As the home of hentai and tentacle porn, one would think that Japan is a little more sexually liberated than say, Alabama, or one of the other conservative red states in the US.

And yet, a new study has found that Japanese adults have their first heterosexual sexual experiences later than their counterparts in the United States and the UK.

Public health experts at the University of Tokyo have found that sexual inexperience is on the rise in Japan, with the percentage of women between the ages of 18 and 39 who have never had sex rising from 21,7% in 1992 to 24,6% in 2015.

Here’s CNN:

The change was greater for men of the same age, with 25.8% virgins in 2015, up from 20% in 1992.

“Sexual inexperience has become a national concern in Japan, but previous reports did not examine the trend across different age groups and socioeconomic backgrounds,” said Peter Ueda, a public health researcher at the University of Tokyo and an author of the study, published Monday.

“Sexual inexperience has become a national concern” – not ideal.

To put those numbers into perspective, in Japan one in four people between the ages of 18 and 30 is a virgin.

Similar surveys in the UK and the US found that rates of heterosexual inexperience in adults was only 1% to 5% amongst adults in their 30s.

Notably, the paper only took heterosexual people into account, so the data does not reflect rates of sexual activity in the LGBTQQIA+ community.

The researchers based their nationwide estimate on data from seven national fertility surveys conducted over three decades. Each drew on the responses of between 11,553 and 17,859 adults 18 to 39 years old.

The report found that a higher percentage of men on lower incomes remained sexually inexperienced compared to women.
“Although the discussion around cause and effect becomes very complex when considering who becomes sexually experienced and who remains a virgin, we show that heterosexual inexperience is at least partly a socioeconomic issue for men. Simply put, money talks,” said Cyrus Ghaznavi, the lead author of the study.

Japan’s population is ageing rapidly, with more than 20% of the population over 65 years old, so the birth rate is important.

Also, sexual conservatism is a relatively new concept in Japan, following the end of the economic boom in the 90s.

Kashima argues that men’s loss of economic clout following the country’s period of financial stagnation affected their confidence when it came to pursuing women.

“Over the past two decades, some Japanese men have found it hard to face external hardships and fear rejection,” Kashima said. “There’s also an attitude of men devoting themselves more to their hobbies compared to women dedicating themselves to work.”

You can hear more about the dating climate in Japan here:

Ueda says that other countries in the world could be heading in the same direction as Japan.

Ueda’s team also suggested that Japan could be leading a global trend toward sexual inexperience between heterosexual couples, with sexual inactivity rising among young adults in Germany and the United States, suggesting a global shift in attitudes on sex.

It’s not all that surprising if you think about it.

With the economy, sexual assault scandals, men with no social skills on dating apps, the gender wage gap and everything else that’s going on – for many people abstaining could be a form of survival.

[source:cnn]