Culture: a Lot of Japanese women are "saving it" survey finds

Japan's demographic challenges are well-known: It's home to the world's oldest population and has a shrinking birthrate and an astonishing number of single people. And it seems that, despite government efforts to incentivize marriage and child-rearing, things aren't quite trending in the right direction.

According to the Japan Times, a new survey of Japanese people ages 18 to 34 found that 70 percent of unmarried men and 60 percent of unmarried women are not in a relationship. It gets worse: Around 42 percent of men and 44.2 percent of women admitted that they were virgins.

The study is carried out by Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research every five years. The organization has noted a marked trend since its first foray on questions of relationships and sex in 1987, when it found that 48.6 percent of men and 39.5 percent of women surveyed were unmarried. In 2010, 36.2 percent of men and 38.7 percent of women in the 18-34 age bracket said they were virgins. The number of children among couples who have been married for between 15 and 19 years averaged a record low this year.

The Japanese government under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said it wants to raise the nation's fertility rate from 1.4 to 1.8 by 2025. It's offering better child-care services and tax incentives for married couples, though such programs have yet to bear statistical fruit.

Most people surveyed said they want to get married at some point. It's just not clear when.

"They want to tie the knot eventually. But they tend to put it off as they have gaps between their ideals and the reality," Futoshi Ishii, head researcher for the study, told Japan Times. "That’s why people marry later or stay single for life, contributing to the nation’s low birthrate."

This is not unique to Japan — in various parts of the developed world, economic uncertainty is reshaping the way millennials and other young people conceive of their sex lives and marital choices. But it's particularly pronounced in the Asian nation, where experts and government officials have spent the better part of a decade fretting over the country's population decline and, as WorldViews once put it, "sexual apathy."

Music: Its getting even better for Kemmy Be Good

Whether its interviews on leading media outlets here and overseas, or holding down top slots on industry charts throughout the sphere of popular music, Kemmy Be Good has a bright future in Dancehall, 

In terms of chart action, he is currently holding down second place on 2 Top Ten Charts. "Mash Up" has the number 2 spot on Vibeslink Radio TopTen Music Video Charts, while his latest single, "Competition" released barely a month ago is holding the Number 2 spot on SFDC RADIO Jamaica Rising Stars Chart, a UK-based chart 

And media hosts and presenters ahve been showing much love as well. Kemmy Be Good was interviewed on ZIP-FM as recently as March of this year as one on Jamaican dancehall's rising stars, and he also gave his growing legion of fans an update on his career to date.

 

Just over a week a go, Kemmy Be Good was Featured on NewsTalk93FM's popular current music programme,  "Nightly Fix" Other dancehall stars featured on the programme in recent times include Busy Signal, Lisa Hyper and Bridgez.

And he is scoring in the "riddim section" too. His "Nah Smile" Riddim which features Dappa Dapz, and Pritti Shu as well as the creator, is doing well both locally and overseas. It has been featured on numerous dancehall mixtapes locally and  as far afield as the "rising Sun" nation of Japan. That is not to mention the rotations on local outlets such as HITZ FM, ROOTS FM, throughout the Caribbean and even to Africa 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CdI9loY44c

 http://sfdcradio.com/jamaica-rising-stars/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1rrQGyYSeE  

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBlaE9l-bdk

localjoe.myorganogold.com

 England and

America.

Book review: The erotic memoir returns, from the East

A touchstone of the 1970s "Me Decade"(and in fact a holdover from the 1920s/1930s heyday of Henry Miller, Anais Nin et al), the erotic memoir  essentially disappeared from popular consciousness and discourse from the early 80s onward.

Who better than a Jamaican to revive the genre and with a near unexpected twist?

Stefhen Bryan initially escapes his mother's repressive parental style, or so he thinks, when he lands,at age 15, at his father's place in New York City. When it becomes clear however, that his father is totally uninterested in nay kind of relationship with him, he begins a westward odyssey that takes him first to Denver Colorado, and eventually to California. the substance of Bryan's parental relationships are detailed in the one-man play "Doodu Boy", which forms an important corollary to this book.

