Sex, Marriage and the Modern Japanese (and Korean) Woman

And here is the second of the links I planned to discuss, from my favourite Japanese blog, PingMag. In its own words, this is what that post is about:

While Japan has an enormous sex-related industry, married couples don’t seem to do it that often (According to a Durex Survey, Japan ranks last internationally in terms of sexual activity.) And this would be the case in many modern societies as well. So for the last two years, author Sumie Kawakami gathered interviews of various Japanese women to depict this one aspect of society: Her latest book, Goodbye Madame Butterfly: Sex, Marriage and the Modern Japanese Woman by the superb Chin Music Press portrays eleven sex lives in painstaking detail. Today PingMag talks to Sumie about the heart of relationships. (Photo by 6uÿ)

Personally, I can’t think of too many ”modern societies” with sexless married couples and huge sex industries outside of Northeast Asia myself. On top of that, this is yet another case where all the “Japan”s could be replaced with “Korea”s in the original link and be equally valid, which is why I devote so much attention to the subject here. On this occasion though, I won’t be copying and pasting the entire original interview sorry: partially because the site AsianOffBeat already has, and the blogosphere doesn’t need a third copy, and partially because by this stage of blogging I’m beginning to have entire posts of my own copied and pasted into other blogs(!), and now I realize how frustrating it can be.

An Interview with Sumi Kawakami

On the plus side though, being selective about what to copy and paste means that the three questions and answers below are at least something that I can add to. They’re only a very small part of the interview though, so after reading them, I naturally recommend that you read the whole thing for more, which would probably only take an extra 5 minutes. You may also want to check out a recent survey about what Japanese people worry about when they get married after that too, but I wouldn’t give it much credence myself, for the same reasons I rubbished a similar-sized Korean survey in my last post (Photo right by thiagoleon).

Let’s get to the point: Why do you think Japanese married couples aren’t having much sex?

I’d like to refer you to statistics: Pharmaceutical company Bayer AG conducted an online survey in 2006, which found that 38.8 percent of couples questioned didn’t have sex in the past year. Sexlessness had little to do with age – 47 percent of those in their 30s, 46 percent of those in their 40s and 50 percent of those in their 50s said they were sexless.

Please explain.

In my interviews of women, I’ve talked to many who said that sex with their husbands was too much work. For one thing, their husbands came home very late from work but had to get up early the next morning, so sex was the last thing on their minds. I didn’t mention this in the book, but in the process of reporting for this book, I’ve also talked to men who claimed they were sexless: One guy was in his early 20s. He told me that he often comes home from work early in the morning and by the time he gets ready to go to bed, his wife wakes up to go to work. Sex is out of the question here. They’re not having affairs either. He said, “I could go home earlier if I wanted to, but going out for drinks after work is part of my job. I feel bad for my wife, but for now, work is my priority – not being at home.” Weekends are so busy with shopping and other events that sex never enters the picture. Making time just for sex in a very busy schedule feels awkward. It’s not that he lacks drive – it’s just easier taking care of business on his own when his wife’s not around.

While that example is an extreme case, this couple has been married for only a few years. If the relationship continues in that way, what awaits them in ten or twenty years? Long working hours and the fact that men are tied to evening social obligations long after they’ve left the company are impediments to a healthy sex life. They’re all tired, men included. These days, women continue to work after they’ve had babies. On weekdays, sex is the furthest thing from their minds as they focus on work and raising their children. I think these are common issues for most families.

(Photo by sqis)

I don’t know enough about Japanese people or that survey to comment on either, but I do know that similar statistics would be notoriously unreliable for Koreans: to put it mildly, most lack the matter-of-factness that I hear that Japanese people have on the subject of sex, nor have the relative openness about it that most Westerners possess (at least amongst friends), to the extent that many 30 year-old Koreans may not even know if their best friend is a virgin or not (lest that sound like an exaggeration,  it’s my Korean wife and friends that have told me this). Moreover, as long-time readers of the blog will know, it isn’t because Koreans are inexperienced sexually either: rather, it’s because to many Koreans…nay, to Korean society as a whole…sex is, well, the elephant in the room. That Korea has one of the biggest sex industries in the world, that love hotels are ubiquitous, and that some Koreans may have sexual urges before marriage…as far as I can tell, most Koreans would prefer to remain in blissful, feigned ignorance of them, and media attention on them must be confined to obscure cable channels in the early hours of the morning.

