usa today article/recent demographics

[montoya 0]

And another article about recent trends in Japan's demographics:

 

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-06-02-japan-women-usat_x.htm

 

Japanese men, women shunning sex

 

Paul Wiseman

USA Today

Jun. 3, 2004 02:36 PM

 

TOKYO - Junko Sakai was nervously looking forward to a romantic getaway with the man she'd been seeing. But when they arrived at a seaside hotel last fall, her beau requested separate rooms.

 

Stunned, Sakai nonetheless anticipated a late-night knock on the door. It never came. "Nothing happened," the Tokyo writer says.

 

Nothing is happening with depressing regularity between Japanese men and women these days. Marriages, births and hanky panky are all spiraling lower with troubling implications for the nation's 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 feel it necessary to exhort the nation's youth to abstain from sexual abstinence: "Young people, don't hate sex," AERA magazine pleaded last month in a report detailing a precarious drop in sales of condoms and in business at Japan's 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 don't 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.

 

And so, to an astonishing degree, men and women go their separate ways - the women to designer boutiques and chic restaurants with their girlfriends or moms, the men to karaoke clubs with their colleagues from work or the solitude of their computer screens to romance hassle-free virtual women.

 

"Men don't want to spend time with their girlfriends, especially shopping," says Takayuki Mori, 40, a single man who works for a Tokyo advertising agency. He says he isn't dating.

 

Better educated, more widely traveled and raised in more affluence than their mothers, young women no longer feel bound by the Japanese tradition that says a woman unmarried after age 25 is like a Christmas cake on Dec. 26 - stale. Men, meanwhile, seem intimidated and bewildered by assertive young women who are nothing like their moms.

 

As a result of the disconnect between genders, Japan, just emerging from a long economic slump, is experiencing a social recession in:

 

- Marriage. Japanese are postponing marriage or avoiding it altogether. Weddings dropped last year for the second straight year. Fifty-four percent of Japanese women in their late 20s are single, up from 30.6 percent in 1985. About half of single Japanese women ages 35 to 54 have no intention to marry, according to a survey in January by the Japan Institute of Life Insurance.

 

- Births. Just 1.1 million babies were born in Japan last year, the third straight decline. The average Japanese couple now produces just 1.32 children, well below the minimum 2.08 needed to compensate for deaths. As a result of plummeting birth rates, Japan's population is expected to peak in 2006, and then decline rapidly.

 

-Sex. In a 2001 survey, condom maker Durex found that Japan ranked dead last among 28 countries in the frequency of sex: The average Japanese had sex just 36 times a year. Hong Kong was next to last with 63.(Americans ranked No. 1 at 124 times a year.)

 

"AERA" reports that condom shipments are down 40 percent since 1993 (probably in part because Japan finally legalized birth-control pills in 1999) and love-hotel check-ins are off at least 20 percent over the past five years. What's more, an increasing number of those visiting love hotels aren't there for romance, "AERA" says; they've found that love hotels offer the cheapest access to karaoke machines and video games.

 

I won't get married!

 

Over tea in the sunlit lobby of the Akasaka Prince Hotel near the Imperial Palace in downtown Tokyo and later over soba noodles and chicken yakatori at a nearby restaurant, Japanese writer and television personality Yoko Haruka describes the shortcomings of love and marriage Japanese-style. The husband works long hours and carouses into the night with his pals from work. The wife is expected to stay home, clean house and take care of kids. If the children behave badly, she's a bad mother. If her husband has an affair, she's a bad wife.

 

The author of "Kekkon Shimasen" (I Won't Get Married!), Haruka abandoned her own plans for marriage a decade ago when she realized her fiance wanted her to give up her career and lead the traditional life of a Japanese housewife. She says Japanese men sometimes propose to women with lines like: "I want you to cook miso soup for me the rest of my life." Not surprisingly, Japan's increasingly educated and well-traveled young women are not impressed.

 

"I'm not expecting men will change," Haruka says.

 

Her assistant, Miho Higuchi, who has kept silent throughout the conversation, suddenly blurts out: "Never again!" A mother of three, she divorced her husband because he refused to do anything to help her clean house and take care of the kids.

 

In fact, Japan's divorce rate rose steadily to 2.3 divorces for every 1,000 people in 2002 from 1.28 in 1990; it appears to have dropped a bit last year, partly because fewer people have been getting married. (The divorce rate in the USA was 4 per 1,000 people in 2002.)

