The Japan Association for Sex Education (JASE), which conducts a national survey on youth sexuality every six years, has released its latest findings, revealing a significant decline in physical intimacy among Japanese youth. Only about one-fifth of Japanese high school boys have had their first kiss, the lowest rate recorded since the organization began its national survey in 1974. Among female high school students, 27.5% report having experienced their first kiss, reflecting a significant drop since 2017 and continuing a downward trend since the mid-2000s.
This decline represents a decrease of 11.1 percentage points among boys and 13.6 percentage points among girls since 2017. These are the lowest figures since 1974, when the organization began measuring high school students' sexual activity every six years, with the most sexually active youth recorded in 2005, when half of high school students had experienced their first kiss.
The latest survey, conducted between August 2023 and March 2024, received 12,562 valid responses from junior high school and university students, including over 12,500 high school students. Participants included 4,621 junior high school students, 4,321 high school students, and 3,614 university students.
Additionally, the survey showed a decrease in sexual intercourse among high school students. The ratio of Japanese high school boys who say they have had sexual intercourse fell by 3.5 percentage points from 2017 to 12%. For Japanese high school girls, the ratio declined by 5.3 percentage points to 14.8%. Meanwhile, solitary sexual habits like masturbation have risen among Japanese youth, with more students reporting that they have masturbated.
The decrease in sexual activity is partly attributed to social restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic, which may have stifled in-person interactions during key developmental years. The Japanese Association for Sex Education partly attributed the downward trend in kissing and intercourse to the Covid-19 pandemic, which triggered school closures and official advice to avoid the "three Cs": confined spaces, crowded places, and close-contact settings.
Yusuke Hayashi, a sociology professor at Musashi University, connects the decline in kissing to the pandemic when schools in Japan closed and people were advised against close contact. "The pandemic restrictions happened at a sensitive time when [they were] beginning to become interested in sexuality," Hayashi said, according to The Guardian. He also told the Mainichi that the greater prevalence of masturbation "may be due to increased exposure to [sexual imagery] in manga and other media, rather than as a substitute for interpersonal sexual behaviour," as reported by The Independent.
Tamaki Kawasaki, a columnist and sociology lecturer, noted that young Japanese are "uniformly disengaging" from sex post-pandemic, reflecting a broader disengagement from physical intimacy among Japanese youth. "It shows that the trend is for people to move away from real, physical sexual activity, even at a time when it's natural for them to be sexually active," Kawasaki wrote in the online edition of President magazine, according to The Guardian. She also wrote, "Instead, there is a stronger tendency for them to stay home and watch sexual content alone. If teens, who represent the country's future, continue like this then it is hard to see any improvement in the declining birthrate."
This development is concerning in Japan, which is facing a demographic crisis, as the disengagement from physical intimacy could potentially impact the country's already low birth rate. Japan has been grappling with a low birth rate for many years, and preliminary government data showed that the number of births in the first half of 2023 dropped to the lowest since 1969. Japan marked 350,074 births between January and June, a 5.7 percent decrease compared to the same period last year, according to the health ministry's preliminary report. This continued the trend of declining births over the past few years. The total number of births in Japan in 2023 is also projected to be the lowest since records began in 1899.
Sources: The Guardian, The Independent, Dagens Nyheter
This article was written in collaboration with generative AI company Alchemiq