The potential speculations already listed in the article sound like enough reasons.
How about you corelate this with cost of living, financial independece, and decreasing socialisation? We are seeing similar trends in european countries.
When my generation was growing up, and reaching adulthood, in the late 90s early 2000s while our own teens didn't have places where to get intimate, outdoor sex was way more common than it is today!
Who in their right mind would do so today when you can't even pick your nose without being caught by some random outside camera or mobile phone.
Maybe think radically and enforce the opposit of curfews whereas old parents living with their young adults are forced to hang outside at bars/clubs from 10pm to 9am to give their youth some breathing room :))
That doesn't work, at the very least, for two simple reasons.
First that you can't attest who filmed something without a lot of effort that law enforcement for sure won't bother with.
In many countries caught doing such activities in public spaces falls under public indecent exposure, if not something more draconian that puts you on a sex offender list. Morally people will feel obliged to report it there.
Can't attest who murdered someone or stole something or drew graffiti either, but making it illegal makes it happen a lot less, because of the chance that someone actually can attest it.
For example if you post it to Instagram or YouTube they'd know it was you, and you could go to jail.
Or a civil liability for you and/or the platform. That and taxing advertising and heavily taxing anything that looks like gambling (very short term speculation) would solve a lot of problems.
“Planet Japan” is where we are headed it seems. Japan got there first.
All these trends are happening everywhere to varying degrees with less developed places like much of Africa simply earlier on the curve but following the same trajectory.
So where does it end? I’m skeptical of population doomerism but shrinking population, like too rapid population growth, creates economic and social problems.
On the other hand if we are about to automate tons of stuff it means we need less humans to run things, and if medicine keeps getting better longer life and health spans somewhat offset lower birth rates.
They mention social issues such as bad work culture and other stuff, but I will copy paste this part that looks new/surprising to me:
"""Among their findings were the rise of sexlessness within marriage, and the popularity of pornography and the services of sex workers, especially among men.
For instance, in some surveys from 2008 to 2024, up to 60 per cent of Japanese men said they had previously paid for sex."""
60% is a lower figure than I would have expected. Prostitution has always been part of Japanese culture (though not as much as the Western view of the geisha would imply). And given the proclivity of young men to "try everything at least once", I imagine it's something many young men have tried. More interesting would be the percentage of people who pay for it regularly. Does a person that tried it once but hasn't done so for years really count?
Meaning there are Japanese women there doing hundreds of thousands of sex. That would explain the average women not doing much. Dont trust too much this kind of stats.
Honestly the whole article sounds like they are getting fucked by their own weird social protocols and standards (that harms both man and women).
So people find escapism in these kind of behaviours.
>In Japan, around 30 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women work for more than 50 hours per week.
That doesn't make a lot of sense. 50hr/w was the norm in many countries till the 1960's or so, and yet people were having lots of babies indicating having marriages with sex.
Just comparing hours hides the reality of what the time outside those hours looks like. When 50h weeks were the norm, you generally had a stay-at-home wife making that whole equation possible.
For some reason when we started sending women out to work, the work they had been doing at home stopped being counted as work. But of course it is work, it still needs to be done. As a result, the modern 50h weeks can be anything between 60-80h weeks depending on your comfort with living in squalor, and the presence of children, it's just we for some reason only count the part you get paid for.
In my city the birth rate has declined by 50% in just the last decade or so. It doesn't feel like it most days, because they are regularly building new housing developments near the city center. But when you get out into the more rural areas, you can really feel it.
In mid-2024, the median age for smaller rural settlements was 51 years. In comparison, for London, it was 35 years – 16 years lower than for smaller rural settlements. [1]
While most people know that rural population is older very few understand how big of a difference there actually is. I was stunned when I first came across this fact.
Why? The answer is directly in this article, : "for women particularly, the idea of marriage might not seem so appealing, in a culture where they were expected to bear most of the responsibility for household chores"
Btw, is it good or bad for individuals and for society?
This reminds me of an article I once read about Pandas. A certain zoo couldn't get them to breed, so they made a Panda porno film and, I kid you not, this gave the bears ideas and they had sex.
> Online porn is banned if you don't upload your ID / use a VPN
No, some online porn is unavailable if you don't use a VPN or send personal details to some dodgy "age verification" site, but lesser known porn websites are still accessible.
> Online porn is banned if you don't upload your ID / use a VPN
That's not what a "ban" is.
If it was, I could say "driving cars is banned in the UK if you don't show the insurance company your licence".
