Sex

Should he return to school after the long summer break, 24-year-old Kota Wakabayashi may not receive the warm reception he is probably used to, as over the weekend the junior high school mathematics teacher was arrested for trespassing after being caught peeping into a man’s house in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Taking the concept of ‘neighbourhood watch’ to extremes, Wakabayashi-san was picked up for peeking into the home of a 44-year-old company employee — just a few hundred metres from where the young teacher lives. The misguided mathematician making no attempt to disguise his dishonour by telling the police, “I went in because I wanted to peep.”

School officials were understandably shocked by the arrest, with headmaster Atsushi Misono saying, “We’re really surprised by this. We’ll hold an emergency meeting for parents on Saturday night to discuss how we’re going to go on from here. We’d like to apologise.” The perplexed principle further adding, “We had expected big things from him.”

The latter being a wish quite possibly echoed by the wily Wakabayashi himself — albeit under slightly different circumstances.

“44 percent of the people who said they weren’t having much sex felt that having a relationship with the opposite sex was ‘very tiresome’ or ‘tiresome’.”

Figures from a report by the Japan Family Planning Association after interviewing 936 people aged between 16 and 49.

Such forlorn findings appear to confirm that Japan’s already low birth rate is set to continue falling, and the nation’s unenviable position at the bottom of the ‘who’s getting it the most’ league table looks very secure indeed — apathy rather than ‘action’ very much the name of the game.

A sorry state of affairs that makes the self-explanatory term sexless marriage — coined in the early 1990’s — seem more appropriate than ever, with another recent poll overseen by the snappily named Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development suggesting that the situation is only set to get worse.

Conducted between March and April this year, the survey asked 3,900 newly hired employees what they would do if they were ordered to do overtime on a day they had already scheduled a date, with a whopping 85% of them saying they would work — the highest figure since the survey began in 1972.

A situation that perhaps unexpectedly means that sexless marriages could well become a thing of the past, as if people aren’t dating, and therefore not having sex, then presumably they’ll never get to the marriage stage and stop having sex because they won’t have been having it in the first place.

Or something like that.