Why Japan Counts Sexlessness, and What the Count Hides

The headline arrives on schedule, the way cherry-blossom forecasts do. A survey has found that roughly half of married couples in Japan have not had sex in the past month. Television panels frown over it. A magazine runs a checklist. A foreign newspaper, always the same three, files a piece about a nation that has stopped touching, with a photograph of a crowded train. Two years later the number is a point higher and the ritual repeats.

Nobody asks the obvious question, which is why the number exists at all. Most countries do not measure this. They measure sexual frequency in general population surveys, occasionally, and nobody makes a category out of the result. Japan has a clinical definition, a named condition, a survey series devoted to it and a public vocabulary in which a marriage can be sexless the way a person can be diabetic. That is unusual, and unusual things have histories.

This essay is about the count: who built it, what it was built to see, and what it cannot see. Its claim is that the sexless statistic is a real measurement of a real absence, and that almost everything interesting about desire in Japan lives in what the measurement was never designed to capture. The number is honest. It is also a very small window, and the window was cut to a particular purpose.

The apparatus has a birthday. In 1994 the Japan Society of Sexual Science gave セックスレス a clinical definition: no sexual contact between a couple for a month or more, without special circumstances, with the expectation that the situation will continue. The definition was attached to the psychiatrist Abe Teruo and was, at the time, a consulting-room convenience. It let a doctor name what a patient was describing.

The counting came later, and it came from a different institution with a different purpose. The Japan Family Planning Association, whose remit is reproductive health, began asking married people about sexual frequency in a periodic survey of attitudes and behaviour, and the sexless line became its most reported finding. The national fertility survey run by the population institute asks its own questions of married couples. The frame in both cases is not pleasure and not intimacy. It is reproduction. Japan started counting sex inside marriage at the moment its birth rate became a national emergency, and the count has always been, underneath the magazine covers, a proxy for babies.

Classification: the definition is a published clinical criterion; the surveys are association and government instruments, self-reported, sample-dependent, and consistent enough across waves to describe a trend. What they support: that the absence of sex within marriage is common enough to be ordinary, and rising. What they do not support: any claim about why, about desire, about satisfaction, or about anyone outside a marriage. The count was built by people worried about fertility, and it sees what fertility needs to see: whether married people are having intercourse. It was never built to see whether anyone wanted to.

The Naked Director, the Netflix series from 2019 and 2021, is set in the same country in the same decades in which the count was being invented, and it is about the opposite fact.

The orientation a viewer needs: the series dramatises the life of Muranishi Tōru, played by Yamada Takayuki, who in the 1980s went from selling English-conversation courses door to door to becoming the most notorious director in the Japanese adult-video industry as it was born. It follows the industry’s explosion, the police, the yakuza, the censorship regime and the mosaic it produced, and the rise of Kuroki Kaoru, the performer whose frankness made her a television personality. The tone is loud, comic and often grotesque; the series is not an accurate history and does not claim to be, and its treatment of the women in it is itself worth arguing about. The spoiler boundary for this essay is the end of the first season.

What the series makes visible, underneath its noise, is scale. In the years when the sexless count was being designed to measure the absence of sex in marriage, the same society was building one of the largest commercial sexual economies on earth: adult video, then the entire apparatus of the 風俗 industry, legal, licensed, advertised, and used by a large share of the men whose marriages the survey would later count as sexless. Classification: a fictionalised biography; it establishes nothing statistically, and the industry’s real size is a matter of estimate rather than measurement. What it supports is a juxtaposition the count cannot make: the same men appear in two ledgers, and the survey reads only one.

The point is not that the commercial economy causes the marital absence, though it is one of the places the absence goes. The point is that a country which counts sexlessness in marriage while not counting, in the same breath, where desire has been redirected, has built a measure that describes a symptom in one room and leaves the other room dark. The sexless number and the industry are two halves of one ledger, and only one half is ever published.

The count also presumes a norm, and the norm is younger than it looks. Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art, the catalogue of the British Museum’s 2013 exhibition, edited by Timothy Clark, Andrew Gerstle, Ishigami Aki and Yano Akiko, is the most thorough recent account of what came before.

The book’s architecture: some four hundred pages on the erotic prints and painted scrolls of the Edo period, the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, made by the same artists who made everything else, Utamaro, Hokusai, Kuniyoshi. The central argument is that shunga were not a marginal pornography but a mainstream genre: produced in enormous quantities, owned across classes, given to brides in trousseaux, kept by women as well as men, comic as often as arousing, with a whole sub-genre of laughing pictures, 笑い絵, whose point was to be funny about sex. The book documents how the Meiji state, importing European notions of obscenity in the 1870s along with railways and a penal code, suppressed the genre, and how the suppression was so thorough that by the twentieth century Japan had largely forgotten it had ever been frank.

Classification: an academic exhibition catalogue by specialist scholars; it establishes the art-historical record and the fact of suppression. What it does not establish is that Edo Japan was a sexual paradise, and the book is careful to say so: the prints were made inside a licensed pleasure-quarter economy that was brutal to many of the women in it, and the frankness of the pictures is not evidence of happy marriages.

What the catalogue supports here is narrower and more useful. The silence that the sexless count measures is not an ancient Japanese trait. It is a modern construction, about a hundred and fifty years old, imposed by a state that wanted to look respectable to Europe and then internalised so completely that the survey can treat the absence of marital sex as a natural fact to be measured, rather than as the product of a history that could be told. The count measures a norm without knowing where the norm came from.

Set the history aside and look at the instrument itself. The survey asks whether married people had sexual contact in the past month. It does not ask whether they wanted to, whether they wanted to with each other, whether they touch, whether they are content, or whether the absence is a loss to either of them.

