No sex please — we’re Japanese

From USA Today:

Nothing is happening with depressing regularity between Japanese men and women these days. Marriages, births and hanky-panky are all spiraling downward with troubling implications for the nations future: A sagging birthrate means that fewer working-age people will be around to support a growing population of elderly; a social crisis looms.

Only in Japan would a popular weekly newsmagazine deem it necessary to exhort the nations youth to abstain from sexual abstinence: ‘Young people, dont hate sex,’ AERA magazine pleaded last month in a report detailing a precarious drop in sales of condoms and in business at Japans rent-by-the-hour ‘love hotels.’

More and more Japanese men and women are finding relationships too messy, tiring and potentially humiliating to bother with anymore. ‘They dont want a complicated life,’ says Sakai, who has written a controversial bestseller, Cry of the Losing Dogs, on the plight of unmarried Japanese thirtysomething women like herself.