فصل 05

CHAPTER 5

INTERNATIONAL INVESTIGATIONS OF LOVE

When I decided to write this book, one of the things I really wanted to explore was how the different issues in modern romance manifested themselves in other countries. My interest in this started one night when I was doing stand-up in a small club in New York. I was talking about texting and I asked for a volunteer who’d met someone recently and had been texting back and forth with them. I read the back-and-forth messages of one gentleman and made jokes about how we were all dealing with some version of this nonsense.

I quickly noticed that one woman seemed very puzzled. I asked her why she looked so bewildered, and she explained that this was something that just didn’t happen in France, where she was from. This kind of back-and-forth simply didn’t exist, she claimed.

I asked her, “Okay, well, what would a guy in France text you, if you met him at a bar?”

She said, “He would write . . . ‘Fancy a fuck?’”

And I said, “Whoa. What would you write back?”

She said, “I would write yes or no depending on whether I fancied one or not.”

I was stunned—that kind of makes so much more sense, right?

Internationally, there’s a huge variety of dating cultures that have their own quirks and dilemmas. Our interviews in Doha were interesting and made me excited about the possibilities of researching dating in other cultures. Obviously, we couldn’t study all of them, so Eric and I had to be very selective about where we went. After a lot of debate, the places we landed on were Paris, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires.

The reason for Paris is obvious. It’s the city of love, blah, blah, blah. Also, relationships in Paris are similar to what we’d read about in other European countries, where dating as we know it in America is not really part of the culture. People hang out in groups of friends, and if they want to start a relationship with someone, they just do it. They are also a bit more casual about sex and have a different attitude toward infidelity, as we will see in the next chapter.

Tokyo was the next place I suggested. This was done less in the interest of the book and more in the interest of me enjoying some delicious ramen. However, after discussing the idea with Eric, we realized Tokyo was a great place to go because Japan is going through a crisis of sorts. Marriage and birthrates are in a huge decline, many young people are showing a lack of interest in romance, and also, again, I love ramen. It was clear Tokyo was a great choice, both for the book—and our tummies.*

While Japan is experiencing a decline in sexual interest, we also wanted to see the other extreme, so we went to explore the romantically aggressive culture of Buenos Aires. There’s a good reason that Buenos Aires is often called the world’s best city for dating.1 PDA is rampant. People are dancing in sweaty clubs until eight or nine in the morning. Sex is everywhere you look.

So there’s our itinerary. While we couldn’t go everywhere, these places all provided a uniquely interesting take on modern romance around the world. Okay, let’s go. First stop, Tokyo!

TOKYO:

THE LAND OF HERBIVORES AND TENGAS

My initial thought was that Tokyo would have a highly active dating scene. It is a booming metropolis, throbbing with life and energy, arguably even more so than New York. You have everything—the tastiest restaurants, the coolest stores, and the weirdest stuff that you can’t find anywhere else in the world. An entire video arcade filled with nothing but photo booths? Yep. A vending machine that grows and sells fresh heads of lettuce? Yep. A restaurant with a dinner show where bikini-clad dancers ride in on huge robots and tanks? What else do you think goes down at the Robot Restaurant in Shinjuku?

THE ROBOT RESTAURANT IN TOKYO. SERIOUSLY. This is a real place. What the hell is happening in this picture? It appears that three Asian women are dancing on three giant Asian women robots. Too meta? Those people in the photo sure do seem entertained.

Plus, I’d heard rumors of “love hotels”—which are what they sound like: hotels specifically built for hooking up. But, of course, this being Japan, they sometimes have really amazing decor—there’s even a Jurassic Park–themed one. Seriously, this exists. I am not joking.

NOTE: There were no photos available online so this is an artist rendition commissioned by me for the book. I hope the rooms are this cool and you get picked up from the airport in a tricked-out JP Ford Explorer from the nineties.

At night the neon signs turn the city into an adult adventure land: The streets, bars, and clubs are raucous and busy. Something fun and interesting is lurking in every nook and cranny. You can wander onto the third floor of an office building and find an amazing high-end cocktail bar behind one door, a record store behind another, and past the hallway a bizarre nightclub filled with Japanese men wearing Bill Clinton masks giving back rubs to dogs.

Walk through many of the big neighborhoods often enough, and you are bound to stumble upon a little hidden corner with sex stores and the aforementioned love hotels—which are actually nice, clean hotels that rent by the hour and are used by couples to pop in and do their thing. Upon first glance, the city closest to Tokyo in terms of dating infrastructure would seem to be New York.

I also assumed the tech-obsessed Japanese were probably on the next level of dating websites and apps. These people invented emojis, for god’s sake! They were texting and they thought, Yeah, this is great, but it’d be really dope to be able to send a small image of a koala bear too.* Who knew what their texting back-and-forth would look like? I couldn’t wait to do our interviews and see what kind of stuff was going on.

