Why are Japanese losing interest in sex? A quarter of young adults have no experience

Researchers said ‘lack of sexual experience may be involuntary’, citing unstable job and income conditions among men

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Published: 2:38pm, 8 Apr 2019Updated: 7:49pm, 8 Apr 2019

About a quarter of people aged 18 to 39 in Japan were estimated to have had no experience of heterosexual intercourse as of 2015, a team of Japanese and Swedish researchers said on Monday.

The findings, published in British medical journal BMC Public Health, said the percentage of people with no such experience rose from 20.0 per cent in 1992 to 25.8 per cent in 2015 among men, and from 21.7 per cent to 24.6 per cent among women, based on data from a fertility survey conducted by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

The researchers, from the University of Tokyo and Karolinska Institute, said the young people’s “lack of sexual experience may be involuntary”, citing unstable job and income conditions among men as potential reasons behind the trend.

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The team found around 80 per cent of women and men aged 25 to 39 who reported no experience of sex in a study said they wished to get married at some point in their life. The study only covered heterosexual experience, so there was no data on same-sex experience, it said.

“Further research is needed on the factors contributing to and the potential public health and demographic implications of the high proportion of the Japanese population that remains sexually inexperienced well into adult age,” the team said.

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Japan’s total fertility rate stood at 1.43 in 2017, among the lowest in the world, and the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research predicted the Japanese population will fall to 88 million in 2065 from the current 126 million.

The proportion grew smaller with age, but among people aged 35 to 39, 9.5 per cent of men and 8.9 per cent of women had no experience, nearly doubling from 1992.