 

As for men, they seem bewildered by the rising assertiveness of Japanese women.

 

"Men are getting weaker," says Takayuki Tokiwa, 23, a student at a Tokyo vocational college. "Women don't have to rely on men anymore. They can live on their own."

 

Masahito Wakauchi, 24, would seem to be a good catch. He has fashionably wavy hair and a good job with an advertising agency in Tokyo. Is he dating? Wakauchi shakes his head sadly.

 

"It's very, very difficult" to meet women these days, he says.

 

Rather than risk rejection or summon the energy to maintain a modern relationship, many Japanese men simply pay for affection in the country's ubiquitous hostess bars and brothels.

 

Others prefer virtual women online to the real kind. "They seem to find the relationship cumbersome. ... You have to be attentive to your partner," says Kunio Kitamura, president of the Japan Family Planning Association's Family Planning Clinic. "A quick way to get satisfaction is so-called cybersex."

 

In fact, as many as a million young men - mostly teenagers, but increasingly older men as well - suffer from what is known here as "hikikomori." It's a condition in which they seclude themselves in their rooms for weeks at a time (though the causes seem to go well beyond fear of women to traumatic experiences from the past such as being bullied at school).

 

But most young Japanese seem to enjoy the single life. In 1973, a Japanese government survey found that the happiest people in the country were those over age 60. A similar survey 24 years later found that the happiest people were in their 20s, and twentysomething women were the happiest of all: 77.7 percent said they were content with their lives. Maybe Gloria Steinem was right: Women need men like fish need bicycles.

 

Many young Japanese women live carefree lives, staying at home with their parents, paying little if any rent, letting their mothers cook their meals, clean their rooms and do their laundry. Many work dead-end jobs that don't pay much but don't cause much stress and give them enough spending money to buy designer handbags, shoes, clothes and jewelry and enough time to take overseas holidays with their girlfriends.

 

Emerging from the Louis Vuitton shop on Namikibashi street in the heart of the Ginza shopping district, Tokyo secretary Yukiko Matsumoto, 38, says she's happily single and living at home with her parents.

 

"I don't want to change my rhythms," she says. "Men expect women to stay home and take care of them." Not likely: Matsumoto travels abroad twice a year with her best friend and shopping companion Terumi Yanagibashi, 38. They've already been to Hawaii together three times.

 

'Parasite singles'

 

A few years ago, Tokyo Gakugei University sociologist Masahiro Yamada coined the phrase "parasite singles" to describe young people who sponge off their parents and use their rent-free incomes to splurge on designer goodies, expensive dinners and trips abroad. It came from the 1997 Japanese horror movie "Parasite Eve" and applies to young, live-at-home men and women alike, though Yamada says the most carefree of the parasite singles tend to be women; the men are more serious about establishing careers and moving out on their own one day.

 

The phrase caught on. Some single women even printed up business cards defiantly describing themselves as "parasite singles."

 

In the past, it made sense for young people to leave home early. In the 1940s and 1950s, Japanese families were large. Staying at home meant sharing a room with brothers or sisters. But after decades of prosperity and falling birthrates, many young adults are pampered only children. Leaving home to marry means the drudgery of housework (especially for women) and the poverty of having to pay your own bills.

 

Sociologist Yamada says the single life in Japan isn't as blissful as it seems. For one thing, many young women still want to marry: They keep waiting for the perfect man - a rich handsome guy who either helps with the housework or can afford to hire help. But Prince Charming never quite arrives. "They hold on to the illusion they will find a man with a high income," Yamada says.

 

"The good men are all married," writer Junko Sakai says. "Those left behind are all nerds or without jobs or violent or not nice looking."

 

And what happens to the parasite singles when their parents become infirm or die? Yamada says their future is grim. He cites one case study that he fears will be a model for the future. A woman lived with her parents until they died, inherited the family home but found that her job didn't pay enough now that her parents weren't around to foot the bill for groceries and other necessities. She ended up bankrupt after borrowing heavily in a futile effort to maintain her lifestyle.

 

The phenomenon of parasite singles also is creating a demographic nightmare. Japan now has about four working-age people to contribute to pension plans to support one of today's retirees. By the middle of the century, there will be just two workers for each retiree, which will create huge financial problems for the country.

 

Sociologist Yamada says young men and women need to get more realistic. Men need to start helping with the housework and supporting their wives' careers. Women need to stop waiting for the flawless man who's never going to show up. "They've got to compromise," he says.

