Guardian | Ai Aoyama is a sex
and relationship counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey
home on a Tokyo back street. Her first name means "love" in Japanese,
and is a keepsake from her earlier days as a professional dominatrix.
Back then, about 15 years ago, she was Queen Ai, or Queen Love, and she
did "all the usual things" like tying people up and dripping hot wax on
their nipples. Her work today, she says, is far more challenging.
Aoyama, 52, is trying to cure what Japan's media calls sekkusu shinai shokogun, or "celibacy syndrome".
Japan's
under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships.
Millions aren't even dating, and increasing numbers can't be bothered
with sex. For their government, "celibacy syndrome" is part of a looming
national catastrophe. Japan already has one of the world's lowest birth
rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060. Aoyama believes the country is experiencing "a flight from human intimacy" – and it's partly the government's fault.
The
sign outside her building says "Clinic". She greets me in yoga pants
and fluffy animal slippers, cradling a Pekingese dog whom she introduces
as Marilyn Monroe. In her business pamphlet, she offers up the
gloriously random confidence that she visited North Korea in the 1990s
and squeezed the testicles of a top army general. It doesn't say whether
she was invited there specifically for that purpose, but the message to
her clients is clear: she doesn't judge.
Inside, she takes me
upstairs to her "relaxation room" – a bedroom with no furniture except a
double futon. "It will be quiet in here," she says. Aoyama's first task
with most of her clients is encouraging them "to stop apologising for
their own physical existence".
The number of single people has reached a record high. A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30
had never dated at all. (There are no figures for same-sex
relationships.) Although there has long been a pragmatic separation of
love and sex in Japan – a country mostly free of religious morals – sex
fares no better. A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association
(JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or
despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way.
Many people who seek her out, says Aoyama, are deeply confused. "Some
want a partner, some prefer being single, but few relate to normal love
and marriage." However, the pressure to conform to Japan's
anachronistic family model of salaryman husband and stay-at-home wife
remains. "People don't know where to turn. They're coming to me because
they think that, by wanting something different, there's something wrong
with them."
Official alarmism doesn't help. Fewer babies were born here in 2012
than any year on record. (This was also the year, as the number of
elderly people shoots up, that adult incontinence pants outsold baby
nappies in Japan for the first time.) Kunio Kitamura, head of the JFPA,
claims the demographic crisis is so serious that Japan "might
eventually perish into extinction".
Japan's under-40s won't go
forth and multiply out of duty, as postwar generations did. The country
is undergoing major social transition after 20 years of economic
stagnation. It is also battling against the effects on its already
nuclear-destruction-scarred psyche of 2011's earthquake, tsunami and
radioactive meltdown. There is no going back. "Both men and women say to
me they don't see the point of love. They don't believe it can lead
anywhere," says Aoyama. "Relationships have become too hard." Fist tap Dale.