After gaining his first degree, and with brief detours in the UK as well as back in his native Jamaica, Bryan - financially down and dogged by his own familial obligations, accepts, in 2001, an offer to teach English in Japan, where he is suddenly able to fulfill his long-held predilection for Oriental women - an appetite first stoked in Jamaica, where the girls of Chinese and mixed ancestry offered a picture of  financial substance relative tothe grinding poverty of his own formative years.

Thus given free rein, Bryan indulges in a sexual spree that would likely defeat many men and may well have made Miller himself proud. Wives, students, professionals (including the co-ordinator of his teaching course) all make up what he describes as a "revolving army of sexual partners, all Japanese. 

The memoir describes Bryan's carnal adventures through a cultural lens that touches on interracial relationships, promiscuity, patriarchy and abortion. Included is sex research that one reviewer asserts "would make Kinsey proud." 

This ethnic exclusivity does impart to the author some insights as to a national psyche of the Japanese woman (aided by Bryan's own extensive bouts of therapy), but for the reader, it largely comes off as a little black book opened for public viewing; one sexual conquest essentially following another, with much the same descriptives used. Bryan's dynamism (coupled with a distinctly amoral persona) is palpable, but the prose itself is never spectacular enough to transcend the subject matter. 


 The author's outsider-insider observations of mores and relationships in Japan are fascinating. They are also the kind of blunt talk you won't get elsewhere. Black Passenger, Yellow Cabs is a ride you may take willingly - but perhaps only once.

Performing Arts: The Journey of "Doodu-san" from Pit to Peace

At no age or stage in life would most human beings contemplate or envisage the consequences of falling chest deep into a pit latrine (think faeces, toilet paper and giant cockroaches and rats).

Little wonder then that Stefhen (no longer Stephen, he remade himself even a his father worked on a "replacement" ) Bryan has a certain skew on life: he lived through just such a nightmarish ordeal while still in what we refer to as "short pants,"

That rude entry into life's potential for adversity became the opener and theme for his excellent and mostly compelling one-man show, "Doodu Boy" (doodu of course being slang for feces) which had a special one-night only preview performance at New Kingston's Theatre Place.

In that well-executed piece we meet young Steve, the typically curious, hyper-imaginative young Jamaican kid mired in poverty and at the mercy of an overbearing, Scripture-quoting mother with a more than free hand when it comes to dishing out beatings to her son.

The situation is of course so dire that Steve has violent fantasies of killing his mother and moving to "'Merica" to live with his absentee Dad. that latter dream eventually comes true at age 15, but the underside of Steve's American Dream and "life in Paradise" comes up all too quickly as he discovers that his father, a mercurial, materialistic yet somehow successful engineer, was even more disdainful of him than his mother.

Faced with this greatest rejection, Bryan heads west, first to family in Denver Colorado and then on to California, where a latent predilection for Oriental women is given  free rein and expression - much of which ends up in his book "Black Passenger, Yellow Cabs" (check back in a couple days for our review of the book).

When an attempt to visit his father for a reconciliation goes awry - his father calls the cops and reveals that he has in fact, fathered another son - to whom he has also given the name "Stephen" - the crushed Bryan responds to a call to teach English....in Japan.

There, he furthers his own education in Oriental delights, but also learns the language and  - as is often the way of such things - falls in love. Even this is an occasion for Jamaican-style bawdiness, as the love of his life is revealed to him as the first girl with whom sex is - for a lengthy initial period anyway -impossible, owing to what he describes as her "monster hymen."

In the wake of losing his mother to cancer (after an intervening heart to heart of sorts while on a home spell), Steve, with his new wife, attempts one last bid to reconcile with his Dad. The latter proves taciturn to the end, but two strokes, and the travails of loneliness (the younger "Steve" has since grown and moved out) have softened him to the point where even an awkward conversation is possible.

Bryan's stage presence and visual communication skills are highly evolved and his total lack of self-consciousness while sharing details which might floor lesser mortals make the play a very engaging experience, one which even Jmaaicans, accustomed tothe ensemble presentation, will be held rapt by