feline74:I've been hearing stories about Japanese women giving up on sex and romance for many years, usually as a response to those very same macho salarymen. If those stories are correct, then "grass-eating men" could be just the thing to get them back in the game.
I lived in Japan for 6 years in the '90s. The 'macho' stereotype belonged much more to the older generation of salary men, the ones who came of age just after the war. Your 50 or 60 year old salarymen could indeed be lecherous, chauvanistic pigs. I never had to rebuff sexual advances by an American school principal, but had to do it at a Japanese company party more than once. But when it came to the younger men, I always found them supremely milque-toasty and passive. For generations, these Japanese man-boys have been handed off to wives from their mothers. It's longstanding custom in Asia that unmarried adult children of both sexes live at home until marriage, unless they get into a company-sponsored dorm. Even then, they can only stay in the company dorm for a couple of years, after which they are supposed to not need subsidizing any more. Japanese men not yet in middle age can seem extremely socially awkward and infantile compared to their Western peers. But I see the same trend happening in the States with the current crop of 20-somethings--they all have tons of electronic toys in lieu of real relationships and "Failure to Launch" wasn't just a rom-com, but a societal trend.
Japanese women are tough--'iron butterflies--and much tougher than their men, in my opinion, international stereotype to the contrary. They will find a way around this. Or maybe they will decide to start using sperm banks or trolling the Internet hard for American husbands. I always thought their men didn't deserve them. Weaker sex, phooey!
