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Sex-deprived Japanese women find help in squad of volunteers
By Max Sato
November 8, 2004
Tokyo — Craving sex after repeated rejection by their partners, women who felt
doomed to join Japan’s growing ranks of the “sexless” are being offered a
prescription: a squad of well-dressed men ready to assist free of charge.
The unique counseling service was launched four years ago in the outskirts of
Tokyo by celebrated sexologist Kim Myong Gan, drawing sex-starved women who
found little satisfaction from textbook advice, sleeping pills and other
medication.
The 54-year-old Kim, a self-trained lovemaking specialist, beams with positive
energy from working out and eating healthy. He says he showers his clients with
praise for their good looks and personality, reassuring them that their sex
lives are far from over.
He then recommends a powerful remedy: free soul-healing conversation and
passionate sex with a mature man of the woman’s choice from a pool of 25
volunteers.
The men, aged 36 to 60 and based in four Japanese cities, dress in suits and
sometimes are trying to meet their own sexual needs, such as one volunteer who
is taking care of his bed-ridden wife.
Kim encourages safe sex but beyond that does not interfere with the romance
between his “healers” and patients.
Kim calls the treatment a temporary fix but also a crucial first step toward a
woman regaining confidence.
“Japanese women are too patient about the void in their sex lives while their
male counterparts are too immature about loving their partners,” Kim told AFP.
Kim explained that many Japanese men soon after marriage start regarding their
wives as a mother or sister—too close to have sex with. And their wives tend to
accept it, observing how their fathers treated their mothers.
“It’s something that has been handed down through generations here,” Kim said.
Despite Japan’s image as a promiscuous country awash with open pornography, the
Japanese are among the world’s least sexually active people, according to a
recent survey by condom manufacturer Durex.
The Japanese have only 46 sexual encounters on average each year, compared with
79 for the Hong Kong Chinese and Singaporeans, 82 for Indians, 90 for mainland
Chinese and a whopping 137 for the French.
It has long been taboo to discuss one’s sexual problems openly in Japan. But
many distressed Japanese women, and some men, are breaking the trend,
encouraged by Internet chat rooms and media reports on so-called “sexless
couples.”
The term was coined by psychiatrist Teruo Abe 13 years ago about couples having
no sensual contact, not even cuddling or kissing, for more than a month and
unlikely to have any sex in the future.
“I wonder where men’s sex drive has gone,” Abe, who runs a counseling clinic in
Urayasu, east of Tokyo, told AFP. “A surprising number of cases don’t even
masturbate for a month or two while not having sex with their partners.”
Tomomi, 36, thinks she is a victim of the phenomenon.
She felt humiliated every time her husband, 38, refused to do what “normal”
couples do in bed. His excuses were always that he was tired from too much
work, that she looked like a little sister or that their apartment was too
cramped.
After only sporadic intercourse during their three-year marriage, Tomomi warned
him that having no sex for six months could lead to divorce. The reluctant
husband agreed to meet her for a “date” at a hotel room.
“The result was miserable. The whole thing lasted for only five minutes with no
foreplay, as in the past. It just hurt me physically and mentally,” recalled
Tomomi.
Tears trickled down Tomomi’s cheeks as she listened to Kim’s straightforward
but warm-hearted speech saying it was normal to seek a sex life and that she
was not alone.
Kim’s service includes an initial 90-minute session that costs 20,000 yen
(US$189) plus free telephone counseling for three months and visits to his
“field hospital.” Many women, some of them virgins approaching middle age,
immediately seek the help of a sex volunteer.
Before Tomomi could enlist a volunteer, she started looking around and met a
“soul mate,” a mature man in his 40s who she says is a good listener and
passionate lover.
Kim endorses finding a sex life even in the form of an extramarital
relationship, like Tomomi’s. Saving a shattered social contract is not high on
his agenda. Born in Japan to Korean parents and raised here, Kim was forced by
law to declare his Korean nationality and relinquish his Japanese citizenship
when he was a toddler.
In contrast, Abe, a medical doctor, said his aim was to save marriages
endangered by a lack of sex. He often prescribes antidepressants and Viagra,
but he acknowledged the cure rate was only 30 percent.
Japanese media speculate the nation’s slumping sex drive could be caused by
environmental pollution and growing exposure to electromagnetic fields through
mobile phones and power lines that sends sperm counts plunging.
But Abe noted that the men disinterested in sex have busy work schedules and
are sleep-deprived and complain they have no time for any hobbies.
“The best medicine would be a weeklong holiday on a southern island,” he said.
For Hiromi Ikeuchi, a marriage consultant who heads the psychiatric and legal
counseling group Tokyo Family Lab, Japanese women are often themselves immature
and demand perfection from their partners.
Japan’s divorce rate has shot up to 2.3 for every 1,000 people in 2002 from 1.4
a decade earlier. Ikeuchi has seen a flurry of divorces by women who cheated on
husbands they claim were unable to satisfy them sexually.
“It’s castration of sons by their mothers,” Ikeuchi said. “It’s a curse from
those mothers in unhappy marriages who wanted their boys to grow up being nice
and attentive to what women have to say.”
Kim cautions that not having sex for a while is not the same as being
“sexless.”
“I sometimes don’t have sex with my wife for a few months, but I wake her up
with aroma oil foot massage to the music of Chopin every morning,” said the
counselor. “There is a difference between being sexless and being off sex.”
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