> And a hilarious titbit: cousin incest porn is banned, but in real life, it's not :)
At the turn of the century, as a 16 year old myself back then, I noted the same about the UK age of consent being 2 years lower than the age at which you were allowed to watch recordings or be in recordings oneself.
People are allowed to use hyperbole, but you said "porn is banned in the UK" in the middle of a list of actually mostly factual things. Feel free to be surprised, I briefly wondered what's going on in there.
The whole list is hyperbole. Hinge is growing, Tinder and Bumble along with most other apps are dying and obviously this is not representative of every Japanese man.
I'm making a point about current general trends and their potential consequences, not listing facts.
Young men becoming increasingly conservative exasperates the issue. Women are opting out largely because of the traditional expectation that they do everything in a household.
This male/female divide is becoming huge in Korea, if I've heard correctly.
But is that a positive move to liberalism or a negative move away from conservatism? Is it cause or effect? The implication is that Liberalism is convincing women not to have children, but I believe that a large part of it is the other way around. Something else is convincing women not to have children, so they're embracing Liberalism because of that.
This is the kind of question that should be hounded all the way down.
But it will take forever and whole generations will live and die before it does, because no one wants to.
Most people will have an opinion on one side or the other, and none of them are interested in finding out that the other side is right.
So it will take a group of people who are neutral on the topic (or professional enough to act that way at work), yet interested enough to do the work, and respected enough for their results are taken seriously by anyone else. Eventually it will happen but it will no longer matter. The current factors and realities will have all changed by then and the problems of that day will be different. The problems of today will have run their course without benefit of ever actually knowing the anwer to this question.
> And other outlets for sexual desire were more acceptable, for example fictosexuality: the expression of romantic or sexual feelings towards fictional characters.
> A 2017 survey of Japanese students aged 16–22 found that 14–17 per cent of them admitted to having romantic feelings towards a character in a video game or anime.
TIL about the name of this phenomenon. I see this always in the context of "terminal online anime fan" but it made me think and look into other occurrences of similar parasocial behavior like the early Sherlock Holmes fandom.
With this current social and tech trends I think we are going to see more Pygmalionic SexBots startups in next cohorts.
The name doesn't really mean anything though. "Sexual attraction to a fictional character" and "fictosexuality" are the exact same word, one is just shorter. You can make up a word to shorten anything. Maintaining milk in your fridge can be called lactostasis.
I think the answer is obvious - after spending years watching pixelated pornography, their fantasy fueled expectations reach extreme heights and are subsequently disappointed by the real deal.
Yeah this is why it's such a pain in the ass to produce dairy products. Have to find a wild pregnant cow and capture it, then throw away the calf before it drinks all the milk.
I blame digital entertainment. It really is so much easier and less risky to just stare at a screen instead of going out and interacting with people. Cheaper too. And quicker. And a near-100% success rate guaranteed. Like it is actually possible to opt out of most activities and instead burn through your life in front of the screens. It actually requires actual effort and resources in order not to - this is increasingly becoming the default. And it is not the Japanese which are at risk. Each one of us is at risk and the problem will only get worse as the digital entertainment improves while many aspects of the "real-life" get wiped out or locked behind an unattainable paywall due to climate destruction, high fuel prices, inflation, lack of people in service roles, or the lack of people to interact with (because they too are at home speedrunning their lives with their entertainment of choice).
I honestly believe our parents and grandparents were right all along. It's the damn computers and phones. Ironically, some of them have had their brains more scrambled by technology than the average Gen Z kid.
I would speculate that people can fulfill their need of intimacy online which results in lowered incentive to persuade it in real life.
In real life there are social and legal implications for relationships: if something goes wrong You could be in a nightmare divorce or simply interpreting things wrong with somebody can cause problems in your life. In the modern world every error pays expesively.
But in the digital world You just swap apps, nobody judges, and You alway get dopamine.
I've heard about that. They say it makes you love everyone (empathetically rather than sexually) which does sound useful in developing social skills for us internet addicts.
I remember when I lived in Japan and was with my male friend visiting temples. I was 21 years old and I'm male. At one point he grabbed my hand to direct me to a temple and didn't immediately let go. I felt strange because in the US that would be misconstrued.
Are you sure Japanese people hate physical contact? I never really considered whether that's true or not.
Are you Japanese and can be provide more insight? I ask because it's common online by non-Japanese (especially on places like Reddit) to make wild generalizations about who Japanese people are because they visited Japan once for a week or want to visit Japan someday.
In my experience of having lived in Japan, I find this simply not true. Of course this is my own anecdata. Physical contact, from my experience, is seen as a more intimate gesture. It depends on the nature of the relationship. In places like America, lots of people would give a hug (at the very least a one arm hug) to their friends when they're parting ways. Japanese don't do that ever from what I've seen, they'll just wave goodbye to each other. But I have seen plenty of hugging, hand holding, and other public displays of affection among those who are intimate.
