The subject is interesting, especially because I'm married to a Japanese - but man do I hate articles that go round and round like this one. Here, have a little bit of a sociological hypothesis - but let's not go too deep for your little brains shall we? Here, have a little bit of anecdotal evidence instead. Enough of that? Alright, let's start over again. [...] Oh I'm outa time, let's end the article now, kthxbye.
It's probably too much to ask - but I think there should be something in between a scientific journal and common journalism. In technology we have some pretty insightful articles coming up in blogs now and then, articles where sources are cited and you can go deeper on any subject if you like. Why can't traditional journalists not use the web the way it is meant to?
What do you mean using anecdotal evidence instead? The author cites data and surveys, which clearly show the problem.
"Japan already has one of the world's lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060."
"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."
"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."
"Official alarmism doesn't help. Fewer babies were born here in 2012 than any year on record. (This was also the year, as the number of elderly people shoots up, that adult incontinence pants outsold baby nappies in Japan for the first time.)"
That would be fine if the article was called "Japanese people don't start enough families" - however, this wouldn't be an interesting headline, since it's years old news and most informed people know this already[1]. But it isn't, is it? It's asking the question why. I can ask such questions as well, but if I'm going to write an article about it, I'd hope to come up with some analysis to try to answer it - and this is exactly where the journalist got lazy and just cobbled up whatever anecdotes he can attribute to actual Japanese people saying them, cause, you know, they must be at the source of this, right?
[1] Although I'm not yet sure whether more babies is actually what Japan needs right now - looking at their population density, going easy on the baby making might be ok for a while, if there is a plan in place on how to turn it around once the population has fallen to more sustainable levels (and also how to pay for everyone's pensions in the meantime).
I'm not sure about you, but the fact that 45% of Japanese women had "no interest or despised sex" was quite news to me, and is definitely worth reporting, and honestly not far from the thesis of the headline.
+1, especially on wishing there were more really good social sciences blogs out there covering issues like this.
One of the big problems of course is the fact that while outsiders can see dynamics of and sometimes critique cultures, such critiques are necessarily incomplete (well all critiques are necessarily incomplete but outsider ones are especially likely to be).
But on your final question, I think one of the big issues is that the corporate media insists on pushing everything into narratives the corporations can understand. For example, in the US I tend to associate with people from a wide variety of backgrounds politically (and talk politics, as taboo as that is) and one thing I have noticed is that while the media tends to see social conservatives as the "sex police" the social conservative movement is the largest movement in the US which questions the desirability of Capitalism on an economic level (and the critiques are really interesting), but that doesn't work for corporations, so....
So here you have a corporate media organization engaging in difficult cross-cultural criticism. While it is an interesting article, it says as much about Western corporations as it does about Japan.
1) I'm fine with incomplete arguments if there is at least some attempt at an analysis shown instead of just a meaningless collection of facts and anecdotes. In that case the engaged reader could benefit by gasp thinking about it for himself.
2) So the problem is that corporate media is politically streamlined? Yes, I absolutely think so. In Switzerland we have an interesting weekly magazine called 'Weltwoche', which allows rather extreme opinion pieces of all political sides to appear unedited. I enjoyed that a lot, until the selection of articles began to appear biased to the right. I think the idea is still great - give me unfiltered opinions and analysis, instead just filter by the 'intellectual depth' if you will. It'd be black coffee in magazine form.
> So the problem is that corporate media is politically streamlined? Yes, I absolutely think so.
Hilaire Belloc in 1918 wrote a wonderful critique of corporate newspapers where he pointed out that their real customers are advertisers, and that in many cases, the cross-ownership of media by other corporations, as well as cross-board memberships meant that the corporate press would necessarily adopt positions friendly to the largest corporations. His book "The Free Press" (although very right wing) is worth reading. It totally anticipates Chomsky's critiques as well.
> I enjoyed that a lot, until the selection of articles began to appear biased to the right. I think the idea is still great - give me unfiltered opinions and analysis, instead just filter by the 'intellectual depth' if you will. It'd be black coffee in magazine form.
It is a good reason to have a robust blogosphere and read blogs you might otherwise disagree with as well as those who you agree with.
> It is a good reason to have a robust blogosphere and read blogs you might otherwise disagree with as well as those who you agree with.
I agree - I haven't really found good resources on general topic blogs however. Collections such as TrueReddit or DepthHub often start out well, but as time goes on, quality goes down. It seems like there is some kind of sedimentation force going on when people can up-/downvote.
Maybe one should ask why narratives instead of detailed scientific analysis is voted up on hackernews? Do the "corporate media organizations" control hackernews now?
Or, you know, people prefer narratives, and there's nothing inherently bad to them, compared to "detailed scientific analysis" (of which, 90% is also shit anyways).
Irony in text is always risky... I thought it was obvious that my reference to "corporate media organizations" controlling everything was enough over the top to make the irony clear...
>the social conservative movement is the largest movement in the US which questions the desirability of Capitalism on an economic level (and the critiques are really interesting)
Huh. Reference? Perhaps it's because I just don't know enough conservative folks, but I've never heard of a mainstream socially conservative anti-capitalist dialogue.
If what you say is true, either I have a pretty huge hole in my political knowledge (that or we're just using 'socially conservative' or 'capitalist' to mean different things.) Especially if it's the former, I'd like to close that hole.
>the social conservative movement is the largest movement in the US which questions the desirability of Capitalism on an economic level (and the critiques are really interesting)
John Medaille has written extensively on the subject. His book "Towards a Truly Free Market" is worth reading.
A lot of it boils down to the critiques of market capitalism by Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Chesterton and how these have largely continued within the conservative Catholic movement, as well as parts of the Orthodox and conservative Protestant communities as well.
I am a Heathen and I worship Odin, Thorr, and Freyr. Chesterton can be a bit arrogant when it comes to religion sometimes, but the reasons for his arrogance are often interesting to ponder even when one does not share the same religion.
People who want to know a bit more about the particulars of this economic thought should check out Distributivism. While I don't know much about it, it seems like the idea of reconciling private property ownership with the spread of the means of production to all people goes well with open source / maker movement ideas.
"According to distributists, property ownership is a fundamental right and the means of production should be spread as widely as possible rather than being centralized under the control of the state (state socialism) or of accomplished individuals (laissez-faire capitalism). Distributism therefore advocates a society marked by widespread property ownership and, according to co-operative economist Race Mathews, maintains that such a system is key to bringing about a just social order.
Distributism has often been described in opposition to both socialism and capitalism, which distributists see as equally flawed and exploitative."
Also I wrote a blog piece(http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-distributist-view...) about Distributism and open source, which comes around to favoring BSD-style licenses on a work-ownership theory. The piece can be an introduction to Distributist theory for open source developers as well as an introduction to open source for Distributists.
Distributism is an interesting movement, but it's incredibly minor and is very Catholic. It's social conservative but very different from the mainstream social conservatism in the U.S.
Strangely I am a Neopagan and was introduced to it by a Russian Orthodox priest. It is moving outside the strict domains of Catholicism. Most of those on /r/distributism on Reddit are not Catholics either.
I agree, I've read too many articles like this one. It's picking up a topic, citing something here and there, some nice stories and persons (a dominatrix, that has to be interesting!), without any point or additional information. It's inflating once 3-paragraph article up to several pages out of nowhere. I like reading longer articles and books but I want a bit more than random chit-chat.
But hey, I now know that some Japanese dominatrix squeezed the testicles of an army general in North Korea. Hooray.
- In standard English, "Japanese", "Chinese", etc. are now used only as adjectives and not nouns (although the noun usage used to be acceptable). So you can't correctly say "a Japanese came in" any more than you can say "a Swedish came in." http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/29887-grammar...
- "The Japanese" remains valid as a way to refer to the people of that nation collectively.
- "-(i)an" endings are both nouns and adjectives, so Canadians, Germans, and Ankh-Morporkians are all fine.
- "-man/woman" endings are no longer applied except where they've become idiomatic, so we have Welshman and Frenchman, but not Chineseman or Japaneseman. ("Chinaman" is, of course, derogatory.)
