Japan's rather tepid sex life of late has drawn considerable attention, not so much prurient as anxious. What does it mean when young people in their sexual prime are bored by sex or can't be bothered with it? The implications are various: psychological (has life grown too virtual to be real?), economic (can a sexless nation muster the energy for global competition?) and demographic (no question mark here — the aging, declining population in which childhood and youth are increasingly under-represented is apparent to everyone).

Last November the health ministry's National Institute of Population and Social Research (NIPSR) released a report, much cited since, compressing the situation into a statistical nutshell: 61 percent of unmarried males and 49 percent of unmarried females aged 18-34 have no sexual partner. Nor, by and large, do they feel the need for one. True, 86 percent of men and 89 percent of women say they want to marry "sometime," but sometime can be anytime and suggests the distant rather than the near future.

One standard explanation has been that in this precarious economy, secure and remunerative employment is hard to find and young people, doubting their ability to support a family, hesitate to start one. That's valid as far as it goes, but as the weekly magazine Aera pointed out last month, history is full of times far more pinched than these, and people lived through them without retreating in despair or weariness from sex and reproduction.