The potential speculations already listed in the article sound like enough reasons.
How about you corelate this with cost of living, financial independece, and decreasing socialisation? We are seeing similar trends in european countries.
When my generation was growing up, and reaching adulthood, in the late 90s early 2000s while our own teens didn't have places where to get intimate, outdoor sex was way more common than it is today!
Who in their right mind would do so today when you can't even pick your nose without being caught by some random outside camera or mobile phone.
Maybe think radically and enforce the opposit of curfews whereas old parents living with their young adults are forced to hang outside at bars/clubs from 10pm to 9am to give their youth some breathing room :))
Maybe make it illegal to publish a video of someone without their consent.
That doesn't work, at the very least, for two simple reasons.
First that you can't attest who filmed something without a lot of effort that law enforcement for sure won't bother with.
In many countries caught doing such activities in public spaces falls under public indecent exposure, if not something more draconian that puts you on a sex offender list. Morally people will feel obliged to report it there.
Can't attest who murdered someone or stole something or drew graffiti either, but making it illegal makes it happen a lot less, because of the chance that someone actually can attest it.
For example if you post it to Instagram or YouTube they'd know it was you, and you could go to jail.
Or a civil liability for you and/or the platform. That and taxing advertising and heavily taxing anything that looks like gambling (very short term speculation) would solve a lot of problems.
That will stop it surely
People steal, assault and even murder people and film themselves doing it and publish it on the internet.
And it's always very useful in their own prosecution.
But the point is that that's AFTER the crime, so doesn't stop it.
“Planet Japan” is where we are headed it seems. Japan got there first.
All these trends are happening everywhere to varying degrees with less developed places like much of Africa simply earlier on the curve but following the same trajectory.
So where does it end? I’m skeptical of population doomerism but shrinking population, like too rapid population growth, creates economic and social problems.
On the other hand if we are about to automate tons of stuff it means we need less humans to run things, and if medicine keeps getting better longer life and health spans somewhat offset lower birth rates.
> while our own teens didn't have places where to get intimate, outdoor sex was way more common than it is today!
I just dont think teen outdoor sex is the thing that should come back.
I too would be confused with blurry genitals
Uncensored Japanese Adult Video is also apparently quite common these days, despite being illegal.
Maybe the moire effect is a Pavlovian turn-on for them?
They mention social issues such as bad work culture and other stuff, but I will copy paste this part that looks new/surprising to me:
"""Among their findings were the rise of sexlessness within marriage, and the popularity of pornography and the services of sex workers, especially among men.
For instance, in some surveys from 2008 to 2024, up to 60 per cent of Japanese men said they had previously paid for sex."""
60% is a lower figure than I would have expected. Prostitution has always been part of Japanese culture (though not as much as the Western view of the geisha would imply). And given the proclivity of young men to "try everything at least once", I imagine it's something many young men have tried. More interesting would be the percentage of people who pay for it regularly. Does a person that tried it once but hasn't done so for years really count?
So it might be a supply side and not a demand side issue?
Meaning there are Japanese women there doing hundreds of thousands of sex. That would explain the average women not doing much. Dont trust too much this kind of stats.
Honestly the whole article sounds like they are getting fucked by their own weird social protocols and standards (that harms both man and women). So people find escapism in these kind of behaviours.
That’s nothing new and very unlikely to be the cause. Pornography maybe but that’s also not new, just more abundant.
Pornography is illegal in China and Korea, yet their populations are in decline, too.
being able to watch millions of hours of videos in your own home on demand is very new
Certainly, especially since you’d need to be 114 years old, without ever sleeping at all, to watch 1,000,000 hours of anything!
Impressive!
Multiple screens.
>In Japan, around 30 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women work for more than 50 hours per week.
That doesn't make a lot of sense. 50hr/w was the norm in many countries till the 1960's or so, and yet people were having lots of babies indicating having marriages with sex.
Just comparing hours hides the reality of what the time outside those hours looks like. When 50h weeks were the norm, you generally had a stay-at-home wife making that whole equation possible.
For some reason when we started sending women out to work, the work they had been doing at home stopped being counted as work. But of course it is work, it still needs to be done. As a result, the modern 50h weeks can be anything between 60-80h weeks depending on your comfort with living in squalor, and the presence of children, it's just we for some reason only count the part you get paid for.
And compound matters income of men entered a long plateau or decline while women‘s preference for better earning partners persisted.
