As couples around the world prepared to celebrate their love on Valentine’s Day yesterday, Japan was grappling with more evidence that its citizens have lost the spark in the bedroom.
A new survey by the Japanese family planning association found that nearly half of married couples had not had sex for more than a month and did not expect that to change in the short term — the association’s definition of a “sexless” marriage.
The data on married couples were among the findings of a wider survey of 3,000 people aged between 16 and 49 conducted at the end of last year.
The association received responses from more than 1,200 people, including 655 married men and women.
A record high 47.2 percent of married men and women said they were in sexless marriages, up 2.6 percentage points from the previous poll in 2014, the association said, and significantly higher than the 31.9 percent recorded when it conducted its first survey of the nation’s bedroom habits in 2004.
“The tendency of being in a sexless marriage has increased,” Japanese media quoted association president Kunio Kitamura as saying.
Some experts have cast doubt on the notion that Japan has suffered a collective loss of libido and point out that its people are not alone among industrialized nations in struggling to find the time for intimacy.
Tellingly, the highest rate of sexlessness was found among people in their mid to late 40s — a time when the demands of work and family can be at their greatest.
More than 22 percent of all women surveyed said they found sex “troublesome” — up from 21.3 percent in 2014.
Among married men, 35.2 percent said that work left them “too tired” for intercourse, while smaller numbers said they had come to see their wives solely as family members rather than as sexual partners, or that their sex lives had fizzled out after the birth of a child.
“This is the first time more than 30 percent of men answered that they were too tired from work to have sex,” Kitamura said. “Apart from improving working hours, there is also a need to review how people work.”
Pressure to overhaul Japanese employment practices to allow more time for family life has increased in the past few years, yet little concrete action has been taken to cut working hours.
The government is expected to set an upper limit for overtime of about 60 hours a month in an attempt to address long working hours highlighted by the suicide of a 24-year-old employee of the advertising firm Dentsu, who had worked more than 100 hours of overtime a month leading up to her death in late 2015.
A survey conducted last year suggested that Japan is experiencing a rise in the number of virgins.
The Japanese National Institute of Population and Social Security Research’s poll of 5,000 single men and women aged 18 to 34 found that the proportion of virgins had increased significantly over the past decade: among men, 42 percent said they had never had sex; among women, the figure was 44 percent.
However, experts said that the percentage of single male virgins had remained almost unchanged since the early 1990s and that other industrialized nations were experiencing similar trends.
The apparent lack of interest in sex among married couples has been blamed for contributing to Japan’s low birth rate, as the nation grapples with the prospect of long-term population decline and the economic fallout from a dwindling workforce.
‘THEY KILLED HOPE’: Four presidential candidates were killed in the 1980s and 1990s, and Miguel Uribe’s mother died during a police raid to free her from Pablo Escobar Colombian presidential candidate Miguel Uribe has died two months after being shot at a campaign rally, his family said on Monday, as the attack rekindled fears of a return to the nation’s violent past. The 39-year-old conservative senator, a grandson of former Colombian president Julio Cesar Turbay (1978-1982), was shot in the head and leg on June 7 at a rally in the capital, Bogota, by a suspected 15-year-old hitman. Despite signs of progress in the past few weeks, his doctors on Saturday announced he had a new brain hemorrhage. “To break up a family is the most horrific act of violence that
HISTORIC: After the arrest of Kim Keon-hee on financial and political funding charges, the country has for the first time a former president and former first lady behind bars South Korean prosecutors yesterday raided the headquarters of the former party of jailed former South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol to gather evidence in an election meddling case against his wife, a day after she was arrested on corruption and other charges. Former first lady Kim Keon-hee was arrested late on Tuesday on a range of charges including stock manipulation and corruption, prosecutors said. Her arrest came hours after the Seoul Central District Court reviewed prosecutors’ request for an arrest warrant against the 52-year-old. The court granted the warrant, citing the risk of tampering with evidence, after prosecutors submitted an 848-page opinion laying out
STAGNATION: Once a bastion of leftist politics, the Aymara stronghold of El Alto is showing signs of shifting right ahead of the presidential election A giant cruise ship dominates the skyline in the city of El Alto in landlocked Bolivia, a symbol of the transformation of an indigenous bastion keenly fought over in tomorrow’s presidential election. The “Titanic,” as the tallest building in the city is known, serves as the latest in a collection of uber-flamboyant neo-Andean “cholets” — a mix of chalet and “chola” or Indigenous woman — built by Bolivia’s Aymara bourgeoisie over the past two decades. Victor Choque Flores, a self-made 46-year-old businessman, forked out millions of US dollars for his “ship in a sea of bricks,” as he calls his futuristic 12-story
FORUM: The Solomon Islands’ move to bar Taiwan, the US and others from the Pacific Islands Forum has sparked criticism that Beijing’s influence was behind the decision Tuvaluan Prime Minister Feletei Teo said his country might pull out of the region’s top political meeting next month, after host nation Solomon Islands moved to block all external partners — including China, the US and Taiwan — from attending. The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) leaders’ meeting is to be held in Honiara in September. On Thursday last week, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele told parliament that no dialogue partners would be invited to the annual gathering. Countries outside the Pacific, known as “dialogue partners,” have attended the forum since 1989, to work with Pacific leaders and contribute to discussions around
RSS