DATING THE STATE:

No sex please -- we're Japanese: To an astonishing degree, the sexes are going their opposite ways in Japan. Young women are revolting against the traditional role of obedient housewife, opting instead to live at home and shop and socialize with girlfriends. Startled men are retreating into solitary ways. Check-ins at the country's famed 'love hotels' are even falling. As birthrates slip, a social crisis looms. (Paul Wiseman, 6/03/04, USA TODAY)

Junko Sakai was nervously looking forward to a romantic getaway with the man she'd been seeing. But when they arrived at a seaside hotel last fall, her beau requested separate rooms.

Stunned, Sakai nonetheless anticipated a late-night knock on the door. It never came. ''Nothing happened,'' the Tokyo writer says.

Nothing is happening with depressing regularity between Japanese men and women these days. Marriages, births and hanky-panky are all spiraling downward with troubling implications for the nation's future: A sagging birthrate means that fewer working-age people will be around to support a growing population of elderly; a social crisis looms.

Only in Japan would a popular weekly newsmagazine deem it necessary to exhort the nation's youth to abstain from sexual abstinence: ''Young people, don't hate sex,'' AERA magazine pleaded last month in a report detailing a precarious drop in sales of condoms and in business at Japan's rent-by-the-hour ''love hotels.''

More and more Japanese men and women are finding relationships too messy, tiring and potentially humiliating to bother with anymore. ''They don't want a complicated life,'' says Sakai, who has written a controversial bestseller, Cry of the Losing Dogs, on the plight of unmarried Japanese thirtysomething women like herself.

Such is the future the statists, secularists, population controllers, anti-immigrationists, etc. would have us embrace.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 6, 2004 9:55 AM