 

But it's going to take a lot of convincing to get Japanese women to give up their independence. Writer Sakai says Japanese society still thinks there's something wrong with unmarried women over the age of, say, 30. She calls spinsters like herself "losing dogs." But fewer and fewer women care about tradition. "I know I'm a losing dog," Sakai says, "but I'm quite satisfied with my life."

[slow 0]

So, what's the matter??

 

I like positive independent men and women, some are married, unmarried, divorced. I believe there are a few attractive Japanese men, but very few...

[oo 1]

Interesting.

 

 Quote:

And so, to an astonishing degree, men and women go their separate ways - the women to designer boutiques and chic restaurants with their girlfriends or moms, the men to karaoke clubs with their colleagues from work or the solitude of their computer screens to romance hassle-free virtual women.

Going back to that segregation topic someone was talking about a short while back.

 

 Quote:

"hikikomori." It's a condition in which they seclude themselves in their rooms for weeks at a time

weeks at a time!

[nzlegend 1]

Junko Sakai? I rememeber that name, did a quick search and found the reason why I remember

http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=quote&id=907

Likes to be controversial this woman.

 

 Quote:

"parasite singles" to describe young people who sponge off their parents and use their rent-free incomes to splurge on designer goodies, expensive dinners and trips abroad

sponge gotta love that word, my father was fond of using that word when I about was 18 years old If woman want to stay single and free to pursue their dreams and ambitions so be it BUT they should also be independent about it to. Dont abuse the love and generosity of parents. You cant have your cake and eat it too. Give and take not take take take. Thats selfish.

This would be very different country if all Dads were like mine, parasite singles would be rare indeed.

[Davo 1]

Chuck the lot of them out on their arse as soon as they leave high school. Most NZ parents are very keen to get the kids out of the house at this point. If you're gonna stay home pull your weight and pay board. The problem is formerly rigid definition of gender roles eg the stereotype housewife/salaryman combo. This reality is over but an amazingly large number of people still follow the model.

 

I used to teach a bunch of housewives, with mostly grown-up kids, who would go on and on about how busy they were. Getting up to make bentos, or standing around in an apron to serve up a hot meal to hubby or the kids coming home from Uni. These people suffer from chronic interdependence, they all need to learn how to look after themselves and be self-reliant.

 

These women become parisites because the old model is like a union of two slaves and nobody wants that these days. They can do it because they're allowed to do it when they should be getting sent out to face the world on their own.

 

It seems to me that people are tired of being overly controlled but lack the wherewithall to be truly independent. I have been living independently since I was sixteen so I find it all completely absurd. Harden up Japan!

[slow 0]

I sometimes feel "losing dog" when I can't pop the bottle open, my favorite sugar-free strawberry jam, pickled gherkins... I want to eat now! but I can't open it... I really feel miserable. " title="" src="graemlins/cry.gif" /> I wish I have someone who is strong enough to open this...

But!! I have a swiss army knife and it always helps me! He is a real brick!

[damian 0]

Slow, you are a classic. Keep it up.

 

I met some Japanese women who impressed me quite a deal and I respect and admire. They were strong, funny, internationally capable, adventurous, determined, educated and successful. Most importantly they had confident happiness which I found strikingly appealing. They ran rings around most Japanese men I knew and most western women as well. It is a privilege to be in a position where you can respect someone. As I said, some of these women very quickly won my respect and admiration. Some even served as role models for me.

 

When these women met other Japanese men you could see in the mans eyes a look of uncertainty. One guy who is quite open about these things later told me that he is envious of many Japanese women as they are taking hold of things in the way they want and have the courage to step out into the different and unknown to experience so much more than Japanese men are able to. From my ignorant position, I agreed with him. In fact I feel sorry for some Japanese men. Many of them are progressively and emotionally retarded in a social development sense. I admit that last line is perhaps a little extreme. It seems to me that many women in Japan have no time for the inability of Japanese men to take the lead so the women are doing it themselves. Japanese men seem to have a perception of themselves as 'strong men' however I think many under the surface feel a perception/reality gap so they resort to working harder and spending more money on women to impress and demonstrate their masculine prowess. The poor guys really do miss the point.

 

from my point, three cheers to a certain type Japanese women. They are some of the most impressive I have met and felt invigorated in my own personal outlook thanks to them. This may seem corny, but the biggest impact that Japan had on me was having my faith in the wonder of women revived. Not at all what I expected from a land that on the surface is so over populated with LV bag clutching, vacant gazed, subservient, money loving oxygen converters (see Shibuya for an example of this). I do not blame these types of women though as they are the product of demand... men made them like that and yet again we are fools for converting 90% of our opposite sex into droids that are suitable for sex but entirely unsuitable as life time equals and companions. More the loss for the men of the world I say.

 

db

 

ps - I hope I have not offended any married guys on the forum, in fact the guys from this form that I have met and that are married seem to have sucessfuly found their needle in the haystack and good on you. And good on Davo for having a new baby! You know that outside Japan, Moe will invite the nickname of Verve, dont you

[Ocean11 0]

Just a quick word for Japanese men...

 

I've worked with some cool, clever, insightful Japanese men, and counted others as my best friends. They're not at all self-conscious about being normal people in a somewhat screwed up society in the way that many 'liberated' Japanese women are.

[Davo 1]

I agree with both of you. The spineless guy who can't attract a woman so he flogs off to the latest schoolgirl DVD; the "running dog" who lives at home and can't accept the fact that she needs to lower her standards below Brado Pitto; the vapid slapper whose only asset is her booty and a few overated luxury goods(whose distinctive value has been eliminated by the fact that almost everyone has them);the chauvinist looking in vain for his miso-cooking slave while blowing all his money and worthless spunk on the sex-industry. Stereotypes the lot of them, but stereotypes which have some basis in reality nonetheless.

 

I also know plenty of good guys and girls as described by O11 & db-ultimately they tend to do pretty well for themselves. Quite often the girls will go for a gaijin. As my wife puts it "Japanese men are too conservative".I'm not claiming to be a renneisance man but I think I'm a little further out of the cave than a lot of Japanese guys-it's the culture I was brought up with. It just seems that the Japanese ,to a slightly greater degree than the rest of the world, are having difficulty making it work these days. The old conventions aren't what they used to be and the new reality is what you see.

 

Db I'm actually more worried she'll get a hard time for having a name spelt the same as "Moe", the barman from "The Simpsons".

 

Anyway it ain't all doom and gloom as I'm sure all those of you who have found their "one" here in Japan would agree. Plenty of fine fish in the sea. Those who aren't hooking any need to sharpen their technique, get a more substantial lure, or accept what they can catch. Alternativeley they could stay they could stay single, but if you're living at home in your mid 20s or 30s something isn't quite right. More people should go flatting to help develop social skills beyond thanking Mum for cooking dinner.

[NoFakie 45]

Many of the examples and quotes given in that article seem to contradict the conclusions being made.

 

Men do not come across very well, but they

 

 Quote:

don't want to spend time with their girlfriends, especially shopping,

That sounds like a good reason not to bother with women to me!

 

It's not mentioned explicitly in the article, but I think the main trend in modern life is the rise of individualism, not independence. People get married later because they want to do their own thing and because they are less willing to compromise, which naturally involves losing ones individuality.

 

Old fashioned views of marriage talk about people being "eligible", an relatively objective attribute, as opposed to the modern idea of "The One" which is totally subjective.

[enderzero 0]

It only takes a few weeks back at home before you realize that there are really a whole lot of f*cked up people in Western societies as well as Japanese. (And if you do not like "f*cked up," at least the kind of people that I really have no interest in interacting with) We just grow up with them and get used to them. It seems the most open minded and interesting people are the ones that are open to living in other counrties, thus those I have spent most of my last couple years with (Japanese and non-Japanese alike).

[bobby12 0]

Its interesting how the Imperial Family are kind of setting a precedent for this impotent nation, in that the two brothers in line to take over as Emporer have no male heirs.

 

They should get some young Cockney stud in there to sex up the family and get some long-shanked boys running around the palace gardens. I wonder if a 'halfu' wouold be eligible to take over the throne...

[miteyak 0]

 Quote:

Originally posted by bobby12:

They should get some young Cockney stud in there to sex up the family

But I thought cockneys were renowned for being all mouth no trousers...

On the ignorance front, i'd have to agree with enderzero. A few weeks back home can make many Japanese appear positively progressive in their thinking. Having said that, the more educated sectors of society, at least in England, have a pretty good knowledge of current affairs, and countless TV debates on a range of issues are a refreshing change to CNN et al.
England did seem to have regressed a little, however, people less willing to discuss politics, and more than a hint of xenophobia creeping in...