Like many Japanese women, Junko waited until her early 30s to get married. When she and her fiance, an employee of a well-known firm, decided to tie the knot, she set her sights on making a home, putting away some money and starting a family.
Fifteen years later, Junko and her husband are childless. It is not that they cannot have children; it is just that they have never had sex.
The sexless marriage is one of several reasons why experts fear Japan is on the verge of a demographic disaster.
PHOTO: AFP
In 2003 Japan's birthrate hit a record low of 1.29 -- the average number of times a woman gives birth during her lifetime -- one of the lowest rates in the world, according to the government. The population will peak next year at about 128 million, then decline to just over 100 million by 2050.
The 200 women a year who seek help at a clinic in the Tokyo suburbs have not had sex with their husbands in up to 20 years, and some never, according to Kim Myong-gan, who runs the clinic.
"The women who come to see me love their husbands and aren't looking for a divorce," he said.
"The problem is that their husbands lose interest in sex or don't want sex from the start. Many men think of their wives as substitute mothers, not as women with emotional and sexual needs."
Kim's short-term solution is unconventional. After an initial ?20,000 (NT$6,800) counselling session, he produces photographs of 45 men, mostly professionals in their 40s, with whom the women are invited to go on dates and then, in almost all cases, arrange regular assignations in hotel rooms.
Kim dismissed charges that his service was little more than a male prostitution ring. "The men volunteer and pay half the hotel and restaurant bills, so legally there is absolutely nothing wrong with it," he said.
He had rescued hundreds of women from despair, he said, but his "sex volunteers" would do nothing to cure the malaise that afflicts the institution of marriage in Japan.
The number of married couples is in rapid decline. In 2000 almost 70 percent of men and 54 percent of women between 25 and 29 were unmarried. That bodes ill for the birthrate, as conservative Japanese society frowns upon having children outside marriage.
A survey of 600 women found that 26 percent had not had sex with their husbands in the past year.
"We are sort of roommates rather than a married couple," one 31-year-old man, who had not had sex with his wife for two years, told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
The government has introduced several measures to lift the birthrate. Fathers will be encouraged to take more than the 47 percent of annual paid leave they currently use, and their employers will be told to provide more opportunities for them to stay at home with their children.
Local authorities, meanwhile, are devising novel ways to increase fertility. In the town of Yamatsuri women will receive ?1m if they have a third child, and in Ishikawa prefecture families with three children will get discounts at shops and restaurants.
The absence of children in so many homes is having an impact. Fun parks are closing and there are signs that the "exam hell" teenagers go through to secure places at top schools and universities is less of an ordeal because the competition is less fierce.
The divorce rate has nearly doubled in the past 10 years, with more women blaming their sexually inactive, as opposed to sexually errant, husbands for break-ups.
"The men love their companies; they live for work," Kim said. "Men don't even think it is a problem if they don't have sex with their wives. They have pornography and the sex industry to take care of their needs, but their wives have nowhere to go. They just suffer in silence."
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