“Japan Will Never Solve Its Declining Birthrate as Long as Sex Is Consigned to the Jungian Shadow”
“Japan Will Never Solve Its Declining Birthrate as Long as Sex Is Consigned to the Jungian Shadow”
What do you think?
I think this idea touches on something very important, although using the word “never” makes the argument slightly weaker as a theory.
From a Jungian perspective, it would be more precise to say that Japan does not place sex itself entirely in the Shadow. Rather, Japanese culture tends to separate desire, sexual pleasure, bodily experience, and openly expressed attraction to the opposite sex from the socially acceptable public self, or Persona, and push them into the Shadow.
In the public sphere of Japanese society, the Persona is often expected to be polite, clean, restrained, considerate, and not overtly driven by desire.
Behind that Persona, however, lie deeply biological forms of Eros:
“I want to hold someone.”
“I want to be held.”
“I want to express love through the body.”
“I want to be seen as a sexual being.”
“I want to feel sexually attractive.”
When these impulses are pushed underground, something strange happens.
What might naturally form a continuous sequence,
romance → sex → cohabitation → marriage → childbirth
becomes fragmented in Japan into separate administrative and social compartments:
romance | marriage | economics | child-rearing
Policies designed to increase the number of children also tend to focus on things such as child allowances, childcare facilities, parental leave, and education costs.
But before any of those stages comes something much more fundamental:
a man and a woman becoming intensely attracted to one another.
Policy discussions hardly ever touch this upstream layer.
In fact, a large Japanese survey conducted in 2024 found that 45.3% of men and 52.8% of women had not had sexual intercourse for more than a year, and if “sexlessness” is defined as no intercourse for more than one month, the figure exceeds 60% for both men and women. Declining sexual experience among younger generations has also been reported.
These figures do not prove a direct causal relationship with the birthrate, but they are highly compatible with this hypothesis.
But at a deeper level, the issue is not merely the repression of sex
I would go further and say that, in Japan, Eros itself is increasingly being pushed into the Shadow.
In the Jungian sense, Eros is not merely sexual intercourse.
It includes:
being drawn to another person,
needing someone,
touching bodies,
depending on another person,
feeling jealousy,
becoming consumed by love,
wanting to create a child together.
It is the irrational vitality of human life itself.
Yet the more highly managed and regulated a society becomes, the more it tends to prioritize things such as:
not failing,
not getting hurt,
not losing anything,
not being accused of harassment,
not inconveniencing others,
not damaging one’s career.
From the perspective of efficiency and risk management, romance then becomes an extremely dangerous activity.
Falling in love can impair judgment.
Sex carries the possibility of pregnancy.
Marriage carries the possibility of divorce.
Children require enormous amounts of time and money.
If life is calculated solely through rational cost-benefit analysis, then the following choices become remarkably rational:
do not fall in love,do not marry,do not have children.
That is where the situation becomes truly serious.
In Japan, almost all births still occur within marriage, so a decline in marriage directly translates into a decline in the number of births.
The OECD has also identified the decline in marriage as one of the major factors behind Japan’s low fertility rate. By 2020, the proportion of people who had never married by age 50 had risen to 28.4% among men and 17.8% among women.
This suggests a possible causal chain:
the relegation of sexual desire to the Shadow↓less approach toward potential partners↓less romance↓less sex↓fewer couples↓fewer marriages↓fewer births
This is a highly plausible pathway.
Of course, other factors are also involved:
employment insecurity,
housing costs,
education expenses,
long working hours,
the disproportionate burden of childcare placed on women,
and later marriage.
The OECD also emphasizes that declining fertility cannot be explained by a single cause. Economic insecurity, housing costs, childcare expenses, work-family balance, and social norms all interact.
For that reason, if I wanted to make the title of the argument more academically robust, I would write:
“A society that pushes sex into the Shadow cannot complete its response to declining fertility.”
I think this is actually stronger than saying that the birthrate will “never improve,” because it is much harder to dismiss.
And there is an even more interesting paradox
Japanese society suppresses sexuality on the surface, while sexual imagery is abundant in advertising, manga, pornography, idol culture, and entertainment.
From a Jungian perspective, this is almost archetypal.
The Shadow does not disappear. It erupts somewhere else.
This creates a society that appears paradoxical:
little sex, yet enormous amounts of sexual content.
Eros itself has not vanished.
Rather,
Eros has been separated from real human relationships and displaced into substitute representations.
Desire migrates into fantasy, entertainment, pornography, idols, fictional characters, and mediated intimacy.
I think this may be one of the most important and least discussed dimensions of Japan’s fertility problem.
Conclusion
My view is that your thesis contains a strong insight, although the word “never” makes it harder to defend scientifically.
From a Jungian perspective, Japan may not place sex itself entirely in the Shadow. Rather, sexual desire, bodily pleasure, vulnerability, dependence, and raw attraction tend to be separated from the socially acceptable Persona.
Eros then migrates away from real relationships into fantasy, entertainment, pornography, idols, and fictional intimacy.
The deeper causal chain may therefore be:
Shadowing of Eros → less approach behavior → less romance → less sex → fewer couples → fewer marriages → fewer births
Economic insecurity, housing, childcare costs, work culture, and gender roles clearly matter too.
But policies addressing only those factors may be treating the branches while ignoring part of the root.
My preferred formulation would be:
“A society that consigns sex and Eros to the Jungian Shadow cannot fully solve its fertility crisis.”
To me, that is even more powerful than saying it can “never” solve it.
