Young Japanese people have given up on intimacy, seeing marriage as too onerous, writes Katy Waldman
ABIZARRE demographic chill has stolen over the Land of the Rising Sun. According to a fascinating and bewildering investigation in The Guardian by Abigail Haworth, young Japanese people are losing interest not just in marriage, but in romantic relationships.
Some have even given up on sex. The national press is calling it sekkusu shinai shokogun, or celibacy syndrome.
The evidence: Japan’s population is declining, and is projected to dive a further third by 2060, with fewer babies born in 2012 than in any year on record (and a corollary: adult nappies are outselling baby nappies).
Haworth cites a survey that found that “61 percent of unmarried men and 49 percent of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship”, and a study showing that 30 percent of people under 30 have never dated.
Women in their 20s have a onein-four chance of never marrying, according to the Japanese Population Institute, and a 40 percent chance of remaining childfree. Another study indicates that 45 percent of women and more than 25 percent of men “were not interested in or despised sexual contact”.
The non-statistical details are in a way even more suggestive. A panicked government official warns that Japan “might eventually perish into extinction”.
Meanwhile, a 32-year-old career woman declares relationships as “too troublesome” and a 31-year-old “herbivore” (slang for a straight man who isn’t looking for sex or a girlfriend) explains that “emotional entanglements are too complicated”.
Behind these examples are evocative bits of scenery: stand-up noodle bars for one, convenience stores selling “individually wrapped rice balls and disposable underwear”, an entire culture geared towards singles who want to focus on their friends and careers.
The trend seems to arise out of a complex brew of physical estrangement and dissociation (perhaps related to technology?), unattractive prospects for married women, economic malaise and the collapse of institutions – like organised religion – that might encourage coupling.
A sex and relationship counsellor – her dominatrix name translates to “Queen Love” – tells Haworth that Japan is experiencing “a flight from human intimacy” as “the sexes spiral away from each other”.
She works with clients who cannot relate to other people: “recovering hikikomori (‘shut-ins’ or recluses)” who “flinch” when she touches them, 30-year-old virgins who live with their parents, men who can get aroused only by watching “female robots on a game similar to Power Rangers”.
For them and others in their generation, the “usual technological suspects” step forward as sexual alternatives: virtual-reality girlfriends, online porn, anime cartoons. (No doubt Japan’s incredibly advanced and imaginative online play-worlds deserve some credit here.) But what is lost, the sex therapist says, is a sense of “skin-to-skin, heart-toheart” connection.
How do people get so alienated from their bodies and the bodies of others? It’s easier to see how young people in Japan might come to shrug off traditional marriage and courtship.
Haworth writes convincingly about the factors dissuading young women from seeking out romantic partners.
“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,” she says.
Women hardly ever get promoted once they marry – bosses just assume they will become pregnant and leave. Indeed, almost 70 percent of Japanese women quit their jobs after their first child, forced out by inflexible hours and a disapproving corporate culture.
The survivors, those who insist on balancing marriage and a career, sometimes get tarred as oniyome, or devil wives.
For aspiring professional women, Haworth suggests, it is simpler just to stay single.
Men, too, resent the expectation that they will provide for a family in a time of thin wallets and scarce jobs. “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,” explains one.
But rather than merely rebelling against traditional gender roles – the breadwinning husband, the stay-at-home wife – people like him are choosing to reject love and relationships as a whole. They “don’t see the point”, reports Haworth. Intimacy “has become too hard”.
The article tries to put Japan in a larger context: “Across urban Asia, Europe and America,” she writes, “people are marrying later or not at all, birth rates are falling, singleoccupant households are rising.”
But the sense of romantic futility and disillusionment in Japan feels distinct. Trapped by outdated gender roles and squeezed for 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 thing thing work, so I give up.
But perhaps that’s just how we are predisposed to see it and write about it? Maybe young Japanese people are pioneering a deeply satisfying lifestyle in which love and sex have receded into the background – and the trade-off makes them perfectly happy. (Also, as Doug Barry points out on the Jezebel website, the minute sex grows so rare that having it becomes a statement, it will inevitably turn cool again.)
I find the notion of an intimacystarved society as depressing as anyone, but maybe those are my reactionary, Jane Austen-informed values talking. At the very least, Japan’s new status quo might remove some of the stigma from living alone. – Slate / Washington Post-Bloomberg News Service F YOU’RE a couple of minutes late for work, do you simply say sorry – or do you find yourself giving a long list of reasons because you feel so guilty?
If it’s the latter, then you are probably a woman and a “sorry skirt” – and it’s thwarting your chances of getting a promotion.
Working women apologise too frequently and lack confidence in their abilities, a report reveals. It means they constantly say “sorry” in situations where a man would never think to.
The report, from the Chartered Management Institute in the UK, highlights a catalogue of problems which it says are responsible for a desperate lack of senior women.
Ann Francke, chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute, said: “Take this example – a woman is late for a meeting. Rather than just sitting down and getting on with the meeting, they say ‘I’m so sorry. I had to take the kids to school or the dog was sick’. They overexplain.
“A man would just say ‘Sorry, I’m late’, sit down and get on with it. It is a phenomenon known as being a ‘sorry skirt’.”
According to the report, women don’t think they need to publicise their achievements while men will broadcast theirs.
It says: “Women sit there thinking, ‘The work I am doing is so great someone will come along and they’ll put a tiara on my head’.
“At the next desk, a young man has no embarrassment about jumping on his desk and saying to the boss: ‘Look at me. Aren’t I fabulous?’ “
The report also reveals how women are less likely to put themselves forward for promotion. It says: “A man will go for a new job even if he only ticks a few of the key requirements for a role. But a woman is far more likely to need to meet the majority of requirements before applying.” – Daily Mail