.

You could find about it after 1, 2, 3 years or a decade. A person you know might find it and use it to blackmail you. Lots of potential for damage.

Fortunately, if someone is blackmailing you, that is a crime and you can use the police to send them to jail, as well as whoever posted it.

Yeah. Like if I break into you house and take two non-matching socks and leave quietly, how will you know that I did?

People steal, assault and even murder people and film themselves doing it and publish it on the internet.

And it's always very useful in their own prosecution.

But the point is that that's AFTER the crime, so doesn't stop it.

Or a civil liability for you and/or the platform. That and taxing advertising and heavily taxing anything that looks like gambling (very short term speculation) would solve a lot of problems.

“Planet Japan” is where we are headed it seems. Japan got there first.

All these trends are happening everywhere to varying degrees with less developed places like much of Africa simply earlier on the curve but following the same trajectory.

So where does it end? I’m skeptical of population doomerism but shrinking population, like too rapid population growth, creates economic and social problems.

On the other hand if we are about to automate tons of stuff it means we need less humans to run things, and if medicine keeps getting better longer life and health spans somewhat offset lower birth rates.

One danger of aging population that doesn't get acknowledged often is that as the population ages, so does their voting and investment behavior.

Older people take less risks and it will reflect in funding available to innovation. Of course it will fall on the younger generation to support the older, but they will have less and less say in what goes on, and will have less opportunities to prove themselves.

There is no way this will end well.

Maybe risk aversion in general, driven by ageing population, culturally feeds into less socialising and less sex too. I personally don't bye the economic explainations at all

The youth revolts in france and albania are just the beginning. It would be nice for Americans to remember the balls they had in the 70s- plenty of things they can fix. Esp now that they can leverage ai to amplify their message and fight all the noise they are being fed

- Population declines until most of the cameras are just filming empty space all day with no human activity.

- Eventually cameras break and nobody (or no bots?) replace them because there wasn't anything interesting being recorded, so why bother

- Then the few people who remain start having sex in those now un-surveilled places

> while our own teens didn't have places where to get intimate, outdoor sex was way more common than it is today!

I just dont think teen outdoor sex is the thing that should come back.

It was a funny annecdote that I felt like sharing. In principle searching for solutions in the way things where done in the past is generally not a good approach.

The lesson there is still that given people more room for privacy is a factor, hence the radical (and absurd) proposal at the end.

For a different annecdote, my country also complains about constantly decreasing natality, but never celebrates decreased teen pregnancy. In fact we have right-wing parties that consider anything related to sex education, a problem.

Why not? Access to birth control has never been better in most places, and they deserve some fun before we "adults" destroy their future and maybe their lives.

Teens having outdoor sex happen to be correlated with teens not using protection.

And conversely, teaching them about protection and sex lowers their outdoor sex and random sex tendencies. Consistently.

I don't think people have sex or not because the cost of living. Poor people have had plenty of sex in the past. I think modern society is more occupying and people just interact less in a romantic sense because they are getting attention drained, in the same way a vampire drains your blood. We relieved the hard labor from peoples life but we also replaced it with attention suction devices that occupied peoples hours at much higher rates.

If you were a peasant in 1300s you worked hard probably 8-12 hours a day but once it was dark or the winter what you did radically changed because you couldn't see. It was just hanging out with people or going to bed, or other indoor task that usually involved other people or being around a limited light source. Those were the options of which one is kind of boring after a while. You'd thus interact with people and by interacting you'd end up having sex because it was fun when compared with doing anything else. Porn also didn't really exist so that as an outlet was basically zero so I'd attribute that to part of the attention occupying culture we have today

Of course it a multi-faceted problem, and I think my comment draws similar lines because I did not draw it out as the sole reason.

Modern media, and it's addiction is also a separate corelateable aspect.

Agree. Its grand theft auto and pornhub. Easily r#sponsible dropping the average children per woman by a whole child

I’m glad you censored r*sponsible.

I don’t think it’s video games though, they tend to be intensive experiences that are only sustainable for a few hours at most - I don’t think most young adults are whiling away their lives playing GTA (although some certainly do). I think the constant dopamine microdosing from social media that’s the much larger issue - it makes everything ever so paler in comparison, especially over time. Porn is a similar kind of dopamine hit (maybe akin to a vodka shot while social media is a dripfeed of wine), so I do agree with you there.

