Hanky panky. Rumpy pumpy. Going all the way. Bonking. Special cuddles. Woohoo time. Sealing the deal. Getting lucky. Fornication. Coitus. Making love.
Pick your synonym; it’s not happening much in Japan.
A recent meta-analysis led by Dr Peter Ueda – a researcher at the University of Tokyo and assistant professor at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute in Sweden – found that the country is in the midst of a sex drought that seems to be getting worse every year.
More than half of adults aged 20–24 say they’re still virgins – that’s 60 per cent of men and 51 per cent of women – compared to just over a third of that age group in 2002, the study found.
Those percentages diminish with age, but by the time Japanese adults reach age 30, more than 1 in 10 have still never had sex.
(At least, they’ve never had heterosexual sex. All these surveys and studies defined ‘sex’ in a straight context.)
What does it matter? Well, less baby-making might mean fewer babies. That’s relevant to those who worry about Japan’s plummeting birth rate.
With a fertility rate of 1.15 – lower than the 2.1 that is considered enough for a stable population – demographers have forecasted that Japan could shrink from a country of 123 million people to 87 million by 2070, if current trends persist.
But not everyone cares about declining populations. For Ueda, these stats are first-and-foremost about human happiness.
“When people are asked what makes them happiest, many respond that intimate relationships are very important,” he says. “If a large proportion of the population are sexually inactive or involuntarily single, this means that many people cannot live their lives as they wish – and that is an important issue.”
So, it’s worth getting to the bottom of this. One problem: the national dry spell is a bit of a mystery, even to the sociologists who study it.
But there are some possible explanations and, together, they might begin to explain why so many Japanese adults have not, ahem, hankied any pankies.
1. Adults are getting married later and less
Japanese adults are not just refraining from sex. They’re also opting out of marriage, at least until later in life.
Government data from the first half of 2025 found that marriage rates fell by 4 per cent – more than the 3.1 per cent drop in births – compared to early 2024.
Combine that with decades worth of data from National Fertility Surveys, and the picture is clear: since the 1980s, young Japanese adults have gradually been staying single for longer.
Those surveys show that, by 2015, around a third of men and women in their early 30s were single.
And that shrinking ‘married’ group has huge implications for the rates of sexual inexperience, explains James Raymo, professor of sociology and East Asian studies at Princeton University, in the US, who is partnered with the University of Tokyo.
“To some degree, the increase in virginity is simply a composition change,” he explains.
“Later and less marriage means that more people are in the ‘not married’ category – and, on average, there are many people in that category who have never had sex.”
2. Financial insecurity as a marital roadblock
If marriage is such an important part of this story, then it begs the question: why are Japanese people getting married later, and less frequently? In part, the answer is money.
Japanese women want to marry financially stable men. That was the finding of a US study based on 11 years of survey data on nearly 9,000 Japanese adults.
The study found that, in 2025, female respondents said they would prefer not to marry rather than compromise on their financial criteria.
At first glance, that may seem shallow – but it makes sense if you consider the wider landscape of Japanese gender politics.
The country still has a considerable gender wage gap.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), women make 22 per cent less money than men. (It’s 16.4 per cent in the US and 13.3 per cent in the UK.)
Raymo explains that women often sacrifice career prospects when they get married, as they’re expected to take on the majority of childcare and housework.
“Bearing in mind women’s education and increasing opportunities, there’s a desire to avoid or postpone enduring a relationship with serious implications for women’s lives,” he says.
“I think that two-career couples certainly have increased a lot over time, but it’s very, very, very hard – relative to what we might see in other countries – to make that happen.”
That’s why the authors of the US study concluded that Japanese women’s preferences for higher-earning men reflected the high stakes of marriage.
In other words, if women are to sacrifice their own earning potential, their husbands must be able to financially provide for their future family.
For men, this financial pressure means those aged 25–39 who are unemployed, in part-time or temporary employment, or on lower incomes are far more likely to have never had sex.
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3. There's not much pressure to couple up
But money isn’t the whole story. Japanese adults are simultaneously faced with little societal pressure to get married.
“In Japan, there seems to be less focus on sexual relationships and sexuality as part of one’s identity or what it means to ‘live your life fully’, compared to in the West,” says Ueda.
“Many individuals respond that they do not have an interest in romantic relationships.”
