イギリス英会話ブログ

The expression in the title of this post has long been an in-joke amongst the English. Above and beyond the usual, boring prudishness that plagues certain sections of society, the English find public displays of an erotic nature highly embarrassing. (The expression’s origins lie in a long-running West End play, and later a feature-length film with the same title.)

The alternative to embarrassment is humour, which is a little better I suppose, though that humour tends to be akin to that childish phase of life when words like ’sex’ and ‘fart’ can cause hysterical laughter. This is not to say that the British (I wonder if the Northern Irish, Scots and Welsh really apply this ‘joke’ to themselves…) are in any way asexual. It’s just that we tend to believe that private things are best kept private, and become embarrassed or awkward when people fail to follow this unwritten rule, unless they can make it funny.

When sex does come up in conversation, it tends to be in the humourous fashion mentioned above, though with changing attitudes to women’s place in society, this humour has begun to change too. This change could probably be summed up as : less bottom-smacking, wolf-whistling and ‘nudge-nudge’ innuendo and more jokes about men’s inability to come up to women’s expectations in bed.

Since I came to Japan, I have lost count of the number of newspaper articles I have read on the subject of ’sexless marriage’ in this country. The impression one gets is of deeply unfulfilling relationships, based on a kind of mutual cooperation and tolerance, rather than any notion of romantic love or passionate desire. The fact, however, that these articles have mostly been in the English-language Japan Times, may indicate that they reflect a foreigner’s over-critical fault-finding - a popular pastime amongst non-Japanese living here. No matter what the country, there is probably no doubt that, if you look hard enough, you can find married couples with unimpressive sex lives.

From my point of view, I get the feeling that there is a certain fatalism in the Japanese attitude to life (or frame of mind?) which lends itself to compromise and the suppression of instinctive desires. Somehow the idea of a sexless marriage seems to fit nicely with the image of the typical salary-man - over-worked and without the time to give much thought to his own quality of life. One is simply too busy, and needs a decent woman to manage the home and family finances; one cannot afford to be too picky or too demanding. And nor can the ladies, either.
Or perhaps that is a consequence rather than a cause, and reflects Japanese men’s reluctance to invest quality time and emotion in their relationships with women?

I wonder if, for the fastidiously-clean Japanese, the act of sex is simply too dirty and sweaty and aesthetically dis-pleasing, for them to want to indulge in it on a regular basis? I know I’m pretty much scraping the barrel here, but I think this is a fairly serious problem for a lot of people. In any case, I am forgetting myself - such matters are not really for public discussion now, are they? Perhaps if you are Japanese you are squirming with embarrassment in your seat as you read this but hanging on in the hope that I will soon change the subject and move on to less prurient matters.

Well, allow me to oblige… Still on a related topic, I thought that this link to a UK Statistics service’s page on the divorce rate might be of interest to readers. Divorce seems to be decreasing in the UK, and in Japan, too. Maybe there is hope that people are beginning to find fulfilment in their married lives. One can pretty much pluck statistics out of the air to prove anything though. So, why does the Japan Times carry these stories? I’m guessing that most of its readers are foreigners, so it can’t be a scare tactic to horrify the Japanese young into raising their standards a bit, but just an excuse for foreigners to reconfirm their own evidently superior virility.