No contraception before the '60. A couple could have sex once a year and still produce lots of babies.
how much did women work back then, work that is counted as work - and it is represented in "50hr/w was the norm"?
In my city the birth rate has declined by 50% in just the last decade or so. It doesn't feel like it most days, because they are regularly building new housing developments near the city center. But when you get out into the more rural areas, you can really feel it.
In mid-2024, the median age for smaller rural settlements was 51 years. In comparison, for London, it was 35 years – 16 years lower than for smaller rural settlements. [1]
While most people know that rural population is older very few understand how big of a difference there actually is. I was stunned when I first came across this fact.
[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/696637175534c...
> But when you get out into the more rural areas, you can really feel it.
yup.
the rural town i'm originally from is down from ~9500 residents to a bit more than 6000 (and trending down).
Why? The answer is directly in this article, : "for women particularly, the idea of marriage might not seem so appealing, in a culture where they were expected to bear most of the responsibility for household chores"
Btw, is it good or bad for individuals and for society?
In captivity, you have to subject mammals to extreme stress or hardship to prevent them from breeding.
There are many cases mammal species that almost never breed in captivity. Giant Pandas and Elephants are perhaps the more well known ones.
This reminds me of an article I once read about Pandas. A certain zoo couldn't get them to breed, so they made a Panda porno film and, I kid you not, this gave the bears ideas and they had sex.
" A 2020 online survey indicated that 20–30 per cent of men aged between 20 and 39 years said they didn't want to have sex"
did anyone think to ask them why they didn't want to?
I'm not sure the responses could be trusted.
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Today in the news: Japanese men are not having sex, porn is banned in the UK and dating apps are dying.
This isn't good if you don't want men becoming increasingly conservative, which is already well underway.
> porn is banned in the UK
As usual, games of telephone change things pretty radically:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50115936Online porn is banned if you don't upload your ID / use a VPN
And a hilarious titbit: cousin incest porn is banned, but in real life, it's not :)
> Online porn is banned if you don't upload your ID / use a VPN
No, some online porn is unavailable if you don't use a VPN or send personal details to some dodgy "age verification" site, but lesser known porn websites are still accessible.
> Online porn is banned if you don't upload your ID / use a VPN
That's not what a "ban" is.
If it was, I could say "driving cars is banned in the UK if you don't show the insurance company your licence".
> And a hilarious titbit: cousin incest porn is banned, but in real life, it's not :)
At the turn of the century, as a 16 year old myself back then, I noted the same about the UK age of consent being 2 years lower than the age at which you were allowed to watch recordings or be in recordings oneself.
You know people are allowed to use hyperbole? I would be surprised if someone took banning porn literally.
People are allowed to use hyperbole, but you said "porn is banned in the UK" in the middle of a list of actually mostly factual things. Feel free to be surprised, I briefly wondered what's going on in there.
The whole list is hyperbole. Hinge is growing, Tinder and Bumble along with most other apps are dying and obviously this is not representative of every Japanese man.
I'm making a point about current general trends and their potential consequences, not listing facts.
Young men becoming increasingly conservative exasperates the issue. Women are opting out largely because of the traditional expectation that they do everything in a household.
This male/female divide is becoming huge in Korea, if I've heard correctly.
Note that in most places besides Korea, the male/female political divide is driven more by unmarried women becoming more liberal.
But is that a positive move to liberalism or a negative move away from conservatism? Is it cause or effect? The implication is that Liberalism is convincing women not to have children, but I believe that a large part of it is the other way around. Something else is convincing women not to have children, so they're embracing Liberalism because of that.
I’m not implying anything. I’m just talking about trends in affiliation over time. E.g.: https://www.americansurveycenter.org/significant-figures/the....
This is the kind of question that should be hounded all the way down.
But it will take forever and whole generations will live and die before it does, because no one wants to.
Most people will have an opinion on one side or the other, and none of them are interested in finding out that the other side is right.
So it will take a group of people who are neutral on the topic (or professional enough to act that way at work), yet interested enough to do the work, and respected enough for their results are taken seriously by anyone else. Eventually it will happen but it will no longer matter. The current factors and realities will have all changed by then and the problems of that day will be different. The problems of today will have run their course without benefit of ever actually knowing the anwer to this question.
False narrative: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-57582-3
How does a study about the US have anything to do with Japan or Korea?
This doesn't sound right. How do you explain places like Utah?
(Not that Mormon voting was ever directed by Japanese mating habits. But you get my point.)
> And other outlets for sexual desire were more acceptable, for example fictosexuality: the expression of romantic or sexual feelings towards fictional characters.
