09 December 2016

Revenge for Pearl Harbor?

Rico's friend Kelley forwards this Yahoo article by Peter Walker of The Independent, with the question: perhaps this is our revenge for Pearl Harbor?


The Japanese sex problem has become so desperate that its young population has given up on dating and is just marrying friends. A government survey found seventy percent of Japanese men and sixty percent of Japanese women do not have a romantic partner. One Japanese aggregator website has been awash with stories of how people have simply married lifelong friends.
The country has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, with just nine children being born per thousand inhabitants over the past five years. Its population of 127 million people is predicted to decrease to 87 million by 2060.
The survey, carried out by the country's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, also reported that about eighty percent of unmarried Japanese want to get married.
In recent weeks, people have posted stories to the aggregator website Matome Naver, telling how in one case a colleague married a friend of ten years.
The trend has been coined Kousai zero Nichikon: roughly translated as "marrying without dating." Japanese actress Maki Horikita married costar Koji Yamamoto in 2015 after just a month of dating. A column in the Joshi Spa magazine last month compared hunting for a marriage partner with suicide.
There is no real evidence that the kousai zero nichikon trend is taking the islands by storm. But it draws parallels with Japan's now mostly defunct omiai arranged-marriage tradition, in which parents suggested partners for their adult children.
After the sexual-partners survey was released earlier this year, columnist and sociologist Maki Fukasawa criticized the media's use of his own term to describe the sex problem: Herbivore men.
Rico says it's just a coincidence that this article came out on 7 December, but he wonders if the use of robots (as in the photo) extends to the bedroom...


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