- In more academic or historical writing, you might still find "-ese" in use as a noun ending, but it sounds faintly racist and outdated: "More than a hundred Chinese up to that date had been interrogated by police." http://books.google.com.sg/books?id=Yqemz6q_nQYC&lpg=PA74&ot... (The same might apply to "-ish" words, but I'm not certain.)
-
(To throw_away) Like you, I've done my fair share of correcting Chinese speakers about this usage, too. But I've seen regular use of "a Chinese" in various older English writing, so the usage is at least historically justified, and probably slipped into older instructional texts. It doesn't surprise me that some of the textbooks used in China may not have kept up with changes in usage over the last few decades - in the first place, English teaching there was almost zilch in the past and remains very spotty today.
The only people I've ever encountered using the "a (Japan|Chin)ese" construction were (Japan|Chin)ese people themselves. Which may have rubbed off on GGP from GGP's Asian spouse. I've wondered if there was some correlation in Asian languages, but the English translation of the Japanese version of that wiki page makes it seem as if the concept of demonym is foreign to Japanese readers: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&pr... (and there's no Chinese version, as far as I can tell).
I think it sounds weird to some people because they're used to "Japanese" being a adjective rather than a demonym. When used in an unexpected way, any word sounds weird.
I'm married to a Britisher (which is not used in Great Britan anyway) sounds similarly awkward. Married to an Englishman/Welshman/Irishman works, but is gender (and England/Wales/Ireland) specific.
I'm married to a Scott works though.
Not sure there is a general purpose word you can use to say "I'm married to someone from Britian".
What's amusing is that in Japan many Japanese are totally unaware of the political incorrectness of it. In Japan I sometimes hear people use 'Jap' as slang, in store or product names, or just in normal language by extension of how other countries are abbreviated in english. In a country that is mostly japanese, it just loses its racist power.
Credit for using "begging the question" properly, but let me clarify. Propaganda against the Germans was either aimed squarely at Hitler himself or at more abstract representations that didn't emphasize the frankly non-existent physical differences between Germans and Americans. Germans were portrayed with swastikas and Prussian helmets and jackboots; Japanese were portrayed with buck teeth, yellow skin, glasses and slanted eyes.
Does to me; I guess I think of it as either an adjective or referring to the language. While this usage is technically correct, I think I'd always say "Japanese person".
I don't really have a good explanation though of why it's different to "American" or "Canadian" in that regard. Maybe just it's less common for some reason.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the form "I'm married to a Japanese" (this usage comes up a lot for me, although I'm generally referring to Chinese rather than Japanese). But if I were to avoid it, I definitely wouldn't say "I'm married to a Japanese person". I'd say "My wife is Japanese".
I think the referring to "a Japanese" vs "a Japanese man/woman" sounds a little racist, it shouldn't, it makes syntactical sense, but I guess its the cultural influence on the language, I don't know why I brought it up, I was just really taken back when you said "I'm married to a Japanese"
It really does sound strange to me as well, almost derogatory in tone. It sounds so much better to my ear to say "i'm married to a Japanese person" or "... person from Japan". But I have no good reason as to why the same doesn't hold for Canadian/American.
Thanks, I think I'll have to keep that in mind when talking in English. The thing is, I thought about writing 'Japanese woman', but her gender seemed besides the point to me, so I didn't want to mention it. In my native tongue (German) there is no unisex term for nationalities, you're either a "Japanerin" (= Japanese woman) or a "Japaner" (= Japanese man). Because of that there might be less subtext when talking about nationalities, but I think this is all just due to the history of your cultural relations - for example in Switzerland there is some negative subtext to the word 'Yugoslave', because their immigrant group was rather unpopular at one point.
This is a stupid article, and young people in Japan have not stopped having sex.
What westerners might call 'casual sex' -- sex without the framework of a relationships that implies various other promieses/committments -- is normal, and also not likely to be spoken about frankly, especially to a reporter, and much less a British one.
Sometimes I'll witness a young woman asked about it at a social gathering (as people have a few drinks and speak more freely). "I don't have anybody... I can't remember the last time I slept with somebody," she might say. What she means is that she doesn't have a steady boyfriend, and thus it is certainly none of your business who she's fucking.
Or I will see a guy asked about it. "Well, romance is too complicated with all I've got going on... I've learned to live without it," he might say, with just the right amount of sheepishness. What he means is that he is seeking only sex that doesn't come with implied commitments and hassle.
These two people might very well end up leaving together.
Why is it stupid? Obviously they don't mean every single Japanese young person hasn't stopped having sex. What the author means is that as a trend, they've stopped having sex, as evidenced by the declining population, the lack of young people in relationships, etc. From the data they cited from the surveys, it seems pretty incontrovertible that there is some sort of problem, despite your own personal anecdotes.
It's stupid because they have multiplied a couple anecdotes, conflated decreased reproductive output and formalized relationships with a decrease in actual sex, and gotten all breathless and hyperbolic about it.
There's no evidence of any trend that young people in Japan have stopped having sex. That is what I was trying to point out: not being in an old-fashioned relationship, and not actually bearing children, does not any longer have any kind of direct relationship to how much sex you are having.
There may well be ongoing generational changes to reproductive and marriage/relationship behavior in Japan, as there is elsewhere (c.f. everywhere on Earth), but this article doesn't go there.
I have upvoted this not because I agree, but because you have provided a basis for your statement about why you don't buy this line of reasoning.
I look toward the prospects of women in Japan for an indication as to what's wrong. These are people who have grown up with dreams that society seems unwilling to support. For how many women in Japan is 'Maybe it's time to have a kid in the next few years' tantamount to "I must give up any dreams of having a career"?
Calm down: Not having sex is for that
article mostly just an exaggeration
for a catchy headline. Of course they
are having sex but likely less sex
and less in love with commitment,
caring, affection, intimacy, passion,
joining of lives, vows, romance,
trust, respect, responsiveness,
supportive families (e.g., he gets
a job in her father's business),
collection of activities, memories,
and traditions like, don't want to lose,
can't get anywhere else, and that cause
'lock in',
homes ("where the heart is, where you are
loved even when you are wrong"), and children
("the most rewarding thing we did").
And why not just
more one night stands? Because they
are short on commitment (feel alone
and, thus, scared in the morning),
caring, ..., children.
And just for passion,
a good version requires the couple to
have had a lot of time together and to
care about each other -- e.g., for a man,
the best result of passion is that, net, she
smiles the rest of the evening, the next
morning, and well into the next day,
and that takes some mutual caring,
practice, and effort.
Why so value the smiles?
Because they promise 1000 more good
evenings of passion instead of maybe 0,
lots of good back rubs, a nice breakfast,
lots of 'contact comfort' for, say, another
24 hours, etc.
>It's stupid because they have multiplied a couple anecdotes, conflated decreased reproductive output and formalized relationships with a decrease in actual sex, and gotten all breathless and hyperbolic about it.
This doesn't fit the article:
> 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.
So A: the person asking the questions isn't a reporter, B: they aren't British, and C: they have every reason to figure out a way to get people to answer the questions honestly, i.e., not "cultural misunderstanding" where someone at a party lies about how much sex they have.
What your argument really boils down to is: "no measurement, real or otherwise, could ever possibly indicate that Japanese people are having less sex": i.e. your post is unfalsifiable, and your claim thusly ludicrous.
>There may well be ongoing generational changes to reproductive and marriage/relationship behavior in Japan [...] but this article doesn't go there.
Did you read it?
>Japan's Institute of Population and Social Security reports an astonishing 90% of young women believe that staying single is "preferable to what they imagine marriage to be like".
So we can correctly interpret your post: what precisely is "going there", if not this?
The article is also based on the opinions of two people who have been claiming to study Japanese sexual behavior: the therapist Ai Aoyama and the sociologist Nicholas Eberstadt. Certainly the opinion of two "experts" is not a conclusive analysis of a situation, but this is a pretty ordinary way of sourcing information for a news article. It isn't particularly "stupid" for this. Which is why statements like this:
>There's no evidence of any trend that young people in Japan have stopped having sex.
