Sex myths without substance: Mislabelling Japan
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/sex-myths-without-substance-mislabelling-japan-8911325.htmlSex myths without substance: Mislabelling Japan
These stories gain traction because they support a view
of east Asia which is at best patronising and at worst overtly racist
Every few months, as if to remind us what a disturbingly odd place Japan is, an alarming Japanese news story explodes online. Western media outlets clamber over each other in their haste to cover the story, with every report of bagel heads, snail facials or ritual head shaving being used as further evidence of a unique Japanese weirdness. A lack of understanding (and, sometimes, basic fact-checking) means that entire stories are lifted, often without critique, and churned into dubious clickbait. Earlier this year, widespread coverage of a supposed eyeball-licking epidemic among Japanese teens that turned out to be a hoax left more than a few editors red-faced.
This round was kicked off with an article in the Guardian looking at reasons behind Japan's rapidly declining population. Since then, sound-bites have been repeated and distorted, and the spiralling birth rate figures have become a hook for a spate of ill-informed, voyeuristic articles that fail to note that the 'weirdness' they see before them is far from representative.
TIME asked whether millions of young people are eschewing sex because they'd rather "manage a virtual candy store in a video game". Vice segued into an exposé of Japan's sex and love industry, taking time to name check "a generation of men obsessed with virtual reality and so intimidated by real women that they prefer cyber girlfriends". They explored 'cuddle cafes', sex dolls, services where you can pay to go on a date with someone dressed as an anime character – all niche industries that would be met with the same bemusement and derision by the average Japanese 20-something that some foreign journalists reserve for East Asia.
Presenter Anita Rani's quest to understand the "psyche of the modern Japanese man" leads her to Akihabara: the home of otaku, or geek, culture. As happens all too often, a tiny minority is portrayed as though it were representative of the wider population, and its impact wildly exaggerated. In a supporting article, Rani makes the entirely bogus claim that "One reason for the lack of babies is the emergence of a new breed of Japanese men, the otaku, who love manga, anime and computers – and sometimes show little interest in sex".
= new reply since forum marked as read
But it's literally one line.
I don't think you can link "otaku" (more "grass feeders"
to the birth rate without a study explicitly set out to do so, but there is a correlation. Whether it's causation or not, of course, is debatable. I think that you can't prove the causation because it's not related to behavior so much external forces. The point was that the article said there were no statistics whatsoever.
I initially, ignorantly, Googled "otaku birthrate japan" and realized that the real question is "consumerism birthrate japan," and that's how I found it. It's not a trigger, it's a symptom.
for not letting that one get by 
....there's supposed to be this horrible population problem in the US - with a fertility rate right around 2, mind you- so people who decide to have children should be yelled at....
and if Japan's population is decreasing, that's terrible, too!
OH NO!
People need to make up their minds. Fine, okay, everything sucks, humans are awful, we're doomed.
But pick one narrative and stick with it. 
But I am not going to do so with you when you begin the discussion by accusing me of condoning the rape of children.
Seriously Sea, I am disappointed in you. We've gone around on a few topics, and you've even changed or opened my mind on things in the past, but this is beneath you. Anyone else I would have reported after the first request. 
Fuck zoo's for animals? Animal brothels,
German zoophiles alarmed by govt s plans to criminalize bestiality
"The best explanation of lower birth rates is that people are more educated, they are capable of making choices, and more choose to do other things than raise children."
This figure shows the strong reverse correlation (-0.8 out of -1.0) between countries’ IQ scores and their fertility rates. The x axis represents the IQ scores and the y axis represents the fertility rate. As you can see, if you go to the right side of the figure (high IQ score), the fertility rate gets lower. This is a typical linear correlation.
Japan’s birth rate is not particularly low at all considering the higher the IQ, the lower the birth rate.
Japan is merely following this global trend. If there are true outliers, they are countries like Singapore or Cuba.
IQ is highly correlated to various educational indexes. I also used educational indexes, percentage of secondary education enrolment and literacy rate, and calculated the correlation between them and the fertility rates and got similar results.
While this correlation alone doesn’t necessarily imply that the IQ is the cause of the low birth rate, you can assume there’s some relationship (whether direct, indirect, or through another variable like higher educational level) between them. The correlation is very strong.
