Month: April 2007

Sex

Sex in Japan – Part3

Let’s finish the articles about Sex in Japan:

Some more data from Anan . Remember that data is from girls between 20 and 50 years old.

More info about how to give pleasure to your boyfriend.

Where do you practice sex?
31% – Love hotels.
35% – At home.
30% – My partner’s home.
3% – Hotels.
1% – Other.

Ar you satisfied with your sexual life?
41% – Is not bad.
31% – It’s OK.
10% – I’m satisfied.
5%- I’m not satisfied.
12% – I’m very satisfied.
1% – Others.

Now some sections with questions, very similar to those that we can find in any western magazine. I just translate the titles so you can get a sense of what are they worried about.

Being sexless is bad for your health?

Is it rare that you want to practice sex everyday?

Is it necessary to talk while having sex? (Typical question from everywhere in the world!)

Do men dislike girls that do not practice fellatio.

But let’s go back to the first chart I showed at Sex in Japan – Part 1, so we can continue discussing the reasons why Japanese are always the last in sexual rankings.

The first to reasons were: they see their partner more as a family member than a sexual partner and they are pretty fond of affairs. Another big reason is that Japanese are very very humble people, they never exaggerate what they say and they even reduce the importance of their merits. Western people as me like to exaggerate data, “Hey guys! yesterday a saw a chocolate cake in a bakery that it was at least two meters long!” when a Japanese would say “By the way, yesterday I saw a cake that was pretty big and looked like kind of delicious”. For sex questions is the same, if a French guy fucks 100 times a year maybe he will say 125, but a Japanese would say 75. Some people exaggerate, some people just do the other way.

Some other reasons are: Japanese women starting to join the labor force, stress in general all around Japan and mainly in big city, they consider sex as a routine and they sometimes they feel that is just annoying, Bayer survey says that even nowadays 10% of the people thinks that sex is just important for making kids.

I think I talked about many of the main reasons, showed data, charts and surveys that should help you to create your own opinion about Sex in Japan. If you are not tired you can continue reading: Timesonline article, a book about the sexless phenomenon and great article at Stippy.com.

Society

Crows in Tokyo

One of the things I really hate about Tokyo are crows. Yes! Noisy and annoying crows that are all over Tokyo metropolitan area. They wake you up Saturday morning at five in the morning when they start cawing, they bother you while you walk to your work because they are always trying to catch food from the garbage and they are ugly-big-scary. I guess I’m not the only one who doesn’t like them. Crow population in Tokyo was 7.000 in 1985 and now is around 40.000, the number of people complaining is increasing, and you can count the number of people being attacked by crows by thousands.

Tokyo’s governor Shintaro Ishihara, a pretty radical guy, is doing at least one good thing, he is trying to stop these annoying birds. Tokyo’s government created a “special commando” whose only purpose is “crow extermination”. This commando is starting to destroy nests and kill crows all around Tokyo. I didn’t really notice any difference yet but let’s be patient.

Tokyo Crow
The only “good” thing is that you can take crow pictures pretty easily even without zoom.

Another measure they adopted is to give 50.000 blue nets for free so Tokyo’s citizens cover their garbage bags when they put them outside their homes in the morning, it happens that in Tokyo they don’t use garbage dumpsters or any other type of “recipient” that could hide it from the crows. It’s pretty easy for the crows to eat in a city like Tokyo.

Society

Underage drinking

I saw this add walking around Shibuya.

It says: “It’s the season of congratulations for your entrance to the University, but please refrain from drinking beer till you are 20”. It seems that Japanese like to start drinking alcohol when they start university when they are 18 even though it is not permitted to drink till 20. It’s a big problem that is even worse in Japan because their body doesn’t really tolerate big amounts of alcohol. They lack an enzyme called low-Km aldehyde dehydrogenase isoenzima that makes them to become drunk faster than other people

The previous ad is a campaign that wants to stop underage drinkers, they even have a website called stop-underagedrinking.com. The interesting point is that in the add they make special emphasizes in the word “beer” (ビール), and if you look more carefully the campaign is sponsored by many Japanese beer brewery companies. Suspicious, interesting, smart? If you were the president of a beer company would you pay to make a similar campaign against drinking? Do they want to clean their image?