For a long time now, news has been circulating that Japan is heading into a national catastrophe. Why? Because apparently young people aren't having sex.
In fact, they're avoiding sex so much that the country is on a population decline, and research has shown that nearly a third of Japanese people in their 30s have not had any sexual experience with an actual human being.
While those statistics might seem shocking to you, a new documentary has discovered that almost half of young Japanese citizens are virgins because they don't have time to date and prefer alternatives such as pornography and sex robots.
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Titled Sex in Japan: Dying for Company, the TV documentary has attempted to uncover why some 44 percent of unmarried women and 42 percent of unmarried men in Japan admitted they were virgins in The 2015 National Fertility Survey.
One of the key reasons is that many men and women in the country are working long hours and therefore find it difficult to make time to date.
One of the workers who speaks in the show - Taiyo Hashimoto - said: "I'm supposed to finish work at 7pm but I work overtime basically every day."
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Taiyo added that when he does socialise, it's often with his boss: "I have to keep up with him, which is hard on me. He has a drink. So do I. He asks for another, so do I. That's what you're expected to do."
His story is not uncommon - according to the Daily Mail, many individuals in the country are worried about starting a family without maintaining long-term job security. And as outlined by Taiyo, with so many sexual alternatives in the country, there's less need to find a girlfriend.
"Men go to brothels or massage parlours, fuelled by after-work drinks with their colleagues. That sort of thing is common."
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Relationship therapist Ai Aoyama added: "There are lots of places for men to have fun. Men don't have to bother having a girlfriend."
That's all very well and good for those who are enjoying this lifestyle, but as a result the country's population is suffering. There has been a downward spiral of children under the age of 14 in Japan since 1981, with 170,000 less this year than the last as of April 1, 2018, according to the data by the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry.
The country's looking to turn this around by offering one time cash payments in a bid to boost the average number of children a woman in the country has in her lifetime from 0.35 to 1.8 by the end of 2025.
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Although as shown by Taiyo and others like him, there are many men who are in no hurry to find a girlfriend and no cash settlement is going to change that.
Featured Image Credit: PATopics: Sex, Documentary, Japan