Neither "declining population" nor "lack of young people in relationships" indicates people not having sex. It only indicates people not wanting families or kids.
Right, but those aren't the only two signs we're talking about. If people are having lots of sex but don't want kids, we might see that in booming contraceptive sales. If people are having lots of sex but not using contraception and not having kids, well that would show up in wider culture too (e.g. gay dating sites would proliferate). Sex on a personal level is a very private thing for many people in many cultures, but trends can always been seen because there is always a commercial side.
This certainly isn't a phenomenon exclusive to Japan either.
I know plenty of western young people who have no interest in marriage, procreation or families. Maybe they're more interested in their work. Maybe they're more interested in rock-climbing. Maybe they're more interested in Pokemon.
A lot of people are looking at the utter destruction of freedom that raising a family is today, and choosing not to. It's not just the price of real estate, it's inflation too. Roll into that the lack of job security and negative real interest rates and it's no wonder people can't think about a future.
One of the most basic needs when planning for a future is the prospect that the future will be better than the past. It's now very difficult to arrange that independently of constant advancement at work and constant advancement at work requires tremendous amounts of effort.
People are getting squeezed from both sides. I feel this myself, and I'm doing quite well statistically; white, male, educated, highly skilled and gainfully employed.
Brazil for example has PLENTY of space and cheap places to live (unless you want to live in São Paulo... like where I am now, the prices here ARE fucked up)
Yet marriages are going down to the point of scare the government too.
The reason for it is simple (there has been lots of research, not only here, but on other countries with declining births to dangerous levels): women prefer their careers to motherhood...
Even the UN gender economic report, state that it thinks is a good thing women have less kids because they can get richer (yes, that is written in the report, specifically, the report consider that countries where women have less than 3 kids, are countries that are awesome because they are reaching gender equality, since women with less kids can work more)
For men, it is the invention of no-fault divorce, that keeps marriage pointless (the point of marriage historically, in cultures where divorce was forbidden by law or by custom or by religion, was to force women stay in the marriage, and indeed in countries with no-fault divorce, no matter where, they keep finding that 70% of the divorces with no reason where started by women)
I wonder if they ACTUALLY prefer careers or if they THINK they do and thus never try. Remember that it's at least an 18 year commitment (probably longer) so that if you've got any doubts it's really easy to talk yourself out of it.
Let me be clear: I'm not suggesting that women have any societal obligations.
But given that we're all here today we can infer historically that women (as a whole) have liked having children at least some amount. Did they never ACTUALLY like it but that was their only choice? Or do they (again as a whole) enjoy motherhood but socioeconomic life is now so treacherous that motherhood is a luxury few can afford? Perhaps something else entirely from the false dichotomy I've suggested?
EDIT: I've accepted your premise at face value, but I'm not sure I should. I don't know how to properly caveat this comment.
This is not fully clear yet, as we need more.20 years or so in this situation to be sure, but seemly women are being convinced that they want careers, and they regret it later... Right now the numbers of 50 year old childless women due to feminism is still low, but many of those few are drifting to be against feminism.instead and attempt to convince younger women to not repeat their mistakes. Mostly because when you are a 50 year old childless rich women, you realize that now you still have 30 years to live, nothing to do, and few people to love and care for you.
Feminism is about empowerment and choices. Being empowered to choose not to get married and have kids as I read it, considering that in the Western world that was "a woman's role" for probably centuries. At least as long as we've had patriarchy, which is quite a while.
Once women have the freedom to choose not to get married, have kids, etc it seems likely that some choose not to and thus the rise of feminism is roughly correlated with a decline in birthrates.
I've tidied this up in a nice little causal package but it's quite likely not so clear cut. But it certainly does seem that way at a glance. Which is why the notion gets such good traction amongst some.
The UN report on gender equality in economy, writes explictly that countries where women have fertility of less than 3 is good, because research shows that women with high education has few kids, and thus it concludes that a country with not much kids mean that country has educated women, that from the point of the view of the report is a good thing.
I'm pretty skeptical of your claim that the point of marriage historically was to force women to stay in the marriage. Evolutionary sociobiology holds the opposite: that marriage evolved to get men to stick around. A woman already has an evolutionary incentive to provide for her offspring: she's invested far more in them (having provided the egg and nurtured them inside her for 9 months) than her partner has. A man's evolutionary incentive is to spread his seed across more women, because he can have many children while his wife can only have one per year. But since society benefits from not having all the violence and uncertainty that results from men porking each others' wives and being unsure whether the children they were raising were actually their own children, marriage evolved.
If your "70% of no-fault divorces were started by women" statistic holds true, it could be because the greater economic power wielded by men made them pretty shitty husbands, and so when the opportunity arose, their wives divorced them.
Women are hipergamous, they stay only with one person at time, but they switch to what they perceive as better ones. Most divorces are early in the marriage, when the woman is still young enough to have her first kids, or more kids beyond her first or second kid, and thus they can still find another man. Also there is research that found out that divorce rates drop when a woman has male children ( but not female, and noone knows why )
Maybe they have too many electronic substitutes. There's nothing in the human makeup that says "will procreate even in the presence of unlimited sexual gratification elsewhere". Its certainly something to be studied and understood.
Your two fictional quotes are vague enough for subtext to creep in, but the quotes in the article are quite plain and clear. Speaking to reporters (especially foreign ones) is one of the few cases where Japanese people feel free to speak frankly, because there is a significantly reduced feeling of social judgment. They generally won't talk within their social circle about causal sex because it will lead to talk (or more likely implication) of marriage, which is an uncomfortable subject nowadays, for reasons outlined in the article.
Do you think that the Japanese would be less inclined to speak frankly about their sex lives with foreign reporters or pollsters than, say, Koreans, Italians or Americans?
Japanese are less inclined to speak frankly about anything to anyone. A western reporter is probably more likely to take what they say at face value, without understanding the subtlety of their response and then report it as truth, especially when it supports a click-bait headline.
Not only about their sex lives, but just about all manner of private things. This is a culture where when you buy a book at a bookstore, they wrap it in a cover for you so that people around you won't know what you are reading.
Many drug stores have extra-opaque dark bags that you can request when you buy stuff you would rather keep private -- don't want the person next to you on the train knowing you have tampons or -- heaven forbid -- hemmhoroid creme. (Of course a small subset of those train riders won't feel any special compunction to hide their 800-page comic book featuring anthropomorphized household appliances coming live at night and raping strangely compliant schoolgirls, but those people are the exception that proves my rule.)
I think the Japanese would be about the least open about the intimate details of their sex lives than basically any modern advanced democratic population.
Yes. Japanese culture has an extreme level of politeness that you don't see in Italy or America (I don't know enough about Korea to comment). Even the British are more open.
Korea is similar to Japan, but not as extreme. They also have a very hierarchical society, but people are more open about their emotions. Whereas the Japanese will go to great lengths to avoid conflict, the Koreans have a breaking point that you can often see reached in public.
Yeah, the British are partly the way they are (reserved, standoffish, polite) because they are a small, crowded, island nation. Japan is the same but more so.
I always heard it described that Japanese are shy to a large part for the same reason Scandinavian/Nordic people are shy -- a very violent society, which isn't violent anymore. The shyness is a historic anacronism.
(The shyness comes from that in a large fraction of quarrels someone(s) will be carried away, in pieces. You don't cause offense without very good reason. Not sober, anyway.)
Haha. They can't resist hormones and desire. Platonic love forever is lying. Japanese could do better as they have highly advanced porn and sexual industry.
The title is linkbait, to be sure, but I think that in focusing on the hyperbolic linkbaiting, you miss the ultimate point of the article, which to me is to describe a growing cultural shift in relationships, which is having major social and economic repercussions.
And speaking with the sex therapist, who also acknowledges the shift in young peoples' cultural approach to sex? Should we disregard that as well?
Also, while the title is certainly link-baity, I think the point of the article is more about the lack of desire to cultivate meaningful intimate relationships that turn into families.
