You make some good points, but it goes against everything I’ve experienced. The women I’ve dated were all middle/upper-class professionals (as in office workers, not that kind of professional), and all of them viewed sex as a normal second- or third-date activity. Talking with my female co-workers indicated that this attitude toward premarital sex is not uncommon.
As for living with the parents, one of the industries in Japan that’s still booming is that of love hotels: high-quality hotels one can rent for a few hours that are designed specifically for sex. Even inside the home, things aren’t quite so restricted; the times I’ve met a woman’s parents, the mothers have not only approved of us sleeping together, they actively encouraged it (the fathers were all either dead or hospitalized, which may have been a factor).
Granted, this is all little better than anecdotal evidence and the sample sizes are necessarily limited, but it just seems that the Japan in which I live is not same Japan that you describe.
p.s. since several people have mention it wrt Thailand, I’ll add my 2 cents: I have never seen any evidence of importance attached to bridal virginity, either in 20th/21st-century Japan or before.
All of the unmarried Japanese women I know (mostly college juniors and seniors) came to the US as virgins. Many of them had never even dated before. One told me that if her father ever suspected she was dating in the US, he’d be on the next flight out of Tokyo. Another attended a birthday party where a male stripper performed, and informed me the next morning that she’d seen more that night than she’d ever seen in her whole life before. A few of the women I know did become sexually active during their time in the US, but all expressed some concern about how their family and friends back home would react when and if they found out.
Of course, most of the unmarried Japanese women I know are no more than 22, and I am guessing that the women you are dealing with are at least a little bit older. That alone may be enough to explain the difference.
Well, my experience comes only from what the Japanese women I know say about themselves. I don’t have evidence as to their real sexual behavior. It would not surprise me if some women pretended to be more modest or innocent than they really were. The real situation may be something akin to that in the US, where taboos don’t so much prevent women from having sex as prevent them from speaking openly about it. Still, all of those who I know seem genuinely less experienced and less knowledgeable when it comes to sex than most American women of the same age.
I hate to say you’re being misled… but I’m definitely with Sublight on this one. I’ve known quite a few Japanese women and they’ve all had what I’d consider a healthy attitude about sex. However this is not the same as openly bragging about one’s exploits – which is not generally their nature. Most lost their virginity in their late teens, same as the US.
Quite a few misconceptions here. Birth control pills were not approved till recently, but abortion has been legal for quite a while and there is little religious or social opposition to it. There are no “arranged marriages” in the sense of parents telling their kids whom to marry. You are probably thinking about “omiai” which is just a formal way of introducing people to potential partners. It’s not all that different from friends arranging blind dates, or using dating services. As for living with their parents, that doesn’t limit your privacy all that much.
Still, it’s interesting that most Japanese think of Americans as being more decadent and promiscuous.
Let’s just say myself and just about every other single guy who has ever lived in Japan would disagree. It was a lot of fun there. Sublight described it pretty well. I would just add that prior to loosing their virginity, Japanese women acted pretty much like virgins in the US. After that milestone, Japanese women tended to go for that second or third date thing…
One thing in all of these asian countries (excluding Philippines) is that there is no such thing as christian guilt. While they may have hang ups or lack thereof about fidelity, virginity, prostitution, etc., christian guilt/beliefs have nothing to do with it.
While this does not reflect my experience in dealing with Japanese women, I have not dealt with a representative sample. I don’t doubt that what you say is true of the women you were involved with, and it may indeed be an accurate portrayl of the average Japanese woman. But this does not indicate that Japan has no cultural bias against promiscuous women or that the culture actively promotes promiscuity. It seems instead to suggest merely that the Japanese are not, as I believed, more sexually repressed than Americans. This is very different from being less repressed, and certainly a far cry from feeling that having many sexual partners is so ordinary that choosing to be a prostitute would not involve a significant change in lifestyle.
In a bordello utopia, or a state of legalized and State controlled prostitution, there would be much emphasis on disease control and STD’s would be few and far between.
The disease rate seems pretty high, according to these stories. Mainly the result of a collective “ignore it and it will go away” attitude on the parts of teens, parents, teachers and the health ministry. Which is why I always wrapped up, no matter how often I heard “I can’t have a disease, only foreigners get those!”
The Economist had a special on Thailand last week, with an article about the sex and drugs culture. From memory, it said that Thai culture is in general fairly sexually repressed, such that the government had some difficulty with its campaign to cut STD rates by emphasising condom use. It also said that the campaign has actually been fairly successful, but the STD rate remains high.