I didnt censor it, i juat suck at typing (n a phone. I think you underestimate how much sex happens because there isnt something else eat*ng up the time, especially in a m(nogamousish relationship over age 25.

Honestly R*pon*blity is probably not the word I'd use (but i get it) because, the addiction we are describing is stocastic. The timings between notifications for activity x/y/z is engineered to break down people. And it really is X/Y/Z not just porn or games, I was trying do draw the abstract idea of attention drain specifically engineered and designed. Dopamine micro dosing definitely reinforce that behavior. I don't know the solution is.

>In Japan, around 30 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women work for more than 50 hours per week.

That doesn't make a lot of sense. 50hr/w was the norm in many countries till the 1960's or so, and yet people were having lots of babies indicating having marriages with sex.

Just comparing hours hides the reality of what the time outside those hours looks like. When 50h weeks were the norm, you generally had a stay-at-home wife making that whole equation possible.

For some reason when we started sending women out to work, the work they had been doing at home stopped being counted as work. But of course it is work, it still needs to be done. As a result, the modern 50h weeks can be anything between 60-80h weeks depending on your comfort with living in squalor, and the presence of children, it's just we for some reason only count the part you get paid for.

And compound matters income of men entered a long plateau or decline while women‘s preference for better earning partners persisted.

And men continue to prefer dating supermodel tradwives. So what? I don't know what you're trying to say, here.

Here is the problem: college educated and well earning women are marrying as much as they used to.

The drop in marriages is among poor and less earning people. Those non marrying women do have option to marry higher earning men ... they just dont.

how much did women work back then, work that is counted as work - and it is represented in "50hr/w was the norm"?

No contraception before the '60. A couple could have sex once a year and still produce lots of babies.

Of course contraception was available, just not the pill. Condoms were a thing back then.

I guess commute times don't help much as well in Japan. But yeah 50 hours per week ain't really that much, especially if it would include lunch break. 8 hours is minimum in many European countries and easily can get to at least 8.5-9 hours per day for majority, so 10 hours per day ain't really that special.

" A 2020 online survey indicated that 20–30 per cent of men aged between 20 and 39 years said they didn't want to have sex"

did anyone think to ask them why they didn't want to?

I'm not sure the responses could be trusted.

Today in the news: Japanese men are not having sex, porn is banned in the UK and dating apps are dying.

This isn't good if you don't want men becoming increasingly conservative, which is already well underway.

> porn is banned in the UK

As usual, games of telephone change things pretty radically:

  Porn showing choking or incest

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50115936

You know people are allowed to use hyperbole? I would be surprised if someone took banning porn literally.

People are allowed to use hyperbole, but you said "porn is banned in the UK" in the middle of a list of actually mostly factual things. Feel free to be surprised, I briefly wondered what's going on in there.

The whole list is hyperbole. Hinge is growing, Tinder and Bumble along with most other apps are dying and obviously this is not representative of every Japanese man.

I'm making a point about current general trends and their potential consequences, not listing facts.

Online porn is banned if you don't upload your ID / use a VPN

And a hilarious titbit: cousin incest porn is banned, but in real life, it's not :)

> Online porn is banned if you don't upload your ID / use a VPN

That's not what a "ban" is.

If it was, I could say "driving cars is banned in the UK if you don't show the insurance company your licence".

> And a hilarious titbit: cousin incest porn is banned, but in real life, it's not :)

At the turn of the century, as a 16 year old myself back then, I noted the same about the UK age of consent being 2 years lower than the age at which you were allowed to watch recordings or be in recordings oneself.

> Online porn is banned if you don't upload your ID / use a VPN

No, some online porn is unavailable if you don't use a VPN or send personal details to some dodgy "age verification" site, but lesser known porn websites are still accessible.

This doesn't sound right. How do you explain places like Utah?

(Not that Mormon voting was ever directed by Japanese mating habits. But you get my point.)

Young men becoming increasingly conservative exasperates the issue. Women are opting out largely because of the traditional expectation that they do everything in a household.

This male/female divide is becoming huge in Korea, if I've heard correctly.

False narrative: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-57582-3

How does a study about the US have anything to do with Japan or Korea?

