And reinforced by peers and popular culture. Sex is fun, but this idea that one must be doing it is a cultural trait, not necessary except for species propagation. That is easily accomplished w/o all the fixation and obsession.

And facing nuke catastrophes is a downer.

Bummer!

I kind of feel that way about relationships myself. But I'm old.

I could totally relate to this article.

I can't think of any time it's ever happened. It's hard for me to imagine, considering how sex-obsessed this country is. The only thing I can think of is that they're environment must be unusual in some way. Japan seems rather crowded, especially Tokyo; could living in a crowded environment pull some sort of societal trigger?

the birth rate declined during the great depression and WWI also.

The young men are overseas and aren't able to have sex with their partners. I didn't know about the Depression, though. It seems like it would have increased since people weren't working as much and would have a lot of time on their hands. I suppose a lot more than the economy was depressed. That's what the situation in Japan sounds like: they have a country full of people who are depressed.

and today not work is no safety net. Folks in the depression worked (if nothing more standing in a soup line is work). They also did more things that folks today would not consider doing for a meal. When an agrarian society is functioning, then more children means more labor. When you can't get anything for your crops, when you have been displaced by the dust bowl or bankers those mouths become liabilities. Finally many men separated from their families as a condition of their work (WPA, CCC etc). Even Roosevelt viewed relief without giving back as the least attractive choice. While we still have day labor our immigration, tax, and social security laws make such hiring risky.

Even people who kept their jobs during the Depression were terrified they could lose them and be homeless overnight. It stayed low during wartime for the reason you cited.

When the war ended, the Baby Boom started. It wasn't that women were having more babies, it was the combination of cohorts of women who had entered their prime childbearing years during the Depression and war all having their children along with women who were just entering their prime childbearing years.

The Japanese economy has been in the doldrums for decades. They fell into a liquidity trap and were never able to get themselves out of it.

It remains to be seen whether or not the US manages.

Why?

paragraph probably explains it pretty well, I think.

A sense of hopelessness, maybe.


Relationships ARE difficult. They're even more difficult when they're complicated by sex, which is, IMO, way overrated as a form of "entertainment".

I never really understood the obsession with it.

When boys get to a certain age, that's all they talk about, and it gets to be all they think about. They talk about who's the hottest and how they can get in her pants. Even the boys who aren't so much into sex are forced to listen to all of the talk, and they can't help but be influenced by it. It's easy to see how obsessions begin with some people.

it probably has a lot to do with hormones as well.

The difference between 8 year olds thinking the opposite sex has cooties and 13 year olds noticing that the cooties have magically disappeared...



Maybe I was cheated in that area...

I love being celibate...

1.
The article mentioned the change in economics, with men no longer being the archetypical, uncontested breadwinner and women advancing.
This made me think of a Manga (not the smutty kind) where a japanese teenage girl explained to an european teenage girl that japanese guys don't like european girls because they can't handle strong women emotionally. They prefer weak girls.

2.
A few weeks ago I read an article about the rise of sexual deviance among Japan's young men. It put much of the blame on the stiff japanese culture: It's about respect and politeness. If an inexperienced young japanese man gets shot down by a woman, he won't shrug it off, take a drink and move on to the next. He will retreat, so as not to bother women who are clearly not interested in him.
Put simple: He got burned once and he gave up forever.

Could this be a natural "depopulation" solution?
Interesting....

Almost an unconscious reaction. It's an island that has to import a lot of resources, with a population that doesn't have anywhere to move to.

It's also a developed country, so they have more options. That technological development causes people to actually need other people less, for a whole host of things, sex being one.

I'm by no means an expert on Japan. But here's the stuff I've been told by people who are far more interested in their culture.

First, virtually no immigration. They're a very isolationist culture, so they are not accepting of immigrants socially. Which translates into difficulties doing it legally. As a result, they can't just "import people".

Second, lifetime jobs - young people can job hop a few times, but they're expected to have settled in to one company by about 25, and work for that same company for the rest of their lives. Why's this a problem? Well, #3.

Third, extremely strict gender roles. All Japanese women are expected to quit their jobs and raise a family once they get married. There is basically no "daycare" in Japan. And no Japanese men are expected to be "househusbands". This creates a problem with #2: if a woman gets married, the company stops bothering to promote her or otherwise advance her career - she's just gonna quit anyway. She's going to run into this even if her husband is going to stay home and raise the kids, because men aren't supposed to do that. And she can't switch to a different employer - it's very taboo to change employers unless you're fresh out of school.

As a result, there's a whole lot of people in Japan who don't want to get married and have kids - Think of it as you being forced back into 1950. And because of #1, they can't make up for this with immigrants, both to bring in raw numbers and to start tweaking their culture.

It's not going to be an easy problem for them to solve. It's going to require blunt instruments that will be very unpopular (X% of executives must be women, for example).

She's American, he's from Japan.. they live with his parents in the family house in the Nagoya area.. she opened her own English school, and is the sole bread-winner, while he stays home and "handles the business side" of the school (as well as handling as much of the home duties as he can).. both of his parents are retired, and his college-aged sister also lives there, so I don't really know just how much housework is laid on him, but I know he doesn't work outside the home.

