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MIDDLE-AGED VIRGINS: JAPAN’S BIG SECRET

Richard Lloyd Parry

OCTOBER 26 2016

EVERYONE HAS AT least one bad date story, but few have the twist in the tale told by Takeshi Yokote. It was 1995 and the 21-year-old Yokote was a student at a prestigious Japanese university. His companion was a young woman from his drama club on whom Yokote was painfully keen. He was nervous in the cinema and tongue-tied over dinner. His date’s boredom and discomfort were obvious, and it was no surprise that he did not see her again. Yokote shrugged it off, returned to his studies (ancient Greek philosophy was his field) and set about looking for another girlfriend.

Then the unexpected happened: nothing at all. There was no doubt that Yokote liked girls and he met plenty of them as a student and, latterly, as a teacher. He had no difficulty forming friendships with women and he was, and remains, a man of above average looks: neat, slim, articulate and gentlemanly. However, that awkward evening 20 years ago was not only the worst date of his life, it was the only one. At the age of 42 he has never touched or kissed, let alone been to bed with, a woman. And in Japan he is one among millions.

A recently published survey by a government institute provides the latest evidence of what has become increasingly clear over several years — the loveless lives led by more and more young Japanese. As it does every five years, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research polled 5,300 single people aged 18 to 34 about their sex lives, past and present, and their romantic aspirations. One of its findings was at first glance encouraging: 86 per cent of men and 89 per cent of women hoped to marry. However, 70 per cent of men and 60 per cent of women in the sample were not in a relationship.

Most striking was the answer to the question about sexual experience. The results showed that 42 per cent of single young men and 44 per cent of single young women were virgins, several percentage points higher than when the question was last posed. The survey has been criticised because it inquired only about heterosexual experience — sexually active gay men and women who took the pollster’s question at face value will have gone down in the data as chaste. Even allowing for this bias, it reveals a population of millions of adults who have no romantic attachments, no sexual experience and whose numbers have been growing for a decade.

“It’s very common,” says Yokote. “In any crowd of people I can see them — the ones who don’t give any thought to what they wear, who look withdrawn, who look down rather than looking you in the eye. There are lots of people like me.”

This is not a collective moral choice, by which young people are consciously “saving themselves” for a future husband or wife. It is more as if an entire generation is losing the knack of intimacy. “As a student I didn’t know what to do to take it to the next stage,” says Yokote. “I didn’t have anyone who could teach or advise me. I still don’t know now.” And apart from the personal loneliness and isolation experienced by Japan’s virgins, they are part of a demographic and economic catastrophe.

Japan is farthest along a path, on which many developed countries also find themselves, towards inundation by the “silver tsunami”. About 1.3 million Japanese died last year, but only a million were born. The total fertility rate, the number of children the average woman will bear in a lifetime, is 1.43, far below the “replacement rate” of 2.1. Old people are living longer and longer but the bill for their pensions and medical bills falls to a shrinking number of taxpayers. If the decline in population continues the Japanese will become extinct in the next century. Long before that happens the country will be bankrupt.

High among the reasons for this crisis is the difficulty of being a Japanese parent. Working mothers are still treated as an aberration; inadequate nursery care and lack of flexibility in the workplace often enforces a choice between career and family; many people, especially women, choose the former. However, there is something more mysterious going on: a growing distaste among the young for relationships.

“The research is consistent,” says Masahiro Yamada, a professor of sociology at Chuo University in Tokyo. “Japanese young people are losing interest in, and a desire for, relationships and sex.”

Yokote’s story goes some way towards illuminating the reasons. He was on the shy side as a boy, but had plenty of friends, girls among them. In his later years at school, the more confident students formed couples, although Yokote’s mild crushes never led anywhere. One thing he remembers distinctly is the poor quality of Japanese sex education, which Yamada cites as one of the causes of the problem. “It invariably emphasises the negative aspects of sex,” he says. “The risks of pregnancy and disease. Sex education in Japan means scaring people off sex.”

After his undergraduate degree, Yokote moved to Tokyo to start a PhD; he packed it in after a few years partly because of the isolation imposed by the scholarly life. As his academic career petered out, he embarked on the life of what the Japanese call a freeter, a casual worker in low-paid, low-status jobs. He earned two million yen a year (then about £12,000), just enough to live on, but with nothing left over.

“I got jobs working at the university: washing dishes, putting out rubbish, fetching and carrying,” he says. “There were girls around me and I badly wanted a relationship, but I felt that I just couldn’t ask them out because of my financial situation. It didn’t seem an odd life — there were lots of people around me doing the same kind of thing.”

Fifteen years earlier, at the peak of Japan’s inflated “bubble economy”, a bright graduate such as Yokote would have been eagerly snapped up by a big Japanese company; now they were cutting recruitment to save the jobs of existing employees.

There are other factors that have given rise to the virgin generation, according to Yamada, among them the ease and availability of internet pornography. The decline of traditional matchmakers, who used to arrange unions between young single people, has also played its part, as has the habit among young Japanese of socialising in groups, making it harder for men and women to break off as couples.

A great deal of the problem, he believes, simply comes down to money — for restaurants, entertainment, presents and the other accoutrements of romance, but also to establish a life of self-respect and independence. Eighty per cent of single Japanese live with their parents; Yamada’s research shows that while salaries among male workers have declined, women’s expectations of income in a potential mate remain unrealistically high.

“The physical aspect of sex is not the problem,” says Shingo Sakatsume, who more than anyone else is tackling Japan’s virginity crisis head on. “Most people, once they get to that point, can work out that for themselves. It’s the social part that is most difficult.” Sakatsume is a social worker and the founder of Virgin Academia, a correspondence course for unwilling celibates. It originated in his specialised work providing counselling on sexual matters to people with disabilities. He quickly recognised that a large number of the able-bodied also needed help.

The year-long course is based on his textbook Virgin Breaker, which attempts to guide its students towards “graduation” from their virginity. Students follow the book, write essays based on its contents and correspond with Sakatsume by email (most are too shy to meet in person). Month by month Sakatsume attempts to build their confidence, encourages them to create opportunities to meet potential mates and guides them through the niceties of online dating. In three years, 40 people aged 20 to 42, all of them men, have taken the £400 course. Only six have successfully graduated. “It’s hard to get past the first step,” Sakatsume admits. “Some of these men get to the end of the year and they still haven’t signed up to a dating site.”

His organisation, White Hands, also organises life classes in which naked models, male and female, pose for an audience of virgins with paints and pencils. The point is to show real human bodies to people whose only experience of them may have been the stylised and aggressive universe of online porn. Yokote went to one and was mesmerised. “Each body was different,” he said. “Each one had such beauty. I had never seen a naked woman before. It gave me the impression of such freshness and such life.”

Inspired by the experience, Yokote has made a conscious effort to seek out more opportunities to meet women, and to open up — with a certain, hesitant success. A friend introduced him to a woman he likes very much; they meet as often as once a week. “I don’t yet have the confidence to say that we are dating,” he says, “but I am very fond of her and I want to see more of her. The first time we met, I told her that I was a virgin. I felt I could be so honest with her and it seemed very natural to talk about it.” How did she respond? “She said, ‘You could practise with me.’”