I have to say, this is the kind of thing I was thinking while reading the entire article. One of the things I remember most about working in Japan is the different manners in which people would answer questions. Everything did seem so extremely indirect, yet not necessarily dishonest.
I think what the parent is saying (and is reiterated by several other posts here) is that premise of young Japanese people not having sex is based on a lack of understanding in the cultural subtexts implied by the way those young people are answering the questions. The reporter is taking their answers at face value, when in fact they shouldn't be at all.
You missed the claim that it is well documented that the Japanese young have less sex. A quick check of condom sales (and/or VD statistics) can verify if people have less sex.
But, of course, the article really might be just pure fantasy with invented statistics.
(I have no idea. Since it is easily testable, any fact checkers at the magazine would find out quickly. But maybe only NYTimes have them, these days.)
Edit: Grammar fix. ferongr, I wrote condom and VD sales like that, since they obviously play off each others -- we do talk about short term affairs... (Ok, gaius did note the third case -- pregnancies/abortions :-) Also supports my points, the amount of sex is easy to measure.)
There was a survey made by the Japanese Government this year, where they found that about 55% of marriages had been having sex less than 1 time every 3 months.
The OP post here discrediting the situation in Japan claiming cultural differences is not understanding that shit DID went downhill.
(by the way, even before the earthquake, there was already numerous article and blog posts written by western reporters but also japanese women complaining that young japanese women cannot convince grasseaters to fuck them... there was even some people that went to reveal their personal anecdotes of forcing men to sleep naked with them, and the guy just... slept, and no matter how much the women caressed him, he just would not have sex)
>A quick check of condom sales (and/or VD statistics) can verify if people have less sex.
Or it could mean that Japanese people have more unprotected sex and that they value personal hygiene and health more, resulting in lower condom sales and V.D. rates per capita.
IF fewer children are being born AND sales of contraceptives are not up THEN less sex is being had. I don't see how it is possible to argue against that.
Again: We talk about short term affairs -- both of these cases would be visible in VD statistics.
Also note the additional obvious problems: Other birth control sales, just like condoms, are easy to find statistically -- and environmental factors ought to be obvious among people trying to get kids.
It really strains credulity to think that Japanese people are going at it like bunnies but are simply light years ahead of everybody else on the planet in terms of sexual sophistication (to the point where unprotected anonymous sex is actually safe sex).
This is a stupid article, and young people in Japan have not stopped having sex.
It doesn't claim that. It says that 25% of young men and 45% of young women are repulsed by sexual contact. That means that 75% of men and 55% of women are still open to it (and, presumably, having it).
I'd bet that if you looked at an American college campus, you'd find similar behavioral statistics, due to the declining ability of young Americans to form intimate relationships (which may not be their fault). Casual sex doesn't fit most people. Many people (including most men) can't get it and many (including most women) don't want it. Only about 50-60% participate in the casual market even once, and half of those end up wishing they hadn't.
Still, a 35% sexlessness rate among people in their 20s means that something is wrong. It doesn't mean that people have stopped having sex (65% are) but it's still a sign of something unhealthy. I don't take those numbers (which are probably not very different from those in the West) to indicate voluntary disinterest, but artifacts of undue stress.
When the cause of the sexlessness (which is not just a Japanese problem) is unnecessary corporate stress, it's worth looking for solutions.
Casual sex doesn't fit most people. Many people (including
most men) can't get it and many (including most women) don't
want it. Only about 50-60% participate in the casual market
even once, and half of those end up wishing they hadn't.
I'd like to read about that in more depth. Can you cite that gender breakdown and participation/satisfaction stat to a specific set of published research?
I would argue that it's not so much that most women "don't want" casual sex, but that they are judged more harshly for having it. I believe women's sex drives are quite a bit higher than is reported, mainly because women are ashamed to admit their strictly sexual desires.
In the midst of all, this seems to be one of the best parts of it:
"Tomita says a woman's chances of promotion in Japan stop dead as soon as she marries. "The bosses assume you will get pregnant." Once a woman does have a child, she adds, the long, inflexible hours become unmanageable. "You have to resign. You end up being a housewife with no independent income. It's not an option for women like me."
Great, so if a woman marries she loses independence and her own income, and then people don't know why women don't want to marry?
Same thing here:
"Romantic commitment seems to represent burden and drudgery, from the exorbitant costs of buying property in Japan to the uncertain expectations of a spouse and in-laws"
Notably, it appears that prior generations had higher birthrates because women were not expected to participate in the workforce. They didn't want to and/or weren't allowed to. They were treated differently than men.
A potential downside of making women equal to men is that they become more similar. They don't need each other. They don't complement each other anymore. Opposites attract, but if women are expected to succeed in the same way as men, then the prior balance is lost.
Happily, I now get to marry my husband because I want to be with him, instead of simply making a bid for economic survival and trading sex & childbirth for food & housing. As someone living in the US, I also get to continue my work which brings me great pleasure and independence. There are certainly difficulties and compromises, but I for one am delighted that I'm no longer required by law to resign my position upon marriage. My husband seems pretty happy that he's not the sole breadwinner, too, as he can contemplate things like quitting work and going back to school.
This messy compromise seems impossible for women in Japan.
I disagree, I think the opposite is the case. American Caucasians have a higher fertility rate than almost all Western Europeans; birth rates in France typically include recent immigrant fertility rates which are significantly higher. The arguments to avoid children are similar to the Japanese: independence, more money for consumption, etc
Disclaimer: I grew up in Germany/Austria and find the topic of Europeqn demographics quite intriguing
America does have a quite liberal attitude about gender roles.
As far as France and immigrants go, I'm not sure relevant studies are available (since France has very specific policies about not mentionning race/origin in its official data).
But My intuition is that the role of the immigrant population is overrated. Mostly because the keyword here is "recent" and while France has a rather large population of second or third generation immigrants, the recent immigrant population is probably not much higher than anywhere in Europe.
Yeah but it's because you get a lot of welfare when you have babies in France,especially when you have 3 or more.
Stop giving these freebies and fertility rates will drop in no time.
The question is , should we encourage it? in the long run ,it doesnt make sense. We often hear on the radio here how Germans dont make babies anymore and it will doom Germany. I dont think so, one country doesnt need perpetual population growth in order to survive, i believe Germans are smarter on these issues.
American Caucasians' fertility rate is steadily declining.
France has high birth rate for native French too.
I'm not sure which one is bigger at the moment.
> That's why France has one of the highest birthrate in Europe for instance.
France has very active policies in place to promote large families, which is why if you run into a French couple with children they'll often have three or more instead of just one or two.
Another potential downside: It doubles the size of the work force. Suddenly there's too many people for a limited pool of jobs, and everyone who works is miserable and makes far too little.
I wonder sometimes if maybe we've swung too far in the direction of gender equality, where now we shame people into believing their self worth can only be found through their professional success, rather than letting them live a life they more care to live. How many times have I seen an article grace the HN homepage defending the idea of being a stay-at-home-whatever?
Even worse the equality argument goes both directions not just women trying the former man lifestyle, but the other way around as the article barely touches on the two decades of economic stagnation issue.
Its not just salaryman and stay at home wife turning into salaryman and salarywoman, its unemployed dude and salarywoman at the same time.
I recall reading an article saying that there is actually quite a lot of undeveloped / rural land in Japan, but people tend to live in the largest cities because large businesses want to be close to the areas of greatest political influence.
I recall reading an article saying that there is actually quite a lot of undeveloped / rural land in Japan, but people tend to live in the largest cities because large businesses want to be close to the areas of greatest political influence.
This is true in most places. The supposedly horribly expensive countries (U.K., Japan, Switzerland; to a lesser degree, the U.S.) are quite affordable outside of the major cities. And there are plenty of high-quality cities that aren't expensive-- analogues of Austin and Portland.
I've come to the conclusion that locating in a large city, for a business, and requiring people work in-office, is an unfunded mandate that borders on the inappropriate. It's worth having a corporate office there, of course; but expecting people to live in a high-COL area if they want to have a career at your company is not only classist, but probably a tactical mistake as well. Remote work poses a lot of difficulties, but it's the only thing that will save us from this catastrophic, worldwide real estate problem. (We should also work on high-speed, affordable trains... but one step at a time.)