It all seemed ideal for the perfect dating city, but I could not have been more off. All my assumptions were wrong. Start doing even the slightest research into Japan and love, and you’ll quickly find sensational articles describing a full-blown crisis. According to demographers, journalists, and even the Japanese government, it’s a hot potato.

Sorry, I needed another word for “crisis,” and when I entered the word “crisis” into Thesaurus.com, it suggested “hot potato” as a synonym. I could not write this book without letting you know that Thesaurus.com lists “hot potato” as a synonym for “crisis.”

“Hey, did you hear about what’s happening with Israel and Palestine? It’s becoming a real hot potato.”

Anyway, back to Japan. You read these articles and they are just filled with panicky language: “No one’s fucking!” “No one’s getting married and having kids!” “Young people aren’t interested in boning anymore!!”

Those aren’t direct quotes, but that’s pretty much what you read.

It sounded alarmist to me. Young people are just not interested in sex?! How could that be possible? Let’s bust out some scary-ass statistics.

• In 2013 a whopping 45 percent of women aged sixteen to twenty-four “were not interested in or despised sexual contact,” and more than a quarter of men felt the same way.2 I’ve always wanted to describe a statistic as “whopping,” and I think we can concur, this is indeed whopping. Seriously, read those numbers one more time. Despised sexual contact.

• The number of men and women between eighteen and thirty-four who are not involved in any romantic relationship with the opposite sex has risen since 1987, from 49 percent to 61 percent for men and from 39 percent to 49 percent for women.3

• A whopping one third of Japanese people under thirty have never dated,4 and in a survey of those between thirty-five and thirty-nine, more than a quarter reported that they’d never had sex.5 (Okay, that was the last “whopping” I’ll use.)

• Almost half of Japanese men and one third of women in their early thirties were still single as of 2005.6

• In 2012, 41.3 percent of married couples had not had sex in the past month, the highest percentage since the figures became available in 2004. There was a steady rise over the previous ten years, from 31.9 percent in 2004.7

• Japan’s birthrate ranks 222nd out of 224 countries.8 A report compiled with the government’s cooperation two years ago warned that by 2060 the number of Japanese will have fallen from 127 million to about 87 million, of whom almost 40 percent will be sixty-five or older.9

This last stat is particularly alarming. The Japanese are legitimately worried about running out of Japanese people. No more ramen?? No more sushi?? No more high-end Japanese whiskeys??! You see how this is really a hot potato.

The situation has reached a point where even the government has seen the need to step in. Since 2010 the Japanese state has paid parents a monthly allowance of between $100 and $150 per child, to take some of the financial burden out of child raising. But before you can have a kid, you need to find someone to love and marry, right? Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe allocated $25 million in the 2014 fiscal budget for programs designed to get people to pair off and have babies, including government-funded dating services. An official survey conducted in 2010 showed that 66 percent of all prefecture governments and 33 percent of city/ward/town/village governments were implementing some form of marriage support. Even more do so today.10

We asked the Japanese American sociologist Kumiko Endo, who studies the new “marriage support” programs that the Japanese government has established, to give us some examples. In Niigata Prefecture, she said, “marriage support events include tours (e.g., bus tour to nearby shrine), cultural events (e.g., cooking classes), sports events, and seminars (coaching sessions for men while fishing).” Saga Prefecture has set up a Department of Connection that fixes up singles who want to meet new people, and both Shizuoka and Akita prefectures now provide Internet communication services for singles, whom they inform about various parties and events for singles, some of which are supported by the government. Finally, Fukui Prefecture recently launched an online dating site called the Fukui Marriage-Hunting Café, and couples who meet on the site and marry receive cash and gifts.

The government is sending Japanese couples wedding presents? What on earth is happening there?

Learning about this crisis—and remembering how much I was fiending for authentic ramen and all the other delights of Tokyo—it was clear I needed to hit the ground myself to find out what was happening.

Contemplating the sexual crisis in Japan while wearing a kimono in Kyoto . . .

THE HISTORY AND CURRENT STATE OF MARRIAGE IN TOKYO

Before getting into the current situation in Japan, it’s important to understand that Japan has also seen a large shift in how adults view and pursue the institution of marriage. My sociologist friend Kumiko explained to me that up until World War II, arranged marriages were more common than any other form of matrimony. Even in the 1960s approximately 70 percent of all marriages were set up by families. In the 1970s the workplace became a prime site for finding a mate. Large companies would organize social gatherings, and cultural norms dictated that most women would quit their posts after they married and started a family.11

Today, however, that system is a relic. Arranged marriages are uncommon (down to 6.2 percent as of 2005).12 Like the United States, Japan has adopted a more individualistic culture based on personal choice and happiness. The Japanese economy has been sluggish since the 1990s, and the modern workplace has become a site for stressful competition. It’s no longer acting as a de facto singles bar for professionals.

