Japanese people still aren't having sex. And nobody knows why

A review of 43 surveys from 1974-2024 finds young adults in Japan are increasingly sexually inexperienced and inactive: about half reach their mid-twenties without sexual experience and roughly 10% reach their 30s before having sex. Online surveys indicate around half of adults aged 20-49 had no sex in the past year, and rates of inexperience rose since 2000 - from about one in three 20-24-year-olds in 2002 to as much as 60% of men and 51% of women in the 2020s. The review also documents growing sexlessness within marriage, widespread use of pornography and sex work (some surveys from 2008-2024 report up to 60% of men had paid for sex), and very low reported non-heterosexual identification.

Authors suggest multiple explanations: a sizable minority say they don’t want sex (20-30% of men and ~40% of women aged 20-39), reluctance to invest time and money in non-marital dating, heavy work hours (about 30% of men and 15% of women work over 50 hours per week), unequal domestic expectations for women, limited sex education and contraceptive use, and cultural acceptance of alternatives such as fictosexuality (14-17% of students reported romantic feelings for fictional characters). An external sexual-health clinician argues social and economic pressures - work culture, job insecurity, shifting gender roles and a focus on stability - likely drive the trend but cautions that diverse survey methods and definitions of sexual activity complicate interpretation.