Winner-take-all economics is somewhat inevitable, and the best that a government can do is to place a floor under it (i.e. it can't, and shouldn't, prevent the winners from shooting ahead; but it should prevent poverty for the less fortunate) but when WTA applies to places, you get wide swathes of joblessness and a few cities with robust economies but housing prices so severe as to constitute a return of debt bondage. Instead of indentured servants paying for their boat ride, now they pay a 500% housing premium for the ability to live there (i.e. access to the local job market). It's the return of hereditary oligarchy, with real estate being passed from one generation to the next and almost unaffordable on the legitimate market (due to regulatory corruption coming from entrenched, malignant interests-- owners trying to keep their property prices artificially high.)
No one asks, "Why did people drink so much in Communist Russia?" because it's taken as self-evident that Soviet-style communism was a gloomy, depressing system so "of course" people hit the vodka. Yet it surprises the hell out of people that urbanites under a runaway market system have stopped having children (and, in some sad cases, relationships and sex).
Very interesting article, multiple points to make:
If living and being in Japan has taught me anything, it's that generalising from anecdote is not a good idea.
Case in point, if you visit an outlet mall a few miles outside of central Sendai on a weekend, you'd have a lot of trouble convincing anyone that Japanese people aren't making enough babies. It was very, very difficult to spot single people, or even couples without babies crawling all over them on our one day out there.
In a population of nearly 130 million, if there's any generalisation you want to make about Japanese people, you'll find enough anecdotes to put together into a convincing article.
On the usage of mendokusai, I think the author of the article may have misunderstood in the situation he's describing. I believe that in this situation mendokusai meant "It's tiresome to be constantly propositioned by male colleagues at work" rather than "I would have sex with everyone, but I can't be bothered". IME you use mendokusai whenever you're tired of something, along with describing a task that is tiresome.
I agree generalizing is not a good idea, but a single person wouldn't necessarily hang out at an outlet mall by himself either. (or spend a lot of time outside for that matter)
Resource depletion is among the highest risks to civilization. Seems straightforward that severe population decline should be desired, and voluntary refraining from reproduction should be welcome.
(Please don't just extrapolate the trend till extinction. See http://xkcd.com/605/. )
I think the concern is an ageing population rather than a shrinking one. Too many older people, no longer working, who need care or support and not enough younger people to provide it.
> Too many older people, no longer working, who need care or support and not enough younger people to provide it.
But this will be a trend that autocorrects itself after some time, as less elder people will be there in the future. Also, the younger people if both working will create more prosperity than being married with one working and the other one staying at home.
In the short term this sounds bad, but long term doesn't seem that worrisome.
The problem is that people in general are living longer but the retirement age is staying roughly the same. So as time goes on you have a higher percentage of the people who aren't working but yet consuming public resources.
In the short term it is bad. In the long term it is devastating. Which is why every developed country is aggressively increasing the immigration rate to compensate. Well except for Japan.
The problem is generally overstated, because of (a) efficiency gains and (b) unemployment.
Some people were alarmist about the ageing population in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Their doomsday predictions turned out to be wrong because of technological advances that meant fewer working people could provide the real goods and services for more non-working people.
And what cannot be buffered by technology simply leads to lower unemployment, which is a good thing as well.
Be wary of extrapolation. As more of the economy gets concentrated in knowledge industries, it's likely that more and more people will just keep working until they die.
My mom's been "retired" for almost a decade now. She's had 2 part-time jobs and usually a volunteer gig too for nearly the entire time.
The worst thing is that in places like Japan especially housing availability is a real problem. Which means you will have young people being forced to live with their parents well into their 20s.
And what happens when you have young people living with their parents ? Far less opportunities for sex.
I don't have the numbers, but anecdotally from looking for an apartment with my SO, there doesn't seem to be a big housing availability problem in Japan. Available apartments are plentiful, and outside of central Tokyo, Osaka etc, are priced reasonably. It's a far cry from the situation where I'm from in Sweden, where you have to be on a waiting list for 3 years to get your turn at a rental contract since there are just no apartments to be had.
Young people in Japan live with their parents due to lack of jobs. The Japanese employment market has recently had a massive shift towards part time labour instead of full time labor, leaving young people with jobs that can't support them.
Also, Japan has had a solution for the "opportunities for sex" issue for decades - the massive amount of hourly Love Hotels that are scattered all around the country (and people aren't shy to use - I've had to queue for one).
At my girlfriend's former job, a normal day went like this: the employees were expected to work from 9 in the morning to 8 in the evening (time on contract: 9-6) then attend staff meetings in another city, with one 30min break for the entire day (meant to be an hour, but who's counting?)
Remember that this is for a full-time employee - the main reason companies only want part-time staff now is so they can avoid paying their 50% of your health insurance and for vacations.
Working way too long isn't a new thing in Japan. The company not keeping up their end of the bargain (good benefits, job for life) is. If the govt grew some balls and actually enforced existing labor laws instead of letting companies abuse their employees, maybe people would have time and energy to have more kids earlier.
I totally agree with what you write - It's long been my pet theory as well that the soul-crushing long hours are a big part of the problem. My SO has a similar job - a normal day is 8 AM-8 PM, but she works a lot "on site" so she'll lose half to all the weekend days in a month to work. Sometimes he has to travel across Kyushyu and so has to get up at 5 AM. It's no wonder people get depressed, and when you're depressed, the sex drive disappears.
The fact that you can now not rely on your company supporting your family for life is just the final nail in the coffin.
My gf is actually looking at marriage as an honorable out with her company - if she just quit flat out, she'd be "abandoning" the company and placing a higher burden on her coworkers (company isn't doing too well...), and if she wanted to get a new job, it would be a huge black mark on her resume. Getting married? Well then OBVIOUSLY she needs to quit, it's not her fault.
It's bad because Japan has an extremely low net migration rate. For comparison Australia has 16x that of Japan. So whilst globally yes we should be aiming to reduce the total population Japan specifically has serious problems.
> I agree that society and technology could evolve us through a much more desirable path. But the more time we can buy for that to happen, the better.
I would inflect this differently. An open and free society is much more likely to figure out a desirable path for the future than one steered by central authority.
(In fact, it is the accumulation of thousands or millions of small improvements that will, in retrospect, be seen as a desirable path.)
Desiring "extra" conservation of the resources that today seem most limited, might not necessarily be incompatible with an open and unplanned society. But it usually is.
I agree with all your points, but, regarding the last sentence, I'd like to point out that this is definitely one of the (perhaps rare) cases in which a desire for radical conservation is compatible with openness and freedom.
I'm talking about letting people choose not to reproduce (textbook freedom), instead of having a government policy to influence them to revert their choices for the perceived greater good (central planning).
Except that people will only evolve once the resources are completely gone.
The underlying problem is that sustainable products almost always have a price premium attached to them. And because the benefits of sustainability are indirect it's hard to convince people to pay more.
What if it evolves in the wrong way? Plenty of emerging middle classes in developing countries are now looking to join the American-style unsustainable lifestyle movement.
Is there convincing evidence that resource depletion is among the highest risks to civilization? Much of what I've seen shows the opposite: for example, China is a rising superpower largely because of their huge population. Having more people means more potential productivity, and that could lead to more prosperity.
On the other hand, small countries with few people are usually able to accomplish little. Places with few inhabitants are considered rural and have a lower standard of living than places with high extremely high population density, like cities.
I'm counting war over the increasingly scarce resources as part of the risk, so the current influence of mildly scarce resources over politics is evidence.
I agree with your point that, from a nationalist perspective, population size is basically nation size.
I think this fact will become much more apparent as drones and droids become more common. The desire to control resources will become stronger when people can project that control "more cleanly". Battle robots and drones will be treated like a barbed wired fence used to keep people out.
Wars aren't overtly fought over resources these days, but the US has spent a lot of money in Iraq and 'stabilizing' the middle east (lot of good it's done). There happens to be oil in that area.