When we're talking about 16- to 24-year-olds, these would be mostly high school and college aged people. How much pressure is on these people to achieve and compete? Do they simply have less time and energy left for anything outside of schoolwork?

All kidding aside, I keep wondering if it has to do with their diet in some way.
Have certain chemicals in the Japanese food increased...I know their seafood intake is huge ??
Just throwing that out there..?

is what got me. Everything has gotten so disposable, easy and instant. If it doesn't go swimmingly from the start, people are quick to say fuck it, I'm moving on. A lot of people seem to be living their lives behind gadget screens rather than face to face.

The fall-out from Fukushima figures in there somewhere.

"Well, the first, second, third episode was just wonderful and exciting and meaningful !!...I mean, just the joy of my life...then I watched the fourth episode and it was just OK.....so I swore I'd never watch the damn series EVER again."

PS ..and I don't want to talk about it !

I mean they have always been too difficult. But now young people are beginning to realize that they don't have to chose living in a relationship as a life style.

They can chose not to live in a relationship. And still be acceptable and have a good life.

I think that more and more modern women and probably modern men, too, are realizing that it's OK for people who want to live that way to go that route. But it's just as OK for people to live their own lives at their own speed.

The rest of the world could take a lesson.

Some places really need to cool it with all the breeding.

not much hope for govts or people to change their ways, it sure doesn't make a lot of sense to bring more children into this mess.

Overall world population to habitable land isn't really that high, it's just that 1) most of those people are crammed into a few slivers of land and 2) many of them consume enough resources to sustain seven or eight people.

Japan is fine. This article is just another example of the meme of japan somehow being sexually "weird" (i.e., different from Anglocentric puritan standards of hating sex but loving babies)

Politicians and economists see this as a crisis. We see it as a "good beginning".

Japan is, as usual, in the forefront of the shift but the birth rate in Germany is very low, the lowest in Europe. Germany is the #2 top exporting country in the world, and the most productive workforce (output per person). Japan has a similar dynamic.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-land-without-children-why-won-t-germans-have-more-babies-a-779741.html

The US hit another new low last year, down by half from the birthrate in 1909. And in Greece they are blaming declines on austerity

http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/06/news/economy/birth-rate-low/

It is hard to read some of these articles without thinking about "Idiocracy", a crude satirical film filled with haunting pieces of truth:

With pre-marital sex, contraception, in-vitro fertilization, and single parenthood, there is no reason to connect them.

Childbearing is probably low in developed countries because children are an extremely expensive financial burden. $250,000 to $500,000 per child.

I think that one of the main reasons for the lowering birthrate is the high cost of raising kids. For example, it is estimated that it costs roughly $150,000 to raise one child to adulthood (which is 20 years in Japan), and that's not including college expenses. Also, in the past kids were expected to take care of aging parents, but that bit of culture also seems to be disappearing, so that reduces the incentive to have kids for some people. I don't think it has much if anything to do with Fukushima and a poor economy, since Japan experienced large population growth while it was still a relatively poor country, and this trend has been a source of hand-wringing since long before Fukushima.

Also, when you consider that Japan already has 4X the population of California living in essentially the same land area, and a higher population density than China, then what's the point of adding more people?

By the way, the population of Japan had actually been increasing or at least remaining stable until just a couple of years ago, with foreigners accounting for increases.

I've been there, and Honshu is the most ridiculously overpopulated place I've ever been.

Japan could easily shed 1/3 of its population.

It's all about the expense of raising children IMO.

Maybe not procreating, but not having sex? Mmhmmm...I don't believe it.

my new OP

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023900767

Ryan Duffy has an interesting look on his face! Nothing like a little BDSM in the morning to go with your coffee!

Thanks for the information.

oh, okay, I see.

By the time the kids become teenagers, they typically see their parents living in the same house but essentially leading separate lives. Dad goes off to work in the morning, comes back late at night. Mom sometimes gets an outside job, and this looks like an increasing trend. However, if Mom has no job, she might spend her days with "the girls", playing tennis or going shopping together, as well as doing household chores and running errands.

Mom and Dad typically do not sleep in the same bed, and oftentimes, not even in the same room. Dad forks over most of his income to Mom (sometimes his salary is even direct-deposited into Mom's account), and typically has little in his own bank account to show for the work he does. So, Son looks at this arrangement, and then sees all the young women in the outside world who act like they're married to their smart phones, and thinks, "What's the point of getting married?"

Everything about life in Japan is overwhelming and physically and emotionally draining. People who become hardened and withdrawn just by suffering day to day life aren't going to have much of a sex drive or social inclination.

a subclass once they've seen how their friends live in the US.

Plus the guys are in love with video games.

This is people just becoming dead inside as a coping mechanism.

This is happening in the US

especially in the cities combined with an economy that has been stagnant for decades. Young people don't seem to think there's anything ahead of them beyond trying to carve out a small niche and keep themselves alive in it for however much time they have before radiation kills them.

That's just a guess, of course.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Know what's bad? Worrying constantly about shit.

With a little weirdness mixed in: