Into the Rising Sun 12

The US occupation after WWII further enforced American cultural values. Japan rebelled with hentai seiyoku surrogate fetish publications. One of these obsessions was women’s underwear. Japanese never traditionally wore any. Panties first came to Japan after the war, teaching the local girls to be ashamed of their vaginas, and to cover them up. The problem was thy were expensive, and the only women who could afford to wear them were the ‘pan-pan girls,’ the high-class prostitutes of the euphemistically-named RAA (Recreation Amusement Association). The panties paradox was that an item of clothing designed to suppress sexuality became intensely associated with sexuality it was designed to frustrate. There were special vending machines, for old male customers buying not new panties.
By the 1960s, fetishism had bolted its last gates, into sadomasochistic gender bender content. In 1986, Toshio Maeda got past the pixelated censored depictions of sexual intercourse, by creating tentacle sex. Pornography was characterized by sexual intercourse with monsters, demons, robots, and aliens, and their respectively bizarre genitalia but, unlike Hokusai's The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, these are modern violent invasive acts, the product of the cultural traumatic turmoil of the atomic age. 
Meat-eating Mad Men salarymen drink and carouse, and live out their underground fantasies in subterranean stations. At the Shibuya Pink Girl's Club in Tokyo, men pay $130 to grope the girl of their choice, from a menu of schoolgirls or office receptionists, on a simulated chikan densha pervert train. The girl beckons to him through the window of a mock-up carriage, which broadcasts station announcements, and shakes and rattles. In 2008, in Osaka, a 35 year old man named Manabu Mizuta was arrested, for repeatedly releasing hundreds of beetle larvae inside moving express trains, ‘to see women get scared and shake their legs.’ Soy sex.
But the biggest single sexual problem in Japan today is not any single degeneracy but the entire degeneration of the sexual activity of an entire generation. Over sixty per cent of unmarried Japanese men and half of unmarried women are not involved in any kind of a romantic relationship, choosing to love pandas and koalas and kittens instead; 45% of Japanese women polled say they are ‘not interested in or despised sexual contact.’   Japan’s total fertility rate is down to 1.21- ranked 220 out of the 224 nations listed in the CIA World Book. The actual population has been declining since 2006. By 2020, in the Land of the Rising Sun, adult diapers will outsell baby diapers: The sun also sets. Soy sex. No sex.
The collapsing demographics are obviously related to individual behaviour, and there is something new in the air and water. Be nice. Don’t have sex. The slow and subterranean currents of history and social change have created an unspoken rebellion against many of the masculine, materialist values associated with Japan's 1980s bubble economy. Meat-eating philoprogenitive samuroids, famously beastly to the Chinese, Allied prisoners of war, immigrant Koreans, and each other, and salarymen, hungry for products to mark their personal economic progress, have turned into herbivore soushoku danshi ’grass-eating boys,’ taking walks, shunning sex, and not spending money. The country's economic stagnation since the early 1990s has altered the behaviour of men, who have, in turn, made the economic stagnation worse. Grass-eating men are as alarming as they are, because they form the nexus between two of the biggest challenges facing Japanese society: the declining birth rate and anemic consumption. 
Up to 75 percent of men in their 20s and 30s describe themselves as grass-eating men. Named for their lack of interest in sex and their preference for quieter, less competitive lives, herbivores are softer, more orderly, tamer, and more obedient than their parents. Young Japanese men today have chosen to have less to prove. They have no desire to live up to traditional social expectations in their relationships with women, their jobs, or anything else.
Grass-eaters love to putter around the house, spend time by themselves or with close friends, and shop more for little luxuries than big-ticket items to decorate their homes with. They prefer vacationing in Japan to venturing abroad. They're often close to their mothers and have female friends, but they have spent so much time playing computer games that they prefer the company of cyber women to the real thing. Many grew up without siblings in households where both parents worked, but with TVs, stereos and game consoles in their bedrooms. They interacted less with their families, and ended up with poor communication skills, so they don't pursue women because they are bad at expressing themselves. They’re not particularly motivated by sex, prefer not to make the first move, and like to split the bill.
The lines between men and women seemed to have blurred; ‘Boys love’ is a genre of manga and novels written for women, about romantic relationships between men, that has spawned its own line of videos, computer games, magazines, and cafes where women dress as men. 
The Internet has helped make these alternative lifestyles more acceptable.
There is a downdraft of isolationism that the grass-eaters have produced, however, that has even further radicalized the next generation. Out of a total population of 128 million Japanese, there are now almost four million Hikikomori, adolescents and young adults who have chosen to completely retreat to their bedrooms and shut themselves off completely from society, boys lost in their video games and the world-wide-web. Triggers like poor grades or a broken heart have put them there, and protective parents, conscious of their social standing and averse to seeking professional help, allow them to remain, but the withdrawal itself can become the continuing traumatic reason for never leaving. A person’s reputation in the community and the pressure he or she feels to impress others, sekentei, is a powerful social force that conspires to keep him there. The longer hikikomori withdraw from society, the more aware they become of their social failure. Whatever self-esteem and confidence they may have had is lost, and the prospect of leaving home becomes ever more terrifying.