It’s no surprise to anyone at this point that Japan has a birth problem. It’s a worrying issue that the country doesn’t know how to deal with it. Although measures such as those in South Korea and Taiwan have been proposed to prevent the situation from worsening further, birth rates have fallen to historical lows and are unlikely to recover in the short term.

There are a variety of factors that interfere with and cause this condition, and one of them may be that young people are experiencing withdrawal from actual physical sexual activity. Come on, it takes a while for them to have their first kiss.

“Three C’s”. During the global COVID-19 pandemic, every country has sought the best way to limit contact and prevent the spread of the disease. For example, in Japan we can see: SanmitsuIt can be translated as the “Three C’s” rule. This refers to three situations that the government is encouraging to avoid to reduce the spread of coronavirus, and these “three Cs” are:

• Closed spaces.
• Crowded places.
• Close contact environments.

Less kisses. It’s clear that this policy affects many people, including the thousands of teenagers who were interviewed in 2023 and asked a very specific question: whether they had experienced their first kiss. As we can read in The Guardian, the Japanese Association for Sexual Education asked 12,500 students aged 15 to 18 to learn about their communication habits, and the data was devastating.

27.5% experienced their first kiss. They achieved this 22.8% of the time. These are respectively 13.6 and 11.1 percentage points lower than in the 2017 survey, and there were already alarming data after the maximum achieved in 2005, when almost half had their first kiss.

less sexual intercourse. If we have sexual intercourse, 12% of the students stated that they had intercourse. The rate in their case was 14.8%, once again lower than in the previous survey: 3.5 and 5.3 points less respectively.

more masturbation. There is no contact among young people, but things change when you look at masturbation data, there is an increasing rate in both genders. Yusuke Hayashi, professor of sociology at Musashi University, comments that “the closure of schools and the restriction of face-to-face communication occurred at a sensitive time when middle school and high school students were beginning to deal with their sexuality.”

Regarding masturbation, Hayashi believes that “this may be due to increased exposure to sexual images in manga and other media and is not a substitute for interpersonal sexual behavior.”

catastrophists. However, the person who did not lose sight of the issue was Tamaki Kawasaki, who teaches sociology and thinks that young Japanese have moved away from sex after the pandemic. According to Kawasaki, this is “something that shows that even at a time when it was natural to be sexually active, people tended to move away from actual physical sexual activity.”

He goes on to comment that “if young people who represent the future of the country continue like this, there is a tendency to stay at home and watch sexual content alone”, which in his opinion leads to a bigger problem. It is difficult to see some improvement in the decline in the birth rate.

It is true that what Kawasaki is painting is a catastrophic scenario, but it is also true that the events surrounding the birth rate in Japan and the increasingly complex issue of generational change are not something that can be taken as a joke. Although the participants were adolescents and had their first relationships after the age of 18, the available data is not very encouraging.

Image | redd francisco

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