> A 2017 survey of Japanese students aged 16–22 found that 14–17 per cent of them admitted to having romantic feelings towards a character in a video game or anime.
TIL about the name of this phenomenon. I see this always in the context of "terminal online anime fan" but it made me think and look into other occurrences of similar parasocial behavior like the early Sherlock Holmes fandom.
With this current social and tech trends I think we are going to see more Pygmalionic SexBots startups in next cohorts.
The name doesn't really mean anything though. "Sexual attraction to a fictional character" and "fictosexuality" are the exact same word, one is just shorter. You can make up a word to shorten anything. Maintaining milk in your fridge can be called lactostasis.
With birth rates collapsing around the world in completely different cultures, why isn’t anyone looking hard at the pollution angle?
Because we don't see that decline in other animals in the same environments as the humans.
The animals aren’t eating the same processed food, etc.
It's because they become wizards if they're virgins at 30
They are, but nobodys making kids
Japan has the highest birth rate in East Asia.
I think the answer is obvious - after spending years watching pixelated pornography, their fantasy fueled expectations reach extreme heights and are subsequently disappointed by the real deal.
Mammals in captivity rarely breed.
Yeah this is why it's such a pain in the ass to produce dairy products. Have to find a wild pregnant cow and capture it, then throw away the calf before it drinks all the milk.
I blame digital entertainment. It really is so much easier and less risky to just stare at a screen instead of going out and interacting with people. Cheaper too. And quicker. And a near-100% success rate guaranteed. Like it is actually possible to opt out of most activities and instead burn through your life in front of the screens. It actually requires actual effort and resources in order not to - this is increasingly becoming the default. And it is not the Japanese which are at risk. Each one of us is at risk and the problem will only get worse as the digital entertainment improves while many aspects of the "real-life" get wiped out or locked behind an unattainable paywall due to climate destruction, high fuel prices, inflation, lack of people in service roles, or the lack of people to interact with (because they too are at home speedrunning their lives with their entertainment of choice).
It's probably this. Same in the West too.
I honestly believe our parents and grandparents were right all along. It's the damn computers and phones. Ironically, some of them have had their brains more scrambled by technology than the average Gen Z kid.
I would speculate that people can fulfill their need of intimacy online which results in lowered incentive to persuade it in real life.
In real life there are social and legal implications for relationships: if something goes wrong You could be in a nightmare divorce or simply interpreting things wrong with somebody can cause problems in your life. In the modern world every error pays expesively.
But in the digital world You just swap apps, nobody judges, and You alway get dopamine.
Our half baked monkey brains are certainly not suited for last decades technologies.
> And this national dry spell seems to have got worse
Hmm. Did the subjects say worse?
Sex isn’t as sexy as it used to be, has little appeal. Our world today is filled with far more interesting things.
> Our world today is filled with far more interesting things.
More interesting than each other?
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If you use marijuana (not posses, just use) you can risk up to 7 years in jail.
Legalize it, organize free rock and roll parties with no phone policy every weekend, see sex and pregnancy rates go sky high in the matter of months.
This and maybe prosecute a parent when he/she kidnaps the children, denying visits or any interaction with the other parent.
Do both please.
Anecdotally alcohol also had the same function, but people just started drinking less
Better legalize MDMA then
I've heard about that. They say it makes you love everyone (empathetically rather than sexually) which does sound useful in developing social skills for us internet addicts.
It probably has something to do with the need to touch someone first.
Japanese people really hate physical contact, or any contact by the way.
That's interesting.
I remember when I lived in Japan and was with my male friend visiting temples. I was 21 years old and I'm male. At one point he grabbed my hand to direct me to a temple and didn't immediately let go. I felt strange because in the US that would be misconstrued.
Are you sure Japanese people hate physical contact? I never really considered whether that's true or not.
Are you Japanese and can be provide more insight? I ask because it's common online by non-Japanese (especially on places like Reddit) to make wild generalizations about who Japanese people are because they visited Japan once for a week or want to visit Japan someday.
In my experience of having lived in Japan, I find this simply not true. Of course this is my own anecdata. Physical contact, from my experience, is seen as a more intimate gesture. It depends on the nature of the relationship. In places like America, lots of people would give a hug (at the very least a one arm hug) to their friends when they're parting ways. Japanese don't do that ever from what I've seen, they'll just wave goodbye to each other. But I have seen plenty of hugging, hand holding, and other public displays of affection among those who are intimate.
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Maybe sex with another human, sure, but sex with robots is definitely on the rise.
Is it because of hypergamy?
Downvoted. but in time it will be clear whats likely the cause of this
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