The land where sex fears to tread
News On Japan via Japan Times -- Jul 01
No love, no sex, no marriage, no kids - such, in glum outline, is Japan today. It's too bleak a picture, it can't be true! But it can't be false either. If it were, people would be marrying, making babies and having love affairs.
Instead, statistics reflecting everything from marriage and childbirth to condom sales and love hotel use are falling or, having fallen to record lows, stagnant. Even many teenagers - more than a third of boys, more than half of girls - find sex a bore and a nuisance, as a Japan Family Planning Association survey found earlier this year. Overseas, they look at Japan and snicker. "No sex please, we're Japanese," quipped USA Today back in 2004. "Only in Japan," it observed, "would a popular weekly news magazine" - Aera, as it happens - "deem it necessary to exhort the nation's youth to abstain from sexual abstinence."
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Jun 19
| UNESCO register adds archive of pre-modern Japan mission to Spain |
|  A collection of materials related to a 17th century mission sent by a Japanese feudal lord to Europe and the world's oldest autographic diary left 10 centuries ago by a Japanese regent have been selected for the UNESCO Memory of the World registry, the Japanese education ministry said Wednesday. (Global Post  ) |
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Jun 19
| Local govts wary of Mt. Fuji 'traffic jam' |
|  Mt. Fuji, the tallest mountain in Japan, will likely see its summer "traffic jam" of climbers worsen this year thanks to its expected addition to the UNESCO World Heritage List. (Yomiuri ) |
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Jun 19
| 'Abenomics' not raising low-end prostitution prices in Tokyo |
|  In May, Akira Ikoma, the editor of a guide to men's entertainment called Ore no Tabi (My Journey), said that "Abenomics" had caused a spike in prices at high-end soapland bathhouses in Tokyo. However, the same editor tells Shukan Post (June 28) that the initiative is not impacting the low-end market in the same way. (Tokyo Reporter ) |
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Jun 18
| Ex-Aum death-row inmates to testify in open court |
|  Tokyo District Court decided on Monday to open planned examinations of three witnesses who are former senior members of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult and now death-row inmates, during an upcoming trial of another former senior Aum member. (Jiji Press ) |
Almost 1,500 people were transported to hospitals by ambulance due to heatstroke last week, up sharply from 942 in the preceding week, the Fire and Disaster Management Agency said Tuesday. (Japan Times 
Police said Tuesday that a mummified body was found earlier this month in a storage cabinet in a restaurant in Morioka, Iwate Prefecture. (Japan Today 
Among about 200,000 traffic signals nationwide, 16 percent are being used beyond the end of the expected lifetime of their electrical systems and some have even toppled over due to age, according to the National Police Agency. (Yomiuri 
A competition has been held near Tokyo to choose the season's best loquats, or biwa fruit, to be presented to the Imperial Household. (NHK 
Police said Monday they have arrested a 64-year-old woman in connection with the murder of her 59-year-old partner in Seki, Gifu Prefecture. (Japan Today 
Tokyo Metropolitan Police on Monday announced the bust of a massage parlor in the Gotanda area of Shinagawa Ward on charges of prostitution. (Tokyo Reporter