Nobody’s Having Sex in Japan, and Everyone’s Having Sex in Japan

Japan has more people over sixty-five than under fifteen. Not proportionally—in absolute terms. The country is aging faster than any other nation on earth, and the reason is straightforward: people have stopped having children. Not gradually, not reluctantly—they’ve largely stopped bothering with the kind of relationships that produce children at all.

The economics of it are legible enough. Precarious employment, brutal working hours, apartments the size of closets—you can see why a young person in Tokyo might look at the prospect of a family and decide it’s a bad trade. What’s harder to account for is the cultural layer on top of that: the herbivore men who’ve opted out of romantic pursuit entirely, the women who prefer fiction to flesh, the generational drift toward solitude as a lifestyle rather than a condition.

And underneath all of it, the sex industry keeps expanding. Ryan Duffy went into the darker neighborhoods of Tokyo for a Vice documentary and came back with footage of love hotels, host clubs, schoolgirl cosplay bars, tentacle fetish shops—the full taxonomy of substitute intimacy, most of it controlled by the Yakuza. What’s striking isn’t the kink, which is no stranger than what you’d find anywhere else if you looked closely enough, but the function: this is what a society builds when it decides that real connection is too expensive and too risky, and that a simulation will do.

The simulation is very good. That might be the problem. If the thing Japan constructed to replace sex and love is more convenient than sex and love, you can’t really be surprised when people choose the convenient option. The population clock just keeps ticking.