Note that in most places besides Korea, the male/female political divide is driven more by unmarried women becoming more liberal.

But is that a positive move to liberalism or a negative move away from conservatism? Is it cause or effect? The implication is that Liberalism is convincing women not to have children, but I believe that a large part of it is the other way around. Something else is convincing women not to have children, so they're embracing Liberalism because of that.

I’m not implying anything. I’m just talking about trends in affiliation over time. E.g.: https://www.americansurveycenter.org/significant-figures/the....

This is the kind of question that should be hounded all the way down.

But it will take forever and whole generations will live and die before it does, because no one wants to.

Most people will have an opinion on one side or the other, and none of them are interested in finding out that the other side is right.

So it will take a group of people who are neutral on the topic (or professional enough to act that way at work), yet interested enough to do the work, and respected enough for their results are taken seriously by anyone else. Eventually it will happen but it will no longer matter. The current factors and realities will have all changed by then and the problems of that day will be different. The problems of today will have run their course without benefit of ever actually knowing the anwer to this question.

I too would be confused with blurry genitals

Maybe the moire effect is a Pavlovian turn-on for them?

Uncensored Japanese Adult Video is also apparently quite common these days, despite being illegal.

They mention social issues such as bad work culture and other stuff, but I will copy paste this part that looks new/surprising to me:

"""Among their findings were the rise of sexlessness within marriage, and the popularity of pornography and the services of sex workers, especially among men.

For instance, in some surveys from 2008 to 2024, up to 60 per cent of Japanese men said they had previously paid for sex."""

So it might be a supply side and not a demand side issue?

Meaning there are Japanese women there doing hundreds of thousands of sex. That would explain the average women not doing much. Dont trust too much this kind of stats.

Well, you know, there are the ladies of the evening..

Honestly the whole article sounds like they are getting fucked by their own weird social protocols and standards (that harms both man and women). So people find escapism in these kind of behaviours.

That’s nothing new and very unlikely to be the cause. Pornography maybe but that’s also not new, just more abundant.

being able to watch millions of hours of videos in your own home on demand is very new

Certainly, especially since you’d need to be 114 years old, without ever sleeping at all, to watch 1,000,000 hours of anything!

Impressive!

Multiple screens.

+split screen videos

I'm old enough to remember the days before online porn, and all I can say is that sometimes a difference in quantity is so large that it becomes a difference in kind.

Pornography is illegal in China and Korea, yet their populations are in decline, too.

60% is a lower figure than I would have expected. Prostitution has always been part of Japanese culture (though not as much as the Western view of the geisha would imply). And given the proclivity of young men to "try everything at least once", I imagine it's something many young men have tried. More interesting would be the percentage of people who pay for it regularly. Does a person that tried it once but hasn't done so for years really count?

In my city the birth rate has declined by 50% in just the last decade or so. It doesn't feel like it most days, because they are regularly building new housing developments near the city center. But when you get out into the more rural areas, you can really feel it.

> But when you get out into the more rural areas, you can really feel it.

yup.

the rural town i'm originally from is down from ~9500 residents to a bit more than 6000 (and trending down).

It's because they become wizards if they're virgins at 30

In captivity, you have to subject mammals to extreme stress or hardship to prevent them from breeding.

There are many cases mammal species that almost never breed in captivity. Giant Pandas and Elephants are perhaps the more well known ones.

This reminds me of an article I once read about Pandas. A certain zoo couldn't get them to breed, so they made a Panda porno film and, I kid you not, this gave the bears ideas and they had sex.

Not really, you just need to interrupt the power process or whatever process is needed for courtship.

For example cheetahs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXQD3nPaO-k

You can give cheetahs all the food and luxury and they won't mate. They need exercise and danger and free space for courtship

Did anyone read the paper or just decide to respond based on mostly racist preexisting bias?

This isn't even a research paper really, it is a survey paper that just looked for other papers. One point stood out a lot

> All but one survey from the 2020s were online surveys

This is already bias let alone what bias may be within each survey which isn't fleshed out in the linked paper. I wouldn't be surprised if at least one survey was run on NicoNico or similar platform.

The adult video industry continues to thrive and P2P just grows, including reaching sex tourism status thanks to the cheap yen, in both directions if looking at the growing denied entries to Japanese hostesses.

