THE ROBOT RESTAURANT IN TOKYO. SERIOUSLY. This is a real place. What the hell is happening in this picture? It appears that three Asian women are dancing on three giant Asian women robots. Too meta? Those people in the photo sure do seem entertained.
Plus, I’d heard rumors of “love hotels”—which are what they sound like: hotels specifically built for hooking up. But, of course, this being Japan, they sometimes have really amazing decor—there’s even a Jurassic Park–themed one. Seriously, this exists. I am not joking.
NOTE: There were no photos available online so this is an artist rendition commissioned by me for the book. I hope the rooms are this cool and you get picked up from the airport in a tricked-out JP Ford Explorer from the nineties.
At night the neon signs turn the city into an adult adventure land: The streets, bars, and clubs are raucous and busy. Something fun and interesting is lurking in every nook and cranny. You can wander onto the third floor of an office building and find an amazing high-end cocktail bar behind one door, a record store behind another, and past the hallway a bizarre nightclub filled with Japanese men wearing Bill Clinton masks giving back rubs to dogs.
Walk through many of the big neighborhoods often enough, and you are bound to stumble upon a little hidden corner with sex stores and the aforementioned love hotels—which are actually nice, clean hotels that rent by the hour and are used by couples to pop in and do their thing. Upon first glance, the city closest to Tokyo in terms of dating infrastructure would seem to be New York.
I also assumed the tech-obsessed Japanese were probably on the next level of dating websites and apps. These people invented emojis, for god’s sake! They were texting and they thought, Yeah, this is great, but it’d be really dope to be able to send a small image of a koala bear too.* Who knew what their texting back-and-forth would look like? I couldn’t wait to do our interviews and see what kind of stuff was going on.
It all seemed ideal for the perfect dating city, but I could not have been more off. All my assumptions were wrong. Start doing even the slightest research into Japan and love, and you’ll quickly find sensational articles describing a full-blown crisis. According to demographers, journalists, and even the Japanese government, it’s a hot potato.
Sorry, I needed another word for “crisis,” and when I entered the word “crisis” into Thesaurus.com, it suggested “hot potato” as a synonym. I could not write this book without letting you know that Thesaurus.com lists “hot potato” as a synonym for “crisis.”
“Hey, did you hear about what’s happening with Israel and Palestine? It’s becoming a real hot potato.”
Anyway, back to Japan. You read these articles and they are just filled with panicky language: “No one’s fucking!” “No one’s getting married and having kids!” “Young people aren’t interested in boning anymore!!”
Those aren’t direct quotes, but that’s pretty much what you read.
It sounded alarmist to me. Young people are just not interested in sex?! How could that be possible? Let’s bust out some scary-ass statistics.
? In 2013 a whopping 45 percent of women aged sixteen to twenty-four “were not interested in or despised sexual contact,” and more than a quarter of men felt the same way.2 I’ve always wanted to describe a statistic as “whopping,” and I think we can concur, this is indeed whopping. Seriously, read those numbers one more time. Despised sexual contact.
? The number of men and women between eighteen and thirty-four who are not involved in any romantic relationship with the opposite sex has risen since 1987, from 49 percent to 61 percent for men and from 39 percent to 49 percent for women.3
? A whopping one third of Japanese people under thirty have never dated,4 and in a survey of those between thirty-five and thirty-nine, more than a quarter reported that they’d never had sex.5 (Okay, that was the last “whopping” I’ll use.)
? Almost half of Japanese men and one third of women in their early thirties were still single as of 2005.6
? In 2012, 41.3 percent of married couples had not had sex in the past month, the highest percentage since the figures became available in 2004. There was a steady rise over the previous ten years, from 31.9 percent in 2004.7
? Japan’s birthrate ranks 222nd out of 224 countries.8 A report compiled with the government’s cooperation two years ago warned that by 2060 the number of Japanese will have fallen from 127 million to about 87 million, of whom almost 40 percent will be sixty-five or older.9