Which we could have simply purchased at a tiny fraction of the cost of going to war for it.
I'm still waiting for all of that free oil we "won" to start making its way over here. It's almost as if the war wasn't fought for oil, but for oil companies. Gee.
The system only works when there's growth... a huge decline in population (hence births, hence sexual activity ...) is the biggest fear of all governments, as it deflates the foundations current countries/systems/power balances/... are built on. It's also the reason why worldwide "family values" and "the traditional family (unit) as cornerstone of the society" are main political points, independent of culture, religion, ...
Well, the fundamental problem is a demographic one. In the end, the elderly are always cared for by the young so if you have a lot of elderly and not very many young, this becomes a real problem.
Ideally, the birthrate would be close to the replacement rate. Much lower and you run into very significant problems. If you want to draw down the population, a birth rate of say, 90-95% of the replacement rate would not be so bad.
> In the end, the elderly are always cared for by the young so if you have a lot of elderly and not very many young, this becomes a real problem.
Fun fact: an evolutionary explanation for "witch hunts" is that when the tribe is low on food, they're an excuse to get rid of less useful / influential elderly people. Which is why they happen more in resource constrained developing countries than rich developed ones.
But it goes to show that if young people feel that the elderly are more burdensome than useful, they may find a way to get rid of them.
The problem is that not everyone is making less progeny. Japanese and European populations may be in decline, but African, Asian, Arabic, and Hispanic ones are growing at a brisk pace.
So yes, it's pretty bad for some people to limit births. You are essentially diminishing your influence and putting yourself at risk of being swallowed up by other cultures.
Population growth rate is declining all over the world, but the effect is more pronounced in developed countries. As standard of living increases people tend to have less children.
This article would be a lot more informative if it looked at some other countries for comparison and contrast. Other countries that have been in the news for a high age of first marriage and a very low birthrate are Italy and Taiwan. What is similar about those countries, and what is different about them, alongside Japan? I have read that Taiwan (where I have lived during two different three-year periods of foreign residence and work) has the highest age of first marriage, and one of the lowest birthrates, of any country in the world. But Taiwan's culture is distinct from that of Japan, and some of the relevant workplace conditions and government policies are a bit different too. So what is the causation here?
This also happened to late roman empire, just before their collapse.
I know you like links, but I am busy now and cannot re-find them...
But basically, any country that is prosperous enough to women work in equal terms to men in a safe environment (ie: police exists and army is strong), ends having women rights movements, a acceptance of homosexuals, and a sharp rise in individualism.
Then a mix of this happen (usually all of it, and it DID happened in Rome):
no-fault divorce (prompting huge amount of women-initiated divorces, and then men stopping marriages)
babysitters and daycare (because women are not home to take care of children)
great numbers of women that prefer their careers over marriage
great numbers of men men that prefer goofing around instead of having responsability over a household.
All this usually results in decline of births, and debt problems as countries start to debase their currency in a attempt to keep the same standard of living for the old while there is not enough young people (this is much worse in countries with military all over the globe, like Rome)
Then you start having governments defaulting on obligations to pay police and army, undoing the conditions that allowed the equality, then your country either drift back to a previous condition, or if it was big enough and streched far enough, it collapses (like Rome did, as your defaulted police and army, immigrants covering for lack of native young people, and lack of native young people to defend their native land, makes your country a sitting duck for anyone that want to bring it down)
There is something about Japan that really brings home the meaning of 'foreign' to me.
I think that being the first rich, advanced large country that isn't western is the reason. On paper, they have a similar relationship with money, technology, their religion and traditional culture. I can't explain the strangeness away with those differences.
When I read something like this about some trend or supposed cultural pathology cropping up, I have nothing to connect it to. I don't intuitively get where its coming from or why. Not even a hint. I don't know whether to dismiss it as conservatives concerned with something harmless, some fringe phenomenon or whatever.
Actually this phenomenon isn't that foreign. Less children being born, a falling number of "serious" relationships etc. are all things that can be observed in any technologically advanced society.
Japan is just an extreme case because their current set of values doesn't deviate as much from more traditional values, which escalates the problem.
Germany is actually somewhat similiar to Japan when it comes to these issues and while the results are by far not as extreme the reasons are very similar: lack of government support for modern types of families and traditional values that still have a strong impact on how children are supposed to be raised.
Sex nowadays became a redundant, obsolete, risky, overcomplicated act which you can totally avoid with the help of good porn. So why bother with searching partner, if you can have all of sex benefits alone, but with porn or good imagination.
With the amazing variety and quantity of high-quality porn nowadays, it never ceases to amaze me the great efforts people are willing to undergo for the possibility of sex.
When I ask, most people admit they don't really like that place or feel like doing that, they do it only to increase their prospects of having casual sex. C'mon, it's the 21st century!
Sex? Add in commitment, caring, affection, intimacy, romance, joining of lives, a good version of passion,
a collection of memories, activities, traditions really
like, don't want to lose, can't get anywhere else, and, thus,
cause 'lock in', vows, supportive families, children ("most rewarding thing we did"), etc. One night stands are not
very good on passion; it takes a while for a caring, loving
couple to be good with each other with passion. One night
stands are at best just mutual friction, and a simple electrical appliance can replace that.
She has two legs. He has two legs. If she breaks a leg, then she is down to one leg to help her broken leg get well. But joined with him with good vows, commitment, etc. they have four legs with three good legs to help her broken leg get well. Can rattle off 10,000 such cases faster than can say them.
People don't want to be alone. Being alone is scary. Nearly all baby mammals know this. Being joined to someone is much more secure.
This probably must sound reasonable, at least for a guy who was taught this things during his whole life. But as for me, any relationships I can imagine with a human being is a painful nightmare. I don't really know if I enjoy loneliness or not, but at least I don't find it painful at all.
Have you tried non-casual sex? The whole point of sex is to make an intimate connection with another person; I'll agree it's kind of pointless without that. But then again so is porn. Hence the original question: it's a very solipsistic attitude that porn is an adequate replacement for sex.
Anyway, how is sex risky and overcomplicated (unless sharp objects, diseases and coordinated acrobatics are involved)? Sex should be simple fun. Maybe you refer to dating or the search for a partner.
If today's gay hookup apps are any indicator, straight hookups will become instant gratification at the tap of a button, soon. We 're not there yet because of cultural hangups.
I loved the picture of the couple leaning away from each other; I think I was supposed to see that as an indicator of the purported epidemic.
I think what the article was, however, was an advertisement for the former dominatrix. Apparently you can pay her to talk to you about women, pay her more to get naked while she talks about women, and maybe if you play your cards right...
Generously assuming your comment is merely clueless instead of intentionally offensive, that sort of subtlety would hardly be necessary, as finding commercial sex in Tokyo is trivial. Most larger train station have red-light districts in the immediate vicinity, with (Japanese-only) signage making it extremely clear what's available.
I have literally been propositioned on the street between Shibuya and Ikejiri. Places I would not have expected it.
I can't speak to signage, as I generally steer clear of areas that seem shady, and I wouldn't put a lot of trust into such things anyway.
Regarding the source of much of the information in this article, I have little to offer. If you were to weigh the hypothesis that the source was advertising services against the hypothesis that this came up in conversation with the article author and she found this worth noting, which do you think is more likely, given that this is interesting information that is unlikely to be left out of a sex-charged article?
In this case, being charitable about the parties involved in this article is probably correct.
Because parents and schools in the developed world have stopped raising kids and have instead opted for 18+ years of babysitting. Part of the problem is that we don't even know what we're about anymore, so we don't know what lessons and principles to pass on to our children. It's a wonder that the problem isn't far worse than it is already.
One of the major things I see though in the article is the way in which modern corporate capitalism isolates individuals and tries to place career above family.
Having lived in some other countries, I disagree. This corresponds with corporate domination of the economy. Where small businesses dominate, family becomes more important. The reason is that family becomes the primary source of small business capital.
(The family also becomes the source of one's "career" as well. It isn't that women don't participate in family businesses. They do, extensively. It's that family and work time are no longer separated by a wall.)
