Heart broken? (Photo : Getty Images)
Japan, that poor country where about half of single young men and women still remain virgins in a country awash with "JAVs" and hentai, is doomed to demographic extinction.
A survey released last week of Japanese aged 18 to 34 surprisingly uncovered that almost 70 percent of unmarried men and 60 percent of unmarried women aren't in a relationship. Worse, 42 percent of the men and 44.2 percent of the women admitted they remain virgins.
The survey by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research also found there are now a lot more virgins than in 2010 when the last study was conducted. At that time, only 36.2 percent of men and 38.7 percent of women said they had never had sex.
Some 30 percent of the 2,706 men and 26 percent of the 2,570 female respondents said they weren't looking for a relationship.
"They want to tie the knot eventually. But they tend to put it off as they have gaps between their ideals and the reality," said Futoshi Ishii, head of the NIPSSR's population dynamics research department.
"That's why people marry later or stay single for life, contributing to the nation's low birthrate."
In 1987 when it first conducted the survey, the institute reported the proportion of unmarried men and women who said they had no partner stood at 48.6 percent and 39.5 percent, respectively. The institute has conducted the same survey every five years since 1987.
The institute said the increase in the number of singles in this new survey was quite high for Japanese in their late 20s, the age at which women are most fertile.
Nearly 90 percent of the respondents said they want to get married "sometime in the future."
The study also found that the number of children among couples who have been married for between 15 and 19 years averaged a record-low 1.94.
Conducted in June 2015, the study covered 8,754 single people and 6,598 married couples across Japan.