So, if the old system is now broken, what has replaced it?

HERBIVORE MEN

After arriving in Tokyo, I knew I had a limited amount of time to do what I needed to get done: visit the five best ramen shops in the city. After eating my fill of ramen, it was time to get down to business: visiting that robot restaurant, because, man, who could pass up an opportunity like that? Then duty called: I also had to visit that Bill Clinton mask/dog back-rub place. It was awesome. Then a quick nap, and finally I started doing some research for this book.

First we organized some focus groups to discuss dating in Tokyo. Dozens of young adults in their midtwenties and early thirties spoke to us (or, in most cases, spoke to Kumiko, who translated their Japanese).

Going in, one of the notions I was most curious about was the “herbivore man.” This is a term that has become ubiquitous in Japan over the past few years to describe Japanese men who are very shy and passive and show no interest in sex and romantic relationships. Surveys suggest that about 60 percent of male singles in their twenties and thirties in Japan identify themselves as herbivores.13

In the first group we held, one of the first to arrive was Akira. A good-looking young Japanese dude in a really sharp suit, Akira, thirty, looked like he was probably doing well for himself. He seemed like a successful, confident young man. This guy wasn’t an herbivore, right?

We did interviews and focus groups with singles on four continents, and in most of them we broke the ice by asking people to tell us how many people they’d asked out or flirted with on their smartphones in the past few weeks. When we asked Akira that question, he just shrugged. Pretty much all the guys shrugged.

Akira said he was working now and too busy to have a girlfriend. Several others we interviewed echoed this sentiment. “I just got a job in construction and there aren’t many girls my age, so there’s nowhere for me to meet them,” said Daisaku, twenty-one.

His friend Hiro nodded. “I’m busy with work and it’s not very urgent. I have to deal with work first, and that takes up my weekdays. I play video games when I go home. On the weekends I hang out with Daisaku and we go out drinking.”

“Can’t you meet women when you’re out drinking?” we asked. “No.” Hiro blushed. “It’s charai [kinda sleazy, in a playboy way] to try to pick up a woman you don’t know. But also, if a girl said yes to me, I wouldn’t want to go out with her. I don’t like girls who would want to be with a guy openly like that. Looking, smiling, winking. I want a girl who’s seiso [pure].”

“Pure?” Eric asked. “Like, a virgin?”

They laughed uncomfortably. “Not exactly,” Daisaku said. “But it has to be someone with the right background, with the right family. If it was someone I just met somewhere, I’d be too embarrassed to tell my parents. They’d be disappointed.”

“How did your parents meet?”

“At work,” Daisaku said.

“An arranged marriage,” Hiro offered.

“This situation seems really difficult,” Eric said. “You want a girlfriend, and the women we meet want boyfriends, but no one knows how to make it happen. Do you feel like it’s a problem?”

“I don’t really think anything about it,” Hiro replied matter-of-factly. “It’s not a problem and it’s not not a problem. It is what it is. Because everyone’s like that here. I don’t even think about it because it’s the norm.”

Akira said that he would only ask a woman out if it was clear without any doubt that she was interested. When asked why, he said, “She could reject me,” and every other guy in the room literally groaned in support. It was clear that the fear of rejection was huge, and much more so than I’d seen among men in America.

I asked the women about the herbivore men and whether they wished guys would take more initiative. It was a resounding yes. These women yearned for the men in Japan to step up and just ask them out. From their perspective, the men’s extreme need for assurance and comfort from the women was irritating. Their frustration was palpable. You could see that they were indeed becoming what the press called “the carnivorous woman.” Some of these women described how they would now take the role more commonly played by Western men and approach Japanese men and ask for phone numbers. Wow, how charai of them, I thought, remembering the word I had learned three minutes earlier.

However, they said it wasn’t always easy. They described how even if they did meet a guy and engage with him, it was like an even more nightmarish version of the American guy who just keeps texting and doesn’t ask a girl out. The texts would keep going and going.

“He will just be so shy and he just needs to feel soooo comfortable with you,” one woman said. “Unless men are really confident that the woman likes them back, they can’t make the move,” another lamented. As one man described it, “They’re waiting for the woman to be totally embracing of them before they make any kind of move.” The fear of rejection even manifests itself in the phone world.

I asked for an example of a back-and-forth text. A woman told me about one guy who had texted with her. The way she described it was that he was never really flirtatious. It would be very direct, impersonal things about movies he’d seen or his pets. One night he texted her and said, “I have this big head of cabbage. How should I cook this?”

I asked if this was maybe a very, very lame, roundabout dinner-date invitation—to ask her to come over for cabbage. “No, he was really asking me how to cook cabbage,” she moaned.