With that qualification out of the way, I personally think that figures for Koreans would be broadly similar, and I say this based on the numbers of Koreans I know that do not have sex for a long time, if ever, after their first child is born. Of course, I’m very familiar with the difficulties all couples have in returning to a normal sex-life after having a baby, and, seeing as the topic came up, I may as well pull the 8th edition of Our Sexuality (2001) by Karla Baur and Robert Crooks out of my bookcase to remind myself as I type this, for on…let’s see…pp. 361-2 it lists those difficulties and gives advice about how to overcome them (What? You don’t have 3kg, thick academic tomes on human sexuality within ready reach in your own bookcase? You’ve never given one as a birthday present to your spouse or partner?).

And in a nutshell, despite all the physiological, psychological, and practical difficulties the book mentions, the underlying message is that the vast majority of couples want to continue having sex after having children, and almost all do sooner or later. But in Korea, in contrast, they just seem to give up. Indeed, since becoming a full-time housewife over a year ago, my wife has come to know at least 6 other housewives in our apartment complex, and all (eventually) reported that they may have had sex with their husbands once, twice, or even not at all in the year since their first baby was born, sometimes in two years. No, not because of difficulties, but because just not trying at all, and they all think that that’s perfectly normal and natural for young parents.

It would be strange to for couples with happy and healthy sex-lives before pregnancy to somehow lose all libido for years afterwards (beyond when the woman is breastfeeding that is, when a loss of libido is natural), so it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that 40% or so of Korean married couples also rarely, if ever, have sex. What gives?

(Photo by Mr Woody)

So, an obstacle seems to be a busy work life?

Also, lack of communication between the spouses is part of the problem. The main focal point in the lives of men becomes the workplace and work itself, while for women, it’s the home and children. They end up sharing so little. In North America, for instance, men are active in the children’s schools or within the local community. That experience likely leads to stronger ties within the family and between the spouses. In Japan, however, many fathers can barely attend the child’s sports day event once a year. The husband works downtown and his center of activity is rooted in that area. The wife’s radius of activity is confined to a small area, perhaps a few kilometers, around the school. No wonder husbands and wives begin to drift apart.

If anything, this would apply even more to Koreans than to Japanese people. Sure, like Korea, I think Japan schools may also usually be single sex (can any Japan-based readers confirm?), and this makes children and teenagers much more likely to seek physical affection from the same sex, and the lack of experience with each other before university means that young Koreans have developed very elaborate blind dating systems to meet the opposite sex without having to go up and actually talk to each other first. But what Japan lacks is Korea’s 22-26 month compulsory military service for men afterward, not only compounding these tendencies learned from school, including how to survive on little sleep, but in the process turning them into the sexist ajosshis (아저씨) that we all love to hate. Think I’m exaggerating? To put it mildly, no countries with compulsory military service are exactly well known for the high status of women in society, and academic journals on Korea are full of articles about the corporatist training, militaristic notions of Korean citizenship, and and sense of post-service privilege that Korean men learn during their service. I’m interested, naturally, so I can point readers in the direction of and discuss some of those articles in another post if anyone asks. In the meantime, you could also simply just ask Korean mothers and girlfriends of young Korean men, and you’ll invariably find that they’ll be very concerned about how they’ll turn out when return home after their service.

After this background, the salaryman lifestyle of long hours, followed by heavy drinking sessions with colleagues and visits to prostitutes sounds somewhat natural. And as I’ve repeatedly mentioned on the blog already, the majority of Korean women still spend many years off work after childbirth, if they return to work at all, and until 1997 Korea had far more salarymen then Japan ever did, and the accompanying company-first work ethos remains very much the Korean ideal. These would exaggerate these seperate spheres of Korean married life all the more (Photo by E.C.A. Studio).

Apart from the relationship issues mentioned by Kawakami, another consequence in Korea is ubiquitous urology clinics for men, which effectively serve more as STD and impotence clinics. I assume Japan has similarly high numbers of them, although admittedly the decentralized structure of the Korean medical industry also plays a role in Korea, and I don’t how much that applies to Japan too. Again, I’d be grateful if any readers could let me know.

On that note, there are many more, related questions to follow in the  interview, but I can’t really add to Kawakami’s already succinct answers, so I’ll end my post here. Again, and especially if you’ve read this far, then I recommend reading the full interview.

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