Few things I'm reading from Japanese people (albeit, I won't say this is unbiased observation) often cite unrealistic expectations of their partner's income, look, and personality.
So, I've looked into the government research about it, at least for income part as it is being tangible. [1]
As for income, there have been some research that lifetime unmarried rate would collaborate with income. (Mostly for male) [2]
Their research further says that "In 2010, for male percentage of marriage for permanent employee is 27.7% while same for temp workers are 6.7%, resulting in about 20% of difference, while for female it is 28.2% for permanent workers, and 25.8% for temp workers, shows the much less difference. Therefore the increased rate of male temp workers is contributing to unmarriage rate or marriage at an older age. [3]
I think I remember a study a while back that found that women expect their future husband(s) to make more than them, even though women make equal to men or more in my country. Naturally, this makes "good men" (according to this rather sexist definition of suitability) hard if not impossible to find.
Women have been liberated from a lot of their gender roles, but seem fine with keeping men in theirs.
Meanwhile the Japanese countryside is depopulating at an amazing rate, leaving ghost towns in their wake, with elementary schools built for 700 students housing 2.
That's not necessarily a bad thing! People move to cities to find a better life, and they usually find it. That's great unless you think a life of rural poverty is some kind of noble virtue.
The global population is 7.1 billion and rising fast. We should all cheer when we hear these statistics.
Not all people in India have premarital sex.In cities it may be different.But in rural areas very few does.This is not something people discuss with a journalist.I know many young men belonging to Christian communities who consider sex outside of marriage as a bad thing.
The problem isn't so much the sex is it? The problem is of course demographic. Related, but not the same. Amazingly the government of Japan surely understands the problem at hand, and still refuses to act. Labour laws of course cannot allow an employer to fire someone (or choose not to hire) based on pregnancy (or being a woman of that age). There is only one sure way of making women as desirable to hire in this respect: ensure men stay at home with children just as much as women. State subsidized childcare and a year or two of paid maternal/paternal leave per child would be a net win for Japan (as it is for most such countries).
Sums up my feelings pretty much exactly. I lack much, if any parental instincts. I also lack any family or peer pressure to marry and make babies. Without the push to produce offspring relationships have more downsides than up. Children 10 times as so.
I enjoy relationships (well most of them). But, there is so much to do and experience in the world. I'll never get to all before I die. There's no reason to spend my time in sub-optimal pursuits.
There's an analogous effect that's reportedly been around for a long time, possibly worldwide: An anti-correlation between birth rates and things like the education and economic empowerment of women. In addition, even the US has seen a decline in birth rates resulting from economic stagnation. Is Japan an exception, or merely an extreme case due to the tenacity of workplace sex discrimination?
The Japanese in the article are missing out
on what man/woman love can really mean
and the value it can have.
So there should be not just
'friction' but 'love' (with the
help that Mother Nature provides)
with commitment,
caring, affection, intimacy, passion,
joining of lives, vows, romance,
trust (he doesn't return from a
business trip and discover that
she's drained the checkbook
and savings account, took the
best of the household belongings
and the dog, and is gone),
respect, responsiveness
(they respond to each other),
supportive families (e.g., he gets
a job in her father's business),
collection of activities, memories,
and traditions like, don't want to lose,
can't get anywhere else, and that cause
'lock in',
homes ("where the heart is, where you are
loved even when you are wrong"), and children
("the most rewarding thing we did").
Joining? For a few hundred years
in Western Civilization, standard marriage
vows started off with "We gather together
to join this man and this women with
the bonds of holy matrimony.", and there
is wisdom there.
Or, for a more direct explanation,
she has two legs. He has two legs. If she breaks a leg, then she is down to one leg to help her broken leg get well. But joined with him with good vows, commitment, etc. they have four legs with three good legs to help her broken leg get well. The three legs are three times better than just the one. Can rattle off 10,000 such cases faster than can say them.
People don't want to be alone. Being alone is scary. Nearly all baby mammals know this. Being joined to someone is much more secure.
This can be great stuff, some of the
best in life, even without children,
and one night stands are nothing like
the same. The article omitted nearly
all the really good stuff.
I see this trend in other industrialized countries, like in western Europe. I believe probably a very important cause of this demographic imbalance is the equality factor. Women work same as men, earn same as men and feel empowered. This is great for the individual, but then the society as a whole remains out of equilibrium.
For some reason being independent (able to buy what I want, when I want it and work 20 hours a day) is better than rising a family and having children. Things that are after all, the reason of what as species, are suppose to be doing in this planet.
The signal is then clear, you fail to do that, but being to extinct. This is exactly what begins where this trends are prevalent. Perhaps we need to rethink the roles and if being independent is something that in the long term will create more value for the group.
When we talk about the medium or long term, we should also start to consider the impact of life-extension, and more importantly, youth preservation technologies; the entire issue of "young supporting the old" disppears if people stop aging. There is virtually no government support for research to support this, even though we should consider it one of the most important issues in history (and many diseases simply a subset of the "disease" of aging.) Perhaps trends like the ones discussed in the article will get governments thinking about it (and having Google investing in this area is a nice boost.)
Who is buying all these JAV videos that make US gonzo look like Disney cartoons ? too much of it is definetly not good for the mind, especially those about v...t or o...p.....s
I don't know what "v...t" or "o...p.....s" means but consider that you might be confusing the cause and effect here: assuming that there's correlation between consuming $WEIRD_PORN and being unable to have normal relationships [1] it may not be that people become unable to have those relationships due to exposure to $WEIRD_PORN so much as that people who turn to $WEIRD_PORN were already unable to have them. This creates demand and $WEIRD_PORN gets produced.
[1] "Normal" a defined by a given society.
Edit: removed a comparison of the parent poster's argument to "violent video games make people violent".
My point is about porn in general. I'm from a generation that did not have access to porn easily. today some 12 yo kids are already addicted to porn,and not the softcore stuff. There will be huge consequences.
I dont think i'm confused about causality here. If you cant get excited unless you see or do extreme stuff, you're going to have a pretty difficult libido,as in reality not that many women are willing to "perfom" these "stunts".
I dont think one needs to be already interested in extreme fetish in order to get hooked to it,the more one looks at porn the more one seeks extreme stuffs. It's like any other addiction.
> I don't know what "v...t" or "o...p.....s"
Nevermind , i was saying that japanese porn is well known for its extreme fetish.
I'm having trouble following the logic because I keep thinking stuff like "so, that's why NASCAR fans all ride the bus, or ...?" I'm having trouble thinking about the proposed rules of the game as applied to sex when compared to any other game from car racing to watching TV.
>I dont think one needs to be already interested in extreme fetish in order to get hooked to it,the more one looks at porn the more one seeks extreme stuffs. It's like any other addiction.
I agree, but my point was that people who see enough porn to get to the really weird stuff are probably more likely the ones who didn't care for real-life relationships already (in a society where these two things a correlated).
You know , back in 2005 , it was the WAP years, i used to work for a VOD business specialised in video content for phones(any content,sport,erotic,tv shows...).
My job was to source content and manage a mobile video website. that's when i got exposed to JAV. So a business we worked with sent us "classic" JAV. And frankly , it was the most extreme stuff i saw back then. There is definetly something cultural. I think japanese get exposed to stuff we would label as extreme , yet for the business i was dealing with it was normal JAV.
And i'm from a country which is quite open minded about sex(one of our first lady was an ex model who did nude photos, i dont think it would be ok in US).
France isn't really that open minded about sex. Although most people are secular, you still have the whole judaeo-christian morals hanging around in the background, subtly changing everybody's behavior. Eh ouais.
> too much of it is definetly not good for the mind
Citation needed. One could easily argue that the ready availability of "extreme" porn is what keeps the Japanese rape (and indeed general crime) rates so low.
Low in comparison to what? The country has female-only trains in rush hours to prevent 'Chikan', or sexual assault. And of course "too much of it is bad for you", it's ridiculous to argue otherwise. (Unless what you're saying is "there's no such thing as too much porn", which is another matter entirely.)