The same guy e-mailed her a few days later with this gem, and again, this is not a joke: “I recently got my futon wet and put it outside to dry, but it got caught in the rain, so now it’s wet again.”

Wow. Quite a suspenseful tale.

• • •

What begat the rise of the herbivore man? There seems to be an almost perfect stew of social and economic ingredients that has cultivated this stereotype. Speaking of stew, while in Tokyo, I went to an izakaya called Kanemasu that had an amazing short-rib dish, one of the most succulent—okay, sorry, getting off track again.

Social scientists argue that the herbivore man emerged with the decline of the Japanese economy. In Japanese culture, as in many cultures, men’s confidence and sense of self is tied to their professional success. Everyone we talked to in Tokyo seemed to recall the booming eighties as a different era for romance, with salarymen, flush with cash, who could confidently approach a pretty woman and ask for her number without fear. This too is probably an exaggeration, but a telling one. With career jobs now gone, it’s not only harder for men to meet a partner but also harder for them to support her financially. So it makes sense that insecurity might leave men feeling more scared of rejection.

Many single men also now live at home with their parents well into their twenties and thirties. The women in the focus groups felt that this situation only worsened a mothering complex already prevalent in Japanese culture. A man who lives at home can expect his mother to cook, clean, and do his laundry for him. The theory goes that guys are so used to being taken care of, they lose their manly instincts.

On top of that, men in Japan are probably not as comfortable around women in general because they didn’t grow up spending as much time with them. Much of the educational system in Japan is single sex, and there’s also sex segregation in co-ed schools. Physically, socially, and to some extent psychologically, boys and girls grow up on separate tracks until at least high school and often until college. Many people don’t date until their twenties. Nearly 50 percent of the single guys in Japan don’t even have friends of the opposite sex.14

When you combine the economic decline, men’s infantilization by their mothers, their fear of rejection, and the lack of contact with the opposite sex throughout their lives, the herbivore man starts making a lot of sense.

• • •

Now, I don’t want to paint the picture that every Japanese guy is a super shy dude who has no interest in sex. There definitely seems to be a lot of that, but there are also plenty of Japanese men who are nonherbivores, who have dating lives that resemble those of the typical omnivorous American man. In our focus groups we met Koji, a young bartender, who seemed to be the most omnivorous of the bunch.

The thing is Koji wasn’t some super stud or anything. Compared with the other guys, he was a little shorter. He wasn’t dressed in a super sharp suit like Akira and the other professionals. He wore a gray vest and a brown fedora. What he had was a casualness and forthrightness to him that, though fairly normal by American standards, really stood out in Japan. Those in the focus groups who knew Koji spoke of his seemingly mythical love life in hushed tones and were in awe of his confidence. Again, Koji was not some Asian Ryan Gosling figure; he just seemed to be comfortable with himself and not particularly shy. Like most fedora wearers, he had a lot of inexplicable confidence.

He and another friend of his wanted to make sure we knew there were some Japanese men who weren’t herbivores and that maybe the media was blowing this out of proportion.

“Can I just speak for real? If I don’t have a girlfriend, I can go find someone to have sex with. I think those guys who say they’re not having sex for a long time? I think they’re bullshitting. They just don’t talk about it,” he said.

“If you’re single in New York, you get on your phone and text people late at night and try to meet up with someone. There’s a whole culture of a ‘booty call.’ What’s the process here?” I asked.

“My friends and I do the same thing. I call all of them and no one will pick up.”

“Well, the same thing happens in New York sometimes too,” I said.

• • •

At the same time Japanese men are undergoing a transformation, a new kind of Japanese woman is emerging as well. Historically, educated women would get office jobs after university, meet men there, and then leave the job to become wives and mothers. Now women are pushing back, and more educated women want to work. They learn skills, like speaking English. They travel the world. They pursue careers of their own. These professional women don’t want to conform to the old norm of being the submissive woman who abandons her own career ambitions to be a housewife. However, being educated, speaking English, and having a good job seem to intimidate some men, with some women even describing their success as a “turnoff” for their would-be suitors. “Men here, they have high pride,” one woman told me. “They don’t want a successful woman who makes a pretty good salary. The minute they find out I’m bilingual, they’re like, Oh no . . . ”

By the end of our focus groups, it was pretty clear that Japanese men and women are on different trajectories. Women are still far from equal, but they are beginning to establish themselves in the Japanese economy and they are gaining all sorts of rights and privileges in the culture as well.

Men are struggling to hold on to their status. Whether in the workplace or in the family, they’ve fallen from the heights of previous generations and are having trouble figuring out what to do next.

Some are clearly so confused that they have taken to wearing fedoras.

A difficult period indeed.

