ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the sexuality of young Japanese from various perspectives. It first discusses data on youth sexuality, then moves on to summarize sexuality education in school and then the current popular discourse on an allegedly sexless young generation. While the data shows indeed a decline in the reported sexual activities, the young generation is nevertheless sexually more active that the generations of their parents and grandparents at any stage of their life. Sexuality education in school is found to problematize youth sexuality, and it is also fraught with taboos and constraints. This stands in stark contrast to the wide availability of information on and representations of sex on the Internet or through other outlets in Japan. Japanese youth perceives sexuality often as “dangerous”, “dirty”, “risky”, “murky”, or “gross”. These assessments and the processes how these perceptions have formed are discussed in the second half of the paper. Information is based on written assignments from and interviews with students taking part in a university course on women’s and men’s studies where one session is dedicated to the discussion of sexuality. The chapter ends with insights gained from interviews with young sexual heath and rights activists who report about their activities and their views about the role of youth sexuality in a super-aged society with too few children.