Sorry if you have some anime based preconception that Japanese people are pure or something but they are normal, and not Christian. Japanese people still have sex, look into the real facts.

Mammals in captivity rarely breed.

Yeah this is why it's such a pain in the ass to produce dairy products. Have to find a wild pregnant cow and capture it, then throw away the calf before it drinks all the milk.

Also why the pet trade catches so many hamsters and guinea pigs in the wild.

I don't know if you know this, but dairy cows are manually impregnated by a human with a bottle of bull semen.

I honestly believe our parents and grandparents were right all along. It's the damn computers and phones. Ironically, some of them have had their brains more scrambled by technology than the average Gen Z kid.

I would speculate that people can fulfill their need of intimacy online which results in lowered incentive to persuade it in real life.

In real life there are social and legal implications for relationships: if something goes wrong You could be in a nightmare divorce or simply interpreting things wrong with somebody can cause problems in your life. In the modern world every error pays expesively.

But in the digital world You just swap apps, nobody judges, and You alway get dopamine.

Our half baked monkey brains are certainly not suited for last decades technologies.

Why? The answer is directly in this article, : "for women particularly, the idea of marriage might not seem so appealing, in a culture where they were expected to bear most of the responsibility for household chores"

Btw, is it good or bad for individuals and for society?

> And other outlets for sexual desire were more acceptable, for example fictosexuality: the expression of romantic or sexual feelings towards fictional characters.

> A 2017 survey of Japanese students aged 16–22 found that 14–17 per cent of them admitted to having romantic feelings towards a character in a video game or anime.

TIL about the name of this phenomenon. I see this always in the context of "terminal online anime fan" but it made me think and look into other occurrences of similar parasocial behavior like the early Sherlock Holmes fandom.

With this current social and tech trends I think we are going to see more Pygmalionic SexBots startups in next cohorts.

The name doesn't really mean anything though. "Sexual attraction to a fictional character" and "fictosexuality" are the exact same word, one is just shorter. You can make up a word to shorten anything. Maintaining milk in your fridge can be called lactostasis.

I bet you should shot the journalist here. Having sexual feelings toward fictional characters is basically watching porn. You can't bucket that with romantic. I bet the journalist confused the two in the that remark. There's no romantic "parasocial" behavior there.

How should I put it? It's pretty nice—I feel an inexplicable sense of resonance. Maybe it's because I'm the type who'll probably stay pure until the day I die XD Just not the type that attracts women, lol. Even as a guy, I don't want to give my first time to someone I won't be able to stay with forever in the future. Maybe I really have been influenced by Japanese anime and have a sort of obsession with romance.

They are, but nobodys making kids

Japan has the highest birth rate in East Asia.

I think the answer is obvious - after spending years watching pixelated pornography, their fantasy fueled expectations reach extreme heights and are subsequently disappointed by the real deal.

The problem is we cannot distinguish cause from effect.

Maybe people are watching porn because they can't get the real deal?

Many marriages succumb to 'dead bedrooms' and many young people feel that they cannot compete in the modern dating game, which is essentially Top Trumps for Humans.

I blame digital entertainment. It really is so much easier and less risky to just stare at a screen instead of going out and interacting with people. Cheaper too. And quicker. And a near-100% success rate guaranteed. Like it is actually possible to opt out of most activities and instead burn through your life in front of the screens. It actually requires actual effort and resources in order not to - this is increasingly becoming the default. And it is not the Japanese which are at risk. Each one of us is at risk and the problem will only get worse as the digital entertainment improves while many aspects of the "real-life" get wiped out or locked behind an unattainable paywall due to climate destruction, high fuel prices, inflation, lack of people in service roles, or the lack of people to interact with (because they too are at home speedrunning their lives with their entertainment of choice).

It's probably this. Same in the West too.

Pretty much. Porn is also getting better and more varied, filling more niches people have. And by porn I don't mean the things you only see on pornhub and from professional studios. Anything that gets you off.

Have you guys seen how beautiful some of the women in Kpop are? Not only that, but they are also idols, meaning they have a strong presence on social media (post pictures, shorts), appear on variety shows, interact with fans through all sorts of fanmeets, online services and so on... They make fans feel like they have a relationship with them. After an event/concert you can usually easily find 4K fancams of the idol. They fill that gap both emotionally and sexually as they're really lovely girls. Japan also has a strong idol culture, although it's not as popular as Korea's internationally.