A RICE COOKER AS A PROFILE PIC: WELCOME TO ONLINE DATING IN JAPAN

Given the state of Japanese dating culture, you would think online dating would be a perfect solution. Sending a message to a potential mate on a website is much less intimidating than asking someone for their number in a bar, right? What better way to mitigate your fear of rejection? The Japanese are also notorious early adopters. If one-third of U.S. marriages are now formed by people meeting online, you’d guess that even more Japanese marriages begin digitally. But although the rise of online dating could be very helpful in Japan, alas, it is not to be. The concerns about being perceived as charai (sleazy playboy type) extend into the social media world as well, and some of the necessary facets of online dating are frowned upon in Japan.

Consider profile pictures. Dating online requires self-promotion. A dating profile is a kind of advertisement, a way of marketing yourself to prospective partners. But this attitude doesn’t really fit well with Japanese culture.

In Japan, posting any pictures of yourself, especially selfie-style photos, comes off as really douchey. Kana, an attractive, single twenty-nine-year-old, remarked: “All the foreign people who use selfies on their profile pic? The Japanese feel like that’s so narcissistic.” In her experience, pictures on dating sites would generally include more than two people. Sometimes the person wouldn’t be in the photo at all.

I asked what they would post instead.

“A lot of Japanese use their cats,” she said.

“They’re not in the photo with the cat?” I asked.

“Nope. Just the cat. Or their rice cooker.”

Let’s do this, ladies . . .

“I once saw a guy posted a funny street sign,” volunteered Rinko, thirty-three. “I felt like I could tell a lot about the guy from looking at it.”

This kind of made sense to me. If you post a photo of something interesting, maybe it gives some sense of your personality? I showed a photo of a bowl of ramen I had taken earlier in the day and asked what she thought of that as a profile picture.

She just shook her head.

OH, I GUESS I CAN’T HOLD A CANDLE TO THAT STREET SIGN DUDE, HUH?

MACHIKON AND GOKON

So online dating is not taking off. What else? There is a traditional group date called a gokon, where a guy invites a few guy friends and a girl invites a few girlfriends, and the group goes out for dinner and drinks. But even at these gatherings women report that most guys are too shy to ask for their numbers. For an exchange to happen, the host would have to announce, “Okay, everyone, let’s all exchange numbers.” I actually participated in a gokon in Tokyo once as part of a travel piece for GQ magazine. Unfortunately, the women they selected did not speak English and I was armed only with the Japanese phrase for “Do you like pizza?” By the end of the evening, filled with delicious yakitori (grilled meats) and beer, most of the women thought I had a story arc as “Indian Chandler” on Friends, and I could confirm that two of them did indeed enjoy pizza.

For those men we met who said that they were too busy with work at the moment, gokon seemed like the most comfortable option for them to explore meeting women. But this presents challenges for men who don’t have any female friends to organize a gokon with.

A newer trend for meeting people is machikon. In machikon men and women pay to participate in a huge, roving party filled with hundreds and hundreds of singles who wander through a neighborhood’s bars and restaurants. At some machikon most people go solo; at others partygoers begin the event by sharing a meal with the one or two friends who come with them, as well as with a few strangers of the opposite sex; after that the organizers move people around, musical chairs style, and participants wind up mingling with lots of other singles. What’s amazing about these events is that both the private sector and the Japanese government are now subsidizing the establishments that host them. According to Kumiko Endo, the sociologist who showed us around Tokyo and studies machikon for her dissertation, bar and restaurant owners get twenty-five to thirty-five dollars per seat that they give to the parties.

In all the research I’ve done on dating, I haven’t heard of another place where the state is throwing money into the singles scene, effectively buying a few drinks for every young person willing to go on the prowl. Thus far the public investment in these events is modest, but it’s a signal of how seriously the government views the marriage drought and of how much it will take to reinvigorate the matchmaking market.

THE RELATIONSHIP REPLACEMENT INDUSTRY: EGGS, PROSTITUTES, AND SOAPLAND

For a lot of the herbivore-esque guys we spoke to, it still seems like it would take quite a lot to overcome the hurdle of shyness to properly engage in these group dating activities. There were also women who weren’t willing to settle for the restrictions that come with traditional marriages and families. Like women in the United States and Europe and an ever-growing number of other places, they want to have rewarding work lives and careers too. The problem in Tokyo is that people who aren’t interested in or capable of entering a traditional romantic relationship don’t have the alternative of an active casual dating culture like you may find in New York.

Lucky for them, Japan has not only a huge sex industry but also what some have dubbed a “relationship replacement” industry that provides everything from “cuddling cafés” (where clients pay for things like pats on the head, eye contact, and ear cleaning with a Q-tip) to full-on sex robots that are built to last for years.15 I never thought I would say this, but of those two things, having sex with a robot seems like the more reasonable option.

