Celibacy syndrome: Why Japan's 20-somethings have stopped having sex - and prefer virtual girlfriends to the real thing
By Ruth Styles12:33 24 Oct 2013, updated 12:33 24 Oct 2013
- Only 27 per cent of Japanese couples have sex at least once a week
- Some 'otaku' (geek) men choose to have virtual girlfriends instead
- Subject of BBC documentary called No Sex Please, We're Japanese
Forget the provocative likes of Rihanna and Miley Cyrus; in Japan, the look that both men and women aspire to is cute, wholesome and resolutely virginal.
Japanese culture, in particular popular cartoons such as Manga and Hello Kitty, has an innocent mien while the cult of the computer game loving geek, the otaru, is burgeoning.
But Japan's obsession with all things cute has come at a price. Not only are people having less sex, the country's birthrate has declined so much the Japanese population is expected to drop by a third within the next 50 years.
No sex please, we're Japanese: Many young people from Japan are choosing not to have sex
In Tokyo, a city of 35 million people, just 250,000 babies are born each year - a shockingly low figure when compared to London's rate of 135,000 children born to a population of just eight million.
So what's going on? It's a question that film maker Anita Rani attempts to answer in new BBC documentary, No Sex Please, We're Japanese.