Then there's things like onlyfans, live-streamers and so on... Of course people are having less sex. On top of what you said of people just generally choosing to interact less because of the amount of digital entertainment. 50 years ago if you didn't get of your house the most entertainment you would have is probably books or TV, situation is wildly different these days. With AI probably gonna get even worse.

All that said, I don't think it's necessarily bad. But for future generations human interaction won't be the default anymore. They will have toto re-discover the value of that interaction.

Think pretty solid reasons why.

https://youtu.be/1QPMcWpJEgM

"Around 1 in 10 Japanese people reach their 30s without ever having had sex"

I actually assumed it's way more. Interesting.

it would be more interesting to see how many of those 90% had paid sex to avoid being in those 10%

Have they asked them? What were their responses? Why don't we just take their word for it?

> And this national dry spell seems to have got worse

Hmm. Did the subjects say worse?

Sex isn’t as sexy as it used to be, has little appeal. Our world today is filled with far more interesting things.

> Our world today is filled with far more interesting things.

More interesting than each other?

Yes.

Absolutely, we just saw a car fly yesterday.

I agree with this. Sex may actually be overrated. It’s just another way of seeking instant gratification, using another person for it. It requires a lot of effort to get there (for most people), and even more to maintain it being exciting over time (with the same person). In the past people didn’t have that many ways to get intense pleasure, so sex always was the pinnacle and gold standard. But that clearly has changed.

To me it’s surprising that so many observers and pundits seem to be so confused about this development.

I don't get the whole blame on instant gratification. Our whole body is made for instant gratification.

Not having instant gratification is going against your survival instinct.

You would think growing kids is not instant gratification? Do you think we make kids because some day they will be functional adults, or because when I get close to them they instantly hug me, triggering my instant gratification?

But we shouldn't be slaves to our impulses.

We are slave to our impulses, literally. You can temporarily work around them, you cannot ignore them the entire time.

It probably has something to do with the need to touch someone first.

Japanese people really hate physical contact, or any contact by the way.

Are you Japanese and can be provide more insight? I ask because it's common online by non-Japanese (especially on places like Reddit) to make wild generalizations about who Japanese people are because they visited Japan once for a week or want to visit Japan someday.

In my experience of having lived in Japan, I find this simply not true. Of course this is my own anecdata. Physical contact, from my experience, is seen as a more intimate gesture. It depends on the nature of the relationship. In places like America, lots of people would give a hug (at the very least a one arm hug) to their friends when they're parting ways. Japanese don't do that ever from what I've seen, they'll just wave goodbye to each other. But I have seen plenty of hugging, hand holding, and other public displays of affection among those who are intimate.

That's interesting.

I remember when I lived in Japan and was with my male friend visiting temples. I was 21 years old and I'm male. At one point he grabbed my hand to direct me to a temple and didn't immediately let go. I felt strange because in the US that would be misconstrued.

Are you sure Japanese people hate physical contact? I never really considered whether that's true or not.

Maybe sex with another human, sure, but sex with robots is definitely on the rise.

Is it because of hypergamy?

Downvoted. but in time it will be clear whats likely the cause of this

If you use marijuana (not posses, just use) you can risk up to 7 years in jail.

Legalize it, organize free rock and roll parties with no phone policy every weekend, see sex and pregnancy rates go sky high in the matter of months.

This and maybe prosecute a parent when he/she kidnaps the children, denying visits or any interaction with the other parent.

Do both please.

Better legalize MDMA then

I've heard about that. They say it makes you love everyone (empathetically rather than sexually) which does sound useful in developing social skills for us internet addicts.

A friend of mine has heard of it too. He says it doesn't really last after the high though unfortunately

Anecdotally alcohol also had the same function, but people just started drinking less

With birth rates collapsing around the world in completely different cultures, why isn’t anyone looking hard at the pollution angle?

Because we don't see that decline in other animals in the same environments as the humans.

The animals aren’t eating the same processed food, etc.

Tell that to the racoons and mice doing the tango every night at 2am in my walls!

The biter population has never been higher

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