The Misreporting of Japanese Mating Statistics

The same error keeps happening

Before Western media began sounding the alarm over declining sexual activity at home, there was a curious fascination with sexless Japan and its ‘herbivore men’—young men said to forgo traditional masculinity and the hassles of real-world courtship in favour of 2D waifus and digital escapism, and who were sometimes blamed for the country’s fertility decline¹. From the start, though, the statistics were presented in a misleading way, and things don’t seem to have improved since. Let’s take a closer look.

The first meme stat

The first meme stat—which spurred a barrage of sensationalist media coverage, including pieces by CNN and the Daily Mail—claimed that 42% of men (and 44% of women) aged 18–34 were virgins.

Another by The Telegraph claims that a whopping one in four Japanese were wizards. For context, under 2% of people 30 and up remain virgins in the US.

It was also cited alongside other misleading meme stats in this Financial Times article on incels.

This came from the 15th Japanese National Fertility Survey, conducted in 2015. I’m not the first to point this one out, but the reason this statistic is misleading is that it refers solely to never-married people—clearly a group more likely to include those without sexual experience.

Ghaznavi et al. (2019) analyzed this data, reporting inexperience rates for the total population rather than just the never-married. Among 18–19s, the rate was nearly identical for the never-married and total population due to very few in this age bracket being married, but by the 30s a significant gap had opened up. The overall percentage of inexperienced men under 35 was about 27.5%—roughly a third lower than the never-married figure.

While around 10% of men over 30 were inexperienced, you’ll notice that the outcome measured was heterosexual inexperience, meaning that if the analysis were limited to heterosexuals it might be closer to 5%.

Looking at the 16th Japanese National Fertility Survey, which includes data for 2021, there’s no sign of a continuing trend in sexual inexperience since 2015. Since these stats focus solely on the never-married, a decline in marriage rates could still lead to an increase in sexual inexperience despite no change within the never-married cohort. Prior surveys showed no difference in sexual inexperience between the never-married and total populations of 18–19s though, and very little among 20–24s—groups that also showed no increase in sexual inexperience. It basically looks like men have returned to roughly the same place they were in 1987. For women, the more notable changes since then might simply reflect increased comfort with reporting premarital sex.

The next meme stat

A popular article titled ‘Meet the incels and anti-feminists of Asia’ cites two statistics:

• In 2022, 42% of men in their 20s said they had never had sex, while 17% of those in their 30s were virgins, too.

• A government report from 2022 found that 40% of men had never been on a date.

The virginity statistics seem to come from Ghaznavi et al. (2024); although in this survey, it was 43% of men in their 20s, so they may have confused it with the previous statistic. These stats cover all men, not just never-married men. Does this mean there has been a sharp rise since 2015 that wasn’t captured by the JNFS? Not necessarily. As the study’s title says, the survey was only ‘quasi-representative’, as it employed an online panel:

Our study had limitations. First, the survey used in the current analysis was conducted via an online platform. Similar to other quasi-representative national surveys, it is uncertain to what extent the study participants are representative of the national population. Although we weighted the sample based on age, region, and marital status to ensure that the survey was nationally representative with respect to these variables, the weighted NInJaS sample was more educated and had slightly higher income across all age and sex groups, as compared to the National Fertility Survey; the slight overrepresentation of highly educated and higher-income individuals has been reported in previous literature using the same survey platform.

I have previously shown how even after weighting, online respondents tend to be less sexually active, likely due to personality differences only partially captured by sociodemographic variables. Therefore, this survey may be safely disregarded for comparative purposes.

‘Japanese men’… are you no important details are being omitted?

The second statistic comes from the White Paper on Gender Equality 2022. The above article also notes how 35% of men in their thirties and 22% of men in their 40s reported never having been on a date. Does it seem remotely plausible that the percentage of men with dating experience dropped by only 5% from 40% in their 20s to 35% in their 30s, despite many more 29- than 20-year-olds being married? It shouldn’t.

It turns out the same stupid ‘mistake’ was made here², with the 40% referring specifically to unmarried men. Since 65.8% of men in their 20s were single, this translates to 26.3% overall who had yet to go on their first date. The reason some married men hadn’t ‘dated’ could be due miai—a traditional matchmaking custom still practiced by some.

The latest meme stat

It never ends. Despite the clickbait headline, the article itself states that—you guessed it—this refers specifically to unmarried young adults:

A total of 1,200 responses were collected, 200 each for unmarried men and women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.

This is the ‘trend’ we’re dealing with here. If anything, the percentage of unmarried men in their 20s who’d never been in a relationship had fallen somewhat from 2017 to 2021, before rising a bit in 2023. Women’s figures remained about the same until 2023. This could indicate a covid effect. Either way, calling a sudden (and fairly small) change across two surveys a ‘trend’ is a stretch.

This data is for unmarried people in their 20s.

There was also a slight increase in men and women who didn’t desire marriage in these surveys, though it’s hard to say how much this correlates with a lack of interest in relationships more generally. Anyway, if you needed another reason not to take lazy click-driven media at its word, there you go.

1. While still well below replacement levels, the fertility rate seems to have actually rose slightly between around 2000 and the time the first meme stat took off.

2. Even the title of this article is similarly misleading: ‘Survey Finds 40% of Japanese Men in Their Twenties Have Never Dated’.