The good news is that for two years in succession Tokyo has staged shunga (erotic woodblock print) exhibitions — one at Toyo Bunko in 2014 and the ongoing show at Eisei Bunko — and there doesn't appear to have been a marked surge in moral decadence or signs of civilization crumbling.

A few weeks ago I noticed crowds of curious attendees reveling in graphic depictions of sex, and it reminded me of how the West often obsesses over celibacy syndrome in Japan, which is portrayed as an unusually undersexed nation. Have the Japanese strayed so far from their rich and uninhibited traditions of sexuality?

The Western media appears to be fixated on how much the Japanese are getting — or not getting, as the case may be. Surveys about Japan's low fertility rate spark febrile speculation about a low appetite for sex even though similarly low fertility rates in Spain or Slovakia don't attract such vacuous analysis. Earlier this year, another survey suggested that half of all Japanese adults are not engaging in sex regularly, unleashing yet another cascade of sweeping broadsides that seem to overlook the fact that Japan's sex industry is thriving in a nation with a bumper crop of love hotels, sex toy shops and numerous service providers covering a wide range of fantasies and preferences.