Copyright realclearscience
Much ado has been made about America's worsening sex drought. But America's dry spell is nowhere near as severe as Japan's. There, the sexual landscape has been parched for some time. In a paper published earlier this month to the Journal of Sex Research, a team of scientists extensively surveyed the country's burgeoning sex desert and attempted to explain it. In Japan, the culture of sex is fascinating. "Sexual behaviors are often described as a puzzling and contradictory mix of permissiveness and expectations of discretion," the researchers wrote. The upper levels of Tokyo's signature multi-level department stores are often stocked with all sorts of "naughty" paraphernalia video games, toys, dolls, art, and tools that would make anyone blush. Sex work is also legal in pretty much all forms apart from penetrative intercourse. Premarital sex is generally accepted. At the same time, hormonal contraception is rarely used and young people often forgo romantic pursuits until they attain socioeconomic success. This cultural milieu has produced a fertility rate that has been below replacement (2.1 births per woman) for almost four decades. It reached a new nadir at 1.15 in 2024. For comparison, the fertility rate in the U.S. is 1.6 births per woman. Driving Japan's record low fertility is rising sexlessness. "Findings indicated that sexual inexperience had increased during the past decades such that around half of the Japanese population remained sexually inexperienced into their mid-twenties and approximately 10% of the individuals had no sexual experience when reaching their 30s," the researchers reported. Sexual inactivity, defined as not having sex in the past year, has also risen this century. "The latest available estimates from national probability surveys indicated that by the mid-2010s, around half of those in their early 20s and a fifth to a third of those in their late 20s to 30s were sexually inactive," the researchers found. Even married couples in Japan are having less sex. "In the 2007 National Survey of Work and Family, the proportion of married women who were sexually inactive was 7% among those aged 2029 years, 15% among those aged 3039 years and 24% among those aged 4049 years. In the 2020 Japan Sex Survey, 52% of married 2049 year-old men and women were sexually inactive." Sexlessness in Japan is much higher than in comparable Western nations, and slightly higher than in neighboring countries in East Asia. The researchers proposed a number of hypotheses for the disparity: Fictosexuality, attraction toward fictional characters, is culturally accepted and common in Japan. Between 14 and 17 percent of male and female high school and tertiary education students indicated that they had felt romantic feelings toward a character in a video game or an anime series. The rise of large language model AI could make fictosexuality even more compelling and common. Hormonal contraception is infrequently used and not covered by public health insurance, making sex more 'risky'. Japan's GDP has been flat and even declining slightly since the mid-1990s, resulting in a decrease in stable employment opportunities over that time. "It is possible that part of the low interest in sexual relationships in Japan represents a calibration of expectations, or resignation, in the face of difficulties in finding sexual partners and an inability to pursue them among socioeconomically disadvantaged men and women," the researchers hypothesize. Pornography use is very common in Japan, particularly amongst men. Can Japan bring its enduring sex drought to an end? "Research is needed on interventions which may help individuals to establish positive sexual relationships..." the authors wrote. "For example, it is possible that counseling regarding communications skills and dating etiquette could help some individuals in establishing sexual and romantic relationships. Moreover, to what extent a reduction in work hours, better employment opportunities and increased recognition of non-heterosexual sexual orientations may impact sexual activity is uncertain..." Source: Ueda, P., Toki, S., Nomura, S., Pacher, A., Ghaznavi, C., & Sakamoto, H. (2025). Sexual Inactivity in Japan: A Scoping Review. The Journal of Sex Research, 126. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2025.2564192
