A bleak portrait of the plague of Japanese chastity
Here’s the strangest statistic I’ve heard for a while: 42 per cent of Japanese men aged 18 to 34, and 46 per cent of women, are virgins. At exactly the age when you’d expect them to be most randy, almost half of Japan’s young are having no sex at all. Ever.
What could have caused this plague of chastity? The reasons, of course, are complex. Far too complex for the 28 minutes allotted to No Sex Please
(Radio 4, Friday). Is it just me, or have Radio 4 documentaries been quietly shrunk, like the pizzas at that wellknown high-street chain?
Never mind: producer Ruth Evans and Japanese reporter Chie Kobayashi used their too-short time wisely, zipping around Tokyo to interview some of the experts on, and victims of, the sex drought. Kunio Kitamura, head of Japan’s family planning association, pointed out that single people aren’t the only ones going without: half of married couples are “sexless” (defined as having sex less than once a month). Japan’s birth rate is plummeting: today’s population of 127m is expected to shrink to 86m by 2060.
Men copped most of the blame. In surveys, they say they are too tired and busy to have sex. Dr Kitamura pooh-poohed this excuse – “I have five children, I am very busy! But I am very active [with] sexual intercourse. No problems!” – and instead blamed “poor communication skills”. Japanese men have a profound fear of being rejected by women, he said. Successful, educated career women are regarded with special dread: they are often referred to as “carnivores”, beside whom men feel like timid “herbivores”.
Instead of risking rejection, these men direct their erotic energies towards fantasy figures. Hence, the phenomenon – impossibly sinister to British ears – of teenage “idols”: childlike girls, often wearing school uniforms, who sing cute pop songs for an audience of obsessed older men. At the “idol show” Evans and Kobayashi attended, a sound like the bellowing of wounded cattle turned out to be men groaning the names of their beloved idol.
None of the experts mentioned the P-word; the sexual element of this obsession with young girls seems partly obscured by the Japanese love of all things cute. Porn director Hitoshi Nimura was the most disapproving. Japanese men, he mourned, have lost interest in fully-grown, fertile women. They want someone young and biddable: a “schoolgirl who doesn’t really have a very strong sexual flavour”. Nimura was also, disappointingly, the only person to mention the state of the female libido. Modern women enjoy their independence, he said, but they are “very disappointed by men”.
One solution is to avoid human lovers altogether. A group of young men told Kobayashi they preferred to date “two-dimensional girls” – animated seductresses who provide online arousal without any of the real-world complications. Nimura believes advances in virtual reality and robotics will make two-dimensional sex the norm: romance between humans, he predicts, will become the preserve of the “elite”. My God, it was depressing stuff. I could have done with at least another hour of it.
British animation was the theme of this week’s Sound of Cinema (Radio 3, Saturday). It began – oh bliss! – with a tinkling harpsichord scale, and the sound of Bagpuss yawning. For the next hour, I was lost in the kind of nostalgic ecstasy that only music can inspire. Presenter Matthew Sweet’s musical tour ranged from the Cuban jazz of the 1925 film Bonzo the Dog to George Martin’s “ceaselessly inventive” productions for Yellow Submarine.
But being, like me, a child of the Seventies, Sweet couldn’t help but linger most lovingly on the works of Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate. These gentle geniuses created worlds that “seemed already lost, already out of reach”, said Sweet; but their music – the delicate folk melodies sung by Bagpuss’s mice, or the wistful puffing of Ivor’s engine, propelled along by Vernon Elliot’s bassoon – “told you that although this was melancholy, it was also basically OK”. It certainly soothed my soul.
It’s Woman’s Hour Takeover week again, and the BBC promises us “five remarkable women you’ll want to listen to”. Hmmm. Monday’s guest editor – Reverend Rose Hudsonwilkin, Chaplain to the Queen – was an interesting new voice. But the rest of the list – Dame Helena Kennedy, Arianna Huffington, Charlotte Church and even, gawd help us, Katie Price – looks like it has been accidentally plucked from the wrong filing cabinet. Has no woman in Britain done anything of note since 2004? Could WH’S producers not persuade, say, Caroline Criado-perez, Mary Beard, Zadie Smith or Cressida Dick to take the mic? Or did they not even try?