The US$2,700 answer to Amazon’s Echo could make Japan’s sex crisis even worse

By Ben Gilbert

Japan has a sex problem. The country’s birthrate is in the negative, where deaths are outpacing births.

Simply put, Japan’s population is decreasing.

But let’s be clear: Population change is a complicated subject affected by many factors.

Western media often correlates the decline in Japan’s population size with recent studies of Japanese sexual habits and marriage. A 2016 study by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in Japan, for instance, found that “almost 70 per cent of unmarried men and 60 per cent of unmarried women are not in a relationship.”