We're Japanese

TOKYO — Junko Sakai was nervously looking forward to a romantic getaway with the man she'd been seeing. But when they arrived at a seaside hotel last fall, her beau requested separate rooms. Masahiro Yamada, the Tokyo Gakugei University sociologist who coined the phrase "parasite singles", in a coffee shop in Tokyo May 17th. By Andy Rain, Getty Images Stunned, Sakai nonetheless anticipated a late-night knock on the door. It never came. "Nothing happened," the Tokyo writer says. Nothing is happening with depressing regularity between Japanese men and women these days. Marriages, births and hanky-panky are all spiraling downward with troubling implications for the nation's future: A sagging birthrate means that fewer working-age people will be around to support a growing population of elderly; a social crisis looms. Only in Japan would a popular weekly newsmagazine deem it necessary to exhort the nation's youth to abstain from abstinence: "Young people, don't hate," AERA magazine pleaded last month in a report detailing a precarious drop in sales of condoms and in business at Japan's rent-by-the-hour "love hotels." More and more Japanese men and women are finding relationships too messy, tiring and potentially humiliating to bother with anymore. "They don't want a complicated life," says Sakai, who has written a controversial bestseller, Cry of the Losing Dogs, on the plight of unmarried Japanese thirtysomething women like herself. And so, to an astonishing degree, men and women go their separate ways — the women to designer boutiques and chic restaurants with their girlfriends or moms, the men to karaoke clubs with their colleagues from work or the solitude of their computer screens to romance hassle-free virtual women. "Men don't want to spend time with their girlfriends, especially shopping," says Takayuki Mori, 40, a single man who works for a Tokyo advertising agency. He says he isn't dating. Better educated, more widely traveled and raised in more affluence than their mothers, young women no longer feel bound by the Japanese tradition that says a woman unmarried after age 25 is like a Christmas cake on Dec. 26 — stale. Men, meanwhile, seem intimidated and bewildered by assertive young women who are nothing like their moms. As a result of the disconnect between genders, Japan, just emerging from a long economic slump, is experiencing a social recession in: Next--->>