I like it how they're trying to "fix" the population decline. A population decline might actually be a good thing for our species. There are too many people and an ever increasing sense of stupidity
HN isn't just for news about startups and tech, it's also about topics of interest to curious critical thinkers (which pretty much defines us, don't you think?). A little bit of /r/DepthHub here is a good thing.
While the level of discourse on HN is high enough, it still suffers from the memes( as in their original definition) permeating through the content and diverting the attention to emotional, not rational issues. I for one find the emotional level on HN too high.
Population decline is multifaceted and rather important - countries that experience it don't seem to bounce back, and it has far reaching economic implications.
The Vice documentary linked upthread suggests that such a startup would be trying to disrupt existing Yakuza business. This is possibly not a good idea.
Several reasons, people like sex and reading about sex. Learning about another culture and their problems is interesting. As the other poster said sounds like Japan might be a rich breeding ground for startups who try to address these issues.
Okay, take a town 60 years ago. Lots of people,
say,
o driving cars with tires that last only 15,000
miles,
o driving cars with engines that last only 80,000
miles (due to poor lubrication due to water and
gasoline in the oil due to inaccurate fuel
mixture and ignition),
o typing on typewriters with carbon paper,
o doing business communications with printing
and/or typing on paper sent by USPS,
o an office telephone switchboard manned by
employees.
Now enter new technology, and each of these
activities uses some automation, is much cheaper,
and puts the old employees out of work.
So, have lots of unemployed people with little or
no money who want to make money and consume but
cannot get jobs.
Why not jobs? For one, the total number of jobs
shrank, and as in musical chairs some people don't
get one.
For another, to create more jobs need some ideas for
new products/services, some capital to get the
businesses going, and some qualified employees. The
unemployed people will need some new training, that
is, investments in 'human capital'.
As we know from depressions, can have a shortage of
capital, lots of people not consuming who want to
work but no jobs for them to do. Then if have a
war, suddenly can have three jobs for everyone who
can work at all.
There is also an effect of the ratios of people to
land and other natural resources. With high density
population, the prices of such resources increase.
Maybe when the population of Japan, Finland, France,
Germany, Russia, the US, etc. shrink, the new ratio
will make it easier for a couple to form a family.
E.g., if the population is low enough that a young
couple can easily buy 200 acres of good farm land,
then there will be some new alternatives for that
couple to form a family. Now at maybe $5000 an
acre, let's, see, 200 acres would be $1 million.
She's 18; he's 22; and where are they going to get
$1 million or even a down payment plus farm
equipment and materials for a house?
Presumably in time startups will find new products
and services that people want and that can make use
of the unemployed.
But, in that town when automation put the typists
out of work, the jobs of some people were not
affected and, first cut, by having the company spend
much less on typing, could pay their remaining
employees more. So, some people are doing well.
And in Japan, the article seems to suggest that real
estate prices are so high that no one can afford
them! No! Instead, real estate prices are so high
just because enough people actually can afford them.
So, some people are doing well, and maybe they, or
their lucky heirs, are forming traditional families.
I would note that there is a particular fascination with Japan and sex, and that google is unlikely to give you an accurate depiction at the frequency of weird in Japan.
I suspect that weird exists in any population of sufficient size.
ever notice how the corporate media is always trying get more people into the developed nations? Mass immigration! More people! More People! More Babies! MOAR! MOAR!
This baby dearth, combined with the ability of the japanese to keep their elites from increasing mass immigration, means less supply of labor, which means higher wage (remember supply and demand? It applies to labor, too). That means that the corporations that support the corporate media via advertising buys will pay more for labor. The media hates that!
Also, fewer people means fewer consumers for the products advertised in the media. The media hates that!
The media is the enemy of the majority working class citizen of the developed nations.
Japan hasn't quite embraced foreign immigration the way many of its European counterparts have. It's an interesting demographic and economics experiments whose results we shall find out in coming 30-50 years.
I'm willing to bet a lot of money that the low-birth rate trend will reverse at some point. A country with 1.2 birth rate will cease to exist in 200 years, and I just don't see that happening.
More interesting questions to ask is:
1. What will trigger the trend reversal, and make young people reproduce more? (My guess is, vast reduction in standard of living and GDP)
2. And how long will it take for Japan to recover from the damage sustained?
In a long run, I think Japan can pull it off. It will be in better shape than Europe 50 years from now.
I cannot speak for all developed nations, but I always got the impression that the corporate media in America was very anti-children. Many shows highlight the trials and tribulations of having children. I cannot think of any popular program that focuses on the joys of having children.
Did you notice that the current system is built upon growth? Growth in everything, in populations, users, consumers, prices, resource extraction etc etc
Yes, but you can talk about demographic trends without delving into fetishism and sexualization. As strange as it sounds, there isn't much relation between sex and the choice to have children, from my understanding Japanese women are rejecting motherhood because it cancels whatever limited career opportunities they may have had. In other words, like most demographic trends, it is driven by economics.
Of course to a sexually repressed Brit walking through Shibuya with a childish smirk and a hard-on surrounded by sexually voracious vixens (in his mind at least), sex is everywhere and needs to at least be a sub theme on any reporting on Japan. Cringeworthy.
While I don't disagree with you that economics and the plight of the working woman in Japan is a major cause of the dismal birth rate, there's definitely more to it than just that. In particular, the "herbivore man" phenomenon is definitely A Thing in Japan, and the WP article claims that anywhere between 36% and 71% (!) of Japanese men under 30 now self-identify as herbivores:
Can you imagine a survey in any Western country where even 36% of young men would willingly fess up to voluntarily avoiding any romantic relationships?
(And FWIW, I'm married to a Japanese woman, and our contribution to the birth rate is already above the national average.)
"turn their backs on typical "masculine" and corporate roles"
So they're basically hippies, although for cultural reasons the girls don't think their hippies are cool, so they get less sex not more.
One interesting effect of huge rates of freeters and neets is some segment of the salarymen feel they're just one bad review or whatever from permanent downgrade into freeter / neet status, or at least the girls may think that about them. So the percentage of people behaving like freeters / neets probably is somewhat larger than the demographic percentage of freeter/neets.
Well, no girl my age would ever have anything to do with me because I'm poor and have no future, so, uh, yeah I'm not looking thats the story I'll tell so I feel a little better. Pout and quit is hardly unknown in the west "Oh so you guys are cheating and stacking the game against me, well F you I'm taking my (two) balls and going home". Although with the decline of casual neighborhood play this might be an unknown social situation for our young... In the past it was not unheard of, screw over the kid who brought the tennis ball and he takes it and goes home and no one plays...
Don't end up like a teen parent, don't have relationships and kids until you can afford it... well, what if the economic deck is stacked such that 25% will never, ever be able to afford it? Well, until the inevitable revolution, you'll get weird things like young people not having sex.
Finally the whole topic is super hetro-normative so I think we can all safely assume at least 5% or so are in the closet.
So 5% in closet, in 2000, in better times, 10% were NEETs per govt figures, in better times 30% were freeters (some of whom do get some...) maybe 10% of salarymen (or more precisely, the girls checking them out) accurately or inaccurately believe they're one unlucky event away from permanent downgrade into freeter/neet (is there significant upward mobility in Japan from freeter/neet? Not that I've read/heard?) So that's 55% right there although some of the freeters ARE probably getting some. Of course not everyone reacts to being screwed over by withdrawing; in the US they sometimes go out shooting, etc. Fixing the withdrawl problem without fixing the economic stressors is likely just to result in different negative social reactions WRT weapons etc.
> Can you imagine a survey in any Western country where even 36% of young men would willingly fess up to voluntarily avoiding any romantic relationships?
Well I'm from Australia and according to the sensationalist press some not insignificant proportion of men are actively avoiding marriage, and Sydney is supposedly seething with 30something year old women unable to find a mate (despite their willingness to go out hunting in packs on a Saturday night).
It's probably too much to ask - but I think there should be something in between a scientific journal and common journalism. In technology we have some pretty insightful articles coming up in blogs now and then, articles where sources are cited and you can go deeper on any subject if you like. Why can't traditional journalists not use the web the way it is meant to?