Tokyo Times

“44 percent of the people who said they weren’t having much sex felt that having a relationship with the opposite sex was ‘very tiresome’ or ‘tiresome’.”

Figures from a report by the Japan Family Planning Association after interviewing 936 people aged between 16 and 49.

Such forlorn findings appear to confirm that Japan’s already low birth rate is set to continue falling, and the nation’s unenviable position at the bottom of the ‘who’s getting it the most’ league table looks very secure indeed — apathy rather than ‘action’ very much the name of the game.

A sorry state of affairs that makes the self-explanatory term sexless marriage — coined in the early 1990’s — seem more appropriate than ever, with another recent poll overseen by the snappily named Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development suggesting that the situation is only set to get worse.

Conducted between March and April this year, the survey asked 3,900 newly hired employees what they would do if they were ordered to do overtime on a day they had already scheduled a date, with a whopping 85% of them saying they would work — the highest figure since the survey began in 1972.

A situation that perhaps unexpectedly means that sexless marriages could well become a thing of the past, as if people aren’t dating, and therefore not having sex, then presumably they’ll never get to the marriage stage and stop having sex because they won’t have been having it in the first place.

Or something like that.