It’s a international law. If they can prove you had sex with a minor you will be done when you get home (sorry no cite, too busy ). It’s not the UK prisons you have to worry about however it’s getting caught in Thailand that could really fuck your life up.
According to Southeast Asian Historian Anthony Reid the Thai government first established a monopoly on prostitution, and began to derive significant income from such, in the 1680s.
American journalist Jorges Orgibet first arrived in Thailand in 1945 (or thereabouts) at a time when there were only about 50 Americans in the entire country. He points out that at that time the sex industry was blamed on the British soldiers and before that on the Japanese soldiers. But he seems sceptical of these explanations.
In his book “From Siam to Thailand” he describes Thai tradition:
[An Old Custom]
In up-country Siam in the old days an honored guest in a home was offered the best that house had to offer, be it farmer’s shack or Governor’s mansion. So that an honored guest’s every comfort was provided, you should not have to sleep alone. Therefore, the best the house had to offer was yours. The best may be a sister, No. 2 wife, aunt, niece even a daughter, but never the No. 1 wife.
It can present some interesting problems.
As a bachelor, it sounds like heaven, except that sometimes the “best” is a 12 year old child. So what to do? You cannot refuse as this would bring the girl disgrace in her own home for being unwanted or unsuitable. I got around that by a sneaky ruse.
Most up-country Siamese houses have living quarters in the middle with sleeping quarters each side and bathing facilities – the hong nam – in the rear. Kitchens were outside or under the house.
On retiring you would whisper to the child – and pantomime if she didn’t understand you – that you sleep there and I’ll sleep here, and at 2 a.m. we’d get up and individually go to the hong nam to noisily splash out of the shanghai jar the cold water supplied for bathing.
It worked. We were happy. The family was happy that their honored guest was happy, and when you departed it was as a truly honored guest by all parties concerned.
I should hasten to add that they were not all 12-year-olds, and many nights those trips to the hong nam were quite legitimate.
As you can see, being an honored guest in an up-country house presented certain problems for the uninitiated. With that background we’ll get to another police chief in another upcountry town. It’s best he shall be nameless and the location unidentifiable.
I was the guest of the Governor. His house, however, was being painted so no guest room was available. Instead, he had prepared a “suite” in the local officer’s club. Now most provincial centers in Thailand have these clubs for civil servants, usually an open air pavilion, offices at one end making a short L with one big room upstairs. It was in this upstairs room that they had installed a bed, wardrobe, and night stand with a group of chairs around a low teak table separated from the sleeping quarters with a four-panel rattan screen. My suite.
At dinner at the Governor’s house that evening he inquired if everything was satisfactory in my guest room. I replied that it was immensely satisfactory, in fact so spacious I felt embarrassed.
“You mean you get lonesome up there?” the Governor asked.
“Certainly,” was my reply, said with a bachelor’s smile.
“Well,” replied the Governor, “we’ll have the police chief do something about that.”
Shortly after I had returned to my “guest house” the police chief drove up in a 1932 Chrysler touring car with two young ladies, one a rather tall Laos girl and the other an attractive Siamese. As they got out of the car the chief, grinning, asked, “You like?” – in the process using about third of his entire English vocabulary.
“I like.”
The two girls stood there giggling, so I took the Siamese girl by the hand and led her into my guest house. The chief put the Laos girl in the car and drove away.
Any way you look at it, it was a thoroughly delightful night.
The next morning over at the Governor’s house for breakfast, he asked, “Everything all right last night, Mr. Jorges?”
My reply was that it was perfect.
“Well,” said the Governor, “I think you made a slight mistake.”
“Mistake, how?”
“You took the police chief’s wife,” he announced.
And with that I nearly dropped through the floor, only to be reassured by the Governor that it was all right.
“The Chief hadn’t tried the Laos girl before, and the Chief said it was …” and he gestured with a thumbs-up clenched first, grinning all the while.
I know this will shock the hell out of a lot of people, but one must understand old Siamese customs. The chief had not announced that this was his wife and I, being an honored guest, could not be corrected. That would be ungracious, especially to a guest of his superior. That’s the Siamese custom part of the story. Actually, I think the only reason his wife went with me in the first place was that he’d been playing around too much and this was one chance to get even without being reprimanded.
A similar description was given by the Chinese explorer Ma Huan in 1433.
). It’s not the UK prisons you have to worry about however it’s getting caught in Thailand that could really fuck your life up.