The 2021 National Fertility Survey found that 1 in 3 unmarried 18- to 34-year-olds say they have no desire to be in a romantic relationship.
That’s a stark contrast to a few decades ago, when Japanese adults were expected to marry young.
“Now the pressure to marry early is not there anymore,” Ueda continues. “The relationships that in previous generations formed out of necessity or due to societal pressure do not form today.”
This, again, is a gendered conversation. Raymo says that, when he first visited Japan in the early 1990s, “there were strong pressures on women to marry, and by extension form relationships that would transition to marriage.”
For instance, he says people would label older unmarried women terms like ‘Christmas cake’ – a derogatory term for ‘spinster’.
“The Japanese eat Christmas cakes on the 25th,” explains Raymo. “The idea of calling a woman a Christmas cake was that she’s valuable up to 25, but after that, nobody would want her. That’s a dead word now.”
The COVID pandemic may have further reduced the stigma of being alone. That was the conclusion of a 2022 study on unmarried adults, which found that women – more than men – associated singlehood with the words ‘positive’, ‘freedom’, ‘ease’ and ‘fun’.
When it came to doing solo activities – called ‘sorokatsu’ in Japanese – women were more likely to describe feeling free, fulfilled and independent, whereas men were more likely than women to choose words like ‘solitude’ and ‘lacking’.
4. Extra-marital sex is risky
So, Japanese adults aren’t getting married as often – but in this day and age, wedding vows don’t have to be the prerequisite for bumping uglies.
What’s going on outside of wedlock? Well, not much. The Ueda meta-analysis concluded that a large proportion of the Japanese population report no interest in sexual relationships whatsoever.
This was the response of 40 per cent of women in their 20s and 30s who participated in the 2020 Japan Sex Survey, as well as 20–30 per cent of men.
Part of the reason for this, says Raymo, is the added risks associated with extra-marital sex in Japan, compared to other countries such as the UK or US.
He explains that “there really is almost zero non-marital childbearing” in Japan, so if couples get pregnant outside of marriage, there’s societal pressure to terminate the pregnancy or get married.
The solution may seem obvious: use contraception. But it’s not as straightforward as that.
“Sex education is, by all accounts, pretty woeful,” says Raymo. “I don’t think that there’s much education around sex, other than for reproductive purposes. Sex is a mystery, and mysteries are scary.”
This lack of education has led to a riskier ‘contraceptive environment’, where very few women use reliable options such as implants, pills and coils.
“The most common contraception, by leaps and bounds, is the condom, and the others are withdrawal and cycle tracking,” says Raymo. “For people who work in my field, this is a bit of a mystery. How can Japan’s fertility rate be so low in that contraceptive environment?
“The answers we can come up with are either that people are fantastically effective users of inefficient contraception, or there’s not a lot of sex. And the answer may be a little bit of both.”
With a heightened threat of pregnancy and poor defences against it, it’s no wonder Japanese young adults may be wary of hooking up.
5. Marriage isn't sexy
If the problem is all about marriage – adults not getting married and not wanting to have sex outside of marriage – then you’d be forgiven for assuming that Japanese married life is sex-central.
Not so fast. Around half the married couples aged 50 or younger in Japan say they never or rarely have sex.
That’s according to a 2023 survey by the Japan Family Planning Association. Out of nearly 800 married respondents, 48.3 per cent said they had sex zero times per month on average.
It’s a percentage that seems to have risen since the early 2000s. For instance, in the 2007 National Survey of Work and Family, only between 7 and 24 per cent of married women under 50 said they were sexually inactive, depending on their age.
Joeun Kim, associate professor of social demography, gender and work at KDI School, on South Korea, points to the interconnectedness between marriage and children.
“In Japan and Korea, people still believe that childbearing should be tied to marriage,” she explains. “So, people get married to have a family and children – and then having a sexual relationship is seen as another thing.”
Raymo agrees. Compared to the UK or US, he says the centering of children in marriage is prevalent in Japan.
“People link sex more closely to reproduction than to pleasure, relatively speaking,” he explains. “Obviously that’s a massive generalisation, but it may be part of the explanation for lower frequency of sex within marriage.
“You get married, you have a kid, and everything is for the kid. You live in a small house, you’re exhausted. Sex is not the top priority.”