The most popular kind of establishment in the relationship replacement industry is the hostess club, which is basically the latest variation of a long-standing Japanese business tradition where men go to a nice bar-type atmosphere and pay women to provide intimate personal service in a romantic but not explicitly sexual way. The women are like modern-day geishas: They light the men’s cigarettes, serve them drinks, and listen attentively to their conversation, doing more or less what an ideal Japanese wife or girlfriend would do.16 Lots of men stop by these clubs after work, either alone or in groups. To be clear, though, this doesn’t lead to any sexual contact. No nudity or sex happens at hostess clubs. It’s basically like prostitution, but they just hang out with you. I was very confused.

Al, a young expat originally from Baltimore, tried to explain the motivations. “It’s like, I’m lonely, I’m scared of people,” he said. “I need to vent or just have a drink with someone who will listen to me and not judge me. They’re paying for the security. They’re paying not to be rejected.”

Women also go to host clubs, which provide the same service: outgoing men who converse and have drinks with them. Again, this does not lead to sex; it’s purely for companionship. These women are basically paying to hang out with nonherbivore men for a while.

But what about sex? Prostitution of the penis-into-vagina sort is illegal in Japan, and while there is a black market, the Japanese have also developed some creative legal alternatives. One that is quite popular and came up several times in our focus groups was Soapland, where a guy lies on a waterproof mattress and a woman covers them both in soapy water and slides all over him. You can pay extra for additional services like oral sex or a hand job. Soapland, which is just a ridiculous word, does not carry a huge stigma. (On a side note, I would give pretty much anything to have been in the room where the guy said, “I’ve got it! We’ll call it . . . Soapland!”)

Some men told us if they went out in groups of friends, it wouldn’t be absurd for one dude to be like, “Okay, I’ll catch you guys later. I’m going to hit Soapland real quick.” Again, it seems that, beyond the sexual pleasure, Soapland is providing a safe outlet for rejection-free romantic exploits. Why go to a nightclub to try to find casual sex and risk rejection when you can go to Soapland and be 100 percent sure a woman will place you on a waterproof mattress, cover you in lubricant, and then slide up and down your oiled-up body?

• • •

And of course there are straight-up illegal prostitutes. When we pushed this topic, we were surprised at how prostitution seemed much more common and accepted than in the United States. One participant in a focus group was a teaching assistant at a local university, and he told us that his college students often talked to him about their trips to visit prostitutes. It didn’t seem to be a big deal to him. The students might as well have said that they went to get ice cream after class.

Now, admittedly, there are no perfect data on how often men go to prostitutes in different countries. But the best statistics we could find showed that roughly 37 percent of Japanese men have paid for sex at least once, compared with 16 percent of French men, 14 percent of American men, and 7 to 9 percent of British men.17

For those men in Tokyo who aren’t into Soapland and brothels, there are sex shops everywhere, and they cater to every fetish imaginable, from French maids to girls in school uniforms to anime characters.

There’s also a booming market in sex toys, which are sold with no stigma attached. One of the most popular recent inventions is the Tenga. What’s a Tenga? If you go on the company’s website, you’ll see what might be the greatest slogan of any corporation ever: “The future of masturbation . . . is NOW.”

The company specializes in masturbation devices like the egg, a single-use silicone egg that men fill with lubricant and masturbate inside. When you’re done, you seal it up and throw it away.

Fun fact: One of the directors of the Tenga Corporation, Masanobu Sato, holds the world record for the longest time spent masturbating: nine hours and fifty-eight minutes. That means he could have watched all three Lord of the Rings films in a row while masturbating, and as the credits of The Return of the King finished rolling, he’d still have had forty-one minutes of masturbating to do.

This also made me realize: The only thing sadder than holding the record for longest masturbation is realizing you lost it to someone else.

“Sorry, man, he just jerked off for a few minutes longer. Better luck next year.”

None of the news articles that described the lack of interest in sex in Japan really delved into this whole world of strange sexual alternatives, and when you learn about it, it does kind of explain the alleged “lack of interest” in sex. The herbivore sector is interested in sexual pleasure but just not interested in achieving it through traditional routes. In their eyes, it seems, if you’re so mortified at the thought of rejection by a woman, why not just jerk off in an egg and call it a day?

• • •

At this point you are probably wondering: What was my top meal in Tokyo? Well, it’s tough to say. I really enjoyed Sushisho Masa, a high-end sushi restaurant. However, I also really enjoyed the tasty tempura I had from the working-class vendors in Tsukiji Market. And of course there was the ramen.

To be honest, the food scene in Tokyo was way easier to understand than the singles scene. It’s hard to figure out why sex and relationships have changed so dramatically, so quickly, and why so many people have turned inward—staying home alone, playing video games, or hanging out in cat cafés—rather than reaching out for one another.