This Journal has written elsewhere that the same category covers at least six different marriages, from the quietly content to the contemptuous. The count adds them all together. A couple who have stopped having sex and are relieved and a couple who have stopped and are grieving sit in the same column, and the headline treats the column as a single national wound.

Above all the count does not see women’s desire, because it was not built to. A fertility survey needs to know whether intercourse occurs; it has no reason to ask whether a wife wanted anything. So the most widely reported statistic about sex in Japan is one in which the wanting of half the population is structurally invisible. A woman reading the headline is being told how many marriages have stopped. She is not being asked what she wants, and the survey that produced the number never will.

The count measures an absence and invites an explanation, and the explanations offered on the television panel are always about attitudes: the Japanese are shy, or tired, or have lost interest. The structural facts are more specific and less flattering to the country, and this Journal has set them out before, so they can be brief here.

The government’s time-use survey records one of the widest unpaid-care imbalances in the developed world. Working hours are long and the suburban commute adds two hours to the day. Children sleep between their parents for years, and separate bedrooms for spouses are ordinary. A couple moves from lovers to co-sleepers to occupants of different rooms without any decision being made, and the survey then records the outcome as sexlessness. Classification: official statistics for time use, cultural observation for sleeping arrangements; they describe a national pattern, not any one marriage.

What the count hides here is that the absence is often the honest expression of a household that has no hour left, and that a wife with no desire at ten at night is not a data point about Japanese reticence. She is a data point about a schedule. The number is accurate. The story told about the number is usually wrong.

The Japanese number travels, and it travels badly.

Because Japan asks the question in a specific way and other countries mostly do not, the comparison that the foreign press makes, Japan against the world, is a comparison between a measurement and an absence of measurement. Multinational surveys of sexual frequency exist, mostly commissioned by manufacturers of condoms and lubricants, and they are self-selected, differently worded and not comparable to the association’s married-couples question. Classification: commercial surveys, unreliable for cross-national comparison; what they support is only that the comparison is not being made on like terms.

The result is a stereotype with a statistic attached. Sexless Japan becomes a story told abroad about a whole people, in which the count is evidence and the crowded train is the illustration, and the story is then sold back to Japan as a diagnosis. For a foreign woman living here, the stereotype arrives in her own relationships: a Japanese partner assumed to be indifferent, or herself assumed to be the exception, both by category rather than by fact. For a Japanese woman abroad, or with a foreign partner, it arrives as a question she is expected to answer for her whole country. The count was built to inform a fertility policy. It has ended up as a national character reference, and it is not a fair one.

If the instrument is the problem, it is worth saying what a better one would look like, not because a magazine will build it but because a woman can ask its questions of herself.

It would ask about desire, separately from acts: do you want sex, and with whom, and has that changed. It would ask about touch, which the current count treats as invisible: are you held, do you hold, has that stopped too. It would ask about wanting to be wanted, which is a need independent of any act. It would ask about satisfaction and about grief: is the absence a loss to you, a relief, or neither. And it would ask people who are not married, who are most of the adults under forty and who are outside the count entirely.

A count like that would produce a smaller headline and a truer one. It would also, almost certainly, show that the interesting number is not how many marriages have gone quiet but how many people, inside and outside them, have stopped being asked what they want.

An honest essay gives the count its defence, and the defence is real.

Counting is a form of care. Before the definition and the surveys, the absence of sex in marriage was a private shame with no name and no scale. The number told women that what had happened in their bedrooms had happened in half the bedrooms in the country, and that fact alone released many of them from the belief that the fault was theirs. A measure that is narrow is still a measure, and this one made something visible that had been invisible for a century.

The demographic worry is also not a pretext. Japan’s fertility has fallen to levels that threaten the shape of the society, and a state that wants to know whether married people are having intercourse is not being prurient. It is asking a question it has a duty to ask. The essay’s objection is not to the question but to the way its answer has been allowed to stand in for everything else.

And the history should not be romanticised. The Edo frankness the catalogue documents sat on top of a licensed sex trade that consumed women, and the commercial economy of the Naked Director years was built on many of the same terms. A country that once looked at sex openly was not therefore a country in which women were free, and an essay that used shunga to make the present look prudish would be telling a flattering half-story of its own.

Moonlight’s position, stated after the count has had its defence, is that the questions the survey never asks are the ones an evening should begin with.

The Experiences start with a written map of what a woman wants, might want and does not want, in her own words, before anything is arranged. That is, in effect, the better count applied to one person: desire separately from acts, touch separately from sex, wanting-to-be-wanted as its own line. Whether she is married, whether her marriage would fall inside or outside the association’s column, is not asked, because it is not the point.

The objection Moonlight must make against itself is that a service for women in Japan benefits from the count. The sexless headline names a market, and a business that offers touch and attention to women whose marriages have gone quiet has an interest in the number staying high and being believed. We accept that the interest exists. What we can say is that nothing here depends on the count being true of any particular woman: the map asks her, rather than the survey telling her, and if her answer is that she wants nothing the survey would recognise, that is a complete answer and the evening is built from it.

The number will come round again, a point higher, with the same photograph of the same train. It will be accurate. Roughly half of married couples will not have had sex in the previous month, and a great many of them will be exactly as content or as bereft as they were the year before.

What the headline will not say is that the count was built to see babies and not wanting; that it reads one room and leaves the room where desire went in the dark; that the silence it measures is a hundred and fifty years old and was imposed, not inherited; and that the wanting of every woman in the column was never asked.

She can ask it herself. The survey has no line for the answer. She does.