It may seem like a sweeping statement, but it’s backed up by research. A study led by Meiji University, in Japan, found that their respondents prioritised sex, fun and passion in short-term relationships – but not in marriages.
Meanwhile, they associated long-term relationships and marriage with trust and stability.
And Japanese wives – saddled with so much extra domestic labour – seem to associate sex with effort. For 22.6 per cent of women in the 2023 Japan Family Planning Survey, sex with their husbands was ‘too much hassle’.
Only 12 per cent of men in the survey agreed, with nearly a quarter (24 per cent) blaming their sexless life on a lack of response from their wives.
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6. Work is exhausting
Exhaustion may play a part, then, in a reluctance to get jiggy with it, but housework is not the only culprit. A large contributor is the Japanese work culture.
“Time is critically important for sexual activity, and it’s well known that a reasonably large proportion of the Japanese labour force works like very few Brits or Americans do,” says Raymo.
Studies can quantify that proportion; according to the Ueda meta-analysis, around 30 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women in Japan work more than 50 hours per week on average.
In fact, 20.8 per cent of women in the Japan Family Planning Survey said they were too tired from work to have sex with their husbands.
Among single people, Kim says this demanding work culture disincentivises young people from prioritising their romantic lives.
“Celibacy in Japan – and also South Korea – is connected to the overworked culture,” she explains. “I did some research that found intention to get married was strongly connected to whether someone was working more than 50 hours per week.
“It doesn’t matter how much money they earn per month; it’s mostly explained by emotional unavailability. Imagine you get home around 9pm and then you have to go on a date! That’s a tiring experience, for most people.”
7. Pollution and low testosterone
Marriage, money, tiredness – these are all social issues. But there’s another potential factor here, which could be lowering the Japanese libido: hormones.
Hormonal dysfunction could help to explain both sexlessness and low birth rate, as increasing numbers of couples seek fertility treatment.
Indeed, more than a fifth of all Japanese married couples have undergone testing or treatment for infertility, according to the 2024 Japanese National Fertility Survey.
Fertility problems and low libido can both be caused by stress. A study led by researchers at Maastricht University, in the Netherlands, found that cortisol – known as the stress hormone – modulates how men respond to sexual stimuli.
After scanning the brains of 25 young men, the scientists discovered that cortisol levels were linked to activity in a region of the brain that decided whether the men moved towards sexual images.
But cortisol is not the only hormone that might be to blame here. A recent study led by the University of Tsukuba, in Japan, found that Japanese men might have low testosterone, potentially due to pollutants in the environment.
When scientists tested 225 young men seeking fertility treatment in Japan, they found that 11 trace elements – such as phosphorous and strontium – were linked to lower testosterone levels and more symptoms of sexual dysfunction.
Other studies have found potential links between sperm health and other chemicals, such as phthalates – used in plastic – and isoflavones, found in foods such as chickpeas and soy.
But the evidence isn’t conclusive yet. An author of both of those studies, Dr Shoko Konishi – associate professor of biodemography at the University of Tokyo – says more research is needed.
“Humans are exposed to hundreds of thousands of different chemicals in the environment, and some may potentially have adverse effects on sexual or reproductive function,” she says.
“We will need to wait for further technological advances to clarify the potential effects of combined exposure to multiple toxins on human sexuality and reproduction.”
All of the above – or none
There are a whole range of potential factors that might be contributing to the coital desertification of Japan – and there are plenty of unknowns.
For instance, there is precious little evidence about non-heterosexual activity. Raymo says: “Data about sexual and gender-orientation minorities is both socially hidden and scientifically hidden.”
And much of the evidence that we do have remains up for debate, particularly because a great deal of it is based on surveys and questionnaires.
“I am not sure if we currently have sufficient evidence to conclude that there is so much sexual inactivity in Japan,” says Konishi.
“Previous studies have several limitations, including low response rates, small sample sizes within each age and sex group, a lack of representative samples, and unclear definitions of key outcomes.”
But for Raymo, the answer is likely to be a combination of all of the above.
“I think it’s natural to want to look for neat and sexy conclusions,” he says. “But in a lot of cases, the answer is a little bit of everything – and often a lot less interesting, and a lot more mundane, than what we might be tempted to assume.”
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