On my last night in Tokyo, I decided to keep an open mind and buy a Tenga. Every stage of it was a bummer. I went into a convenience store and had to say, “Do you guys have Tengas?” The lady gave me a sad look and pointed me in the right direction. As I paid, I smiled and said, “Research for a book project!” It didn’t seem to convince her that I was cool. Instead, she’s probably convinced I’m doing some very bizarre book called Masturbating Across the Globe: One Man’s Journey to Find Himself.

When I got back to my hotel room, I opened the thing up and gave it a go. I was kind of excited to see if it really was masturbation taken to the next level. Masturbation at the current level feels pretty good, so maybe this wouldn’t be bad? Again, no. The experience of using an egg-shaped masturbation device was both odd and uncomfortable. The thing you put your thing into was cold and weird. It felt like I was masturbating with a thick, cold condom on, and I didn’t understand the appeal.

But in a symbolic sense the Tenga seemed to be an alternative to casual dating and sex. It was a way to avoid putting yourself out there and having an actual experience with another person. Say what you will about casual sex and the substance and quality of that experience, but the more casual encounters I had in my own periods of singledom helped me grow as a person and brought me to a place to be ready to have a serious relationship. It also made me realize the true value of that sort of connection and better understand the advantages and disadvantages of a serious relationship. Dating has its downsides, but it can be a lot of fun. Even when it isn’t, when you’re meeting other people there are always experiences that you remember and learn from.

No matter what happens, you get a lot more out of it than you do from blowing your load into a cold silicone egg.

BUENOS AIRES:

THE LAND OF CHONGOS AND HISTERICO

After our trip to Japan, I got interested in seeing what happens in a dating culture where men are more omnivorous. Eric and I searched around for the world’s particularly aggressive dating scenes and decided a good place to go was Argentina. If Tokyo is the capital of the “herbivore man,” then Buenos Aires must surely be the capital of the “rib eye–eating maniac.”

Whether or not they deserve it, Argentine men have a global reputation for their hot-blooded, romantic passion, which often bleeds over into something pathological and scary. In 2014 a survey conducted by a nonprofit organization called Stop Street Harassment revealed that more than 60 percent of women in Buenos Aires had experienced intimidation from men who catcalled them.18 To a lot of men in Buenos Aires, women’s concern came as a surprise. When asked about the survey, Buenos Aires’s mayor, Mauricio Macri, dismissed it as inaccurate and proceeded to explain why women couldn’t possibly have a problem with being shouted at by strangers.

“All women like to be told compliments,” he said. “Those who say they’re offended are lying. Even though you’ll say something rude, like ‘What a cute ass you have’ . . . it’s all good. There is nothing more beautiful than the beauty of women, right? It’s almost the reason that men breathe.”

To be clear, this is the mayor. Upon reading this quote, I investigated, and I can confirm that at the time of this interview he was not wearing one of those helmets that holds beers and has straws that go in your mouth.

As you can imagine, these statements didn’t go over well. Hundreds of women—including the mayor’s own daughter—condemned Macri’s remarks, forcing him to publicly apologize.

Among men in Buenos Aires, however, Macri’s opinion probably isn’t uncommon. In Argentina, where Eric and Shelly, a sociology graduate student, spent a month doing interviews and leading focus groups, hitting on women with abandon is deeply ingrained in the city’s cultural traditions. Men are expected to be pursuers in what Argentines casually refer to as “the hunt,” and the primary arena for such pursuits is the street.

In Buenos Aires the streets are filled with sexual energy: There is sensual tango dancing, chamuyo (flirtatious chitchat) and various sexual quips are heard left and right, and people make out publicly in parks, restaurants, and on buses.

In Japan a woman would be surprised to be directly approached, but in Buenos Aires the women we interviewed said that being the object of unsolicited male attention was a daily occurrence, and many men were reluctant to take no for an answer. “Guys here, they don’t care if you turn them down or deny them,” one woman told us. “They just keep talking to you.”

Talking is the least of it. Many of the women we interviewed told us that Argentine men can be uninhibited in their pursuit of sex. In one memorable focus group, a woman named Tamara reported that men she’d just met had kissed her, touched her leg, and tried to slip their hands up her skirt despite her clear lack of interest in them, and that when she told them to stop, they responded as if frustrated and asked, “Why?” As she told the story, every other woman in the group nodded to show their familiarity with this situation. “That’s normal,” one explained.

“When I go out and I get approached by a guy, no matter if I say I’m in a relationship and if I’m not interested, they still keep on going,” said another. “They’ll say, ‘Is your boyfriend here right now? Do you live with your boyfriend?’ It’s, like, totally acceptable. As much as you say, ‘no, no, no,’ they get closer and closer into your face.”

Rob, a twenty-eight-year-old expat from New York, tried to explain this behavior to us during a focus group. He said the attitudes in Argentina were much different from the “no means no” culture of the United States. “Here, if [women] say no, they’re interested. If they’re really not interested, they just don’t say anything to you. They just completely ignore you.” So now Rob only keeps clear if women literally turn their back to him. On his reading of courtship in Buenos Aires, “no” is usually just a prelude to “yes.”

You can see how much trouble this could generate. In our focus groups both men and women said it was common for a propositioned woman to play hard to get and then, only after the man had made a sufficient number of attempts, finally agree to a date. Many woman attributed this farce to a need to keep up appearances. If they responded too quickly, they might appear cheap.

“I have a friend who told me last week that she said no a few times to a guy she actually liked before saying yes just to play hard to get,” one woman explained. “It was just to make sure that he wanted something serious and to not be taken for an easy girl.” Sexually, too, women described a fear of appearing too eager. “We women know that if we have sex on the first date, then it’s over,” said another.

Argentine women have plenty of ways of signaling their interest to suitors, but as in the United States, men tend to initiate contact. Women sometimes approach men, but most of those we spoke with said they thought men found aggressive women a turnoff. “I think they love the chase,” said Sara. “Whenever you’re forward, it’s like, Whoa—why is she after me?”

The use of technology in Buenos Aires mirrors the street culture. There’s a level of aggression that Americans just don’t hit. Emilio, a twenty-eight-year-old from the United States, told us that he’d taken to friending hot friends of friends on Facebook just to ask them out. Eduardo, thirty-one, said he messaged about thirty women a week in hope of making something click. He’d hit them up on Facebook, Instagram, anywhere he could find them.

Despite all this, very few young people we spoke with actually used online dating sites like OkCupid, in part because online dating still carried a stigma of desperation. But, more important, it simply wasn’t necessary. As Eduardo put it, “If you’re an Argentine woman, you don’t need online dating to hook up with other people because men will be after you all your life.”

Texting, however, was huge. When we asked the single people in our focus groups in Buenos Aires how many partners they were currently texting, few had less than three. It wasn’t uncommon for people to be in multiple relationships of various levels of seriousness. One expat from the United States, a twenty-seven-year-old named Ajay, compared the dating scene in Buenos Aires to an asado—a barbecue.

“You get all these different cuts of meat cooking at once,” he said. “You’ve got your sausage, which cooks fast. You’ve got your big steak, which is your best cut, which takes some time, right? You got to talk to all these girls at once just like you take care of all the meat at once.”

After he made this analogy, I presented Ajay with a trophy that said “Most Sexist Food Analogy of All Time: Meat and BBQ Division.”

When it comes down to the business of actually getting into a relationship, Argentines have a reputation for being histérico. The idea of histérico (histérica for women) came up frequently in our discussions. It’s one of those culturally specific words that’s kind of hard to define to someone who isn’t from that culture, but I understood it to mean that someone acts one way toward you initially and then completely reverses course. A woman who says, “no, no, no” and then, finally, “yes” is said to be histérica, as is a man who flirts madly, then suddenly disappears for weeks without contacting you again.

“When they are trying to pick you up, they really act like men,” said Sara. “They will talk to you and talk to you . . . until you hook up with them. And then they will act like girls. If you’re not interested in them, they will become obsessed with you. If you are interested in them, they will disappear. It’s like . . . it’s like math. It’s an equation.”

One common approach we heard about involved a man pursuing a woman by repeatedly professing his love for her and proving it in a distinctively Argentine manner: inviting her to meet his parents for a Sunday barbecue. “He’ll say, ‘I love you, you are the love of my life, I want to marry you, I want to have kids,’” said a twenty-seven-year-old Argentine woman named Sofia. “But then he never calls. In Spain they tell you, ‘I love you,’ because they really mean it. It’s not just a word. Here they don’t mean it.” Another woman told us about a popular Argentine phrase that means, “Lie to me because I like it.” It’s all part of the chase.

Even people in notionally committed relationships said they liked to keep a past lover or potential partner waiting in the wings, ready to swoop in if their current relationship fell through. Several people we spoke with had a backup plan in case their current relationship didn’t work out. Isabell, twenty-eight, reported flirting with several men over text, even when she was in a relationship. She called it hacerte la linda, which translates roughly as “to make yourself pretty” and refers to a kind of flirting. “Just because you’re on a diet, it doesn’t mean you cannot check out the menu,” she said. “I mean, just as long as you don’t pick up that particular plate.”

What’s up with these people and the food analogies?!

“Even when I had a boyfriend, if I went to a bar or something and I met a guy, I would give him my phone number just in case,” said Marilyn, twenty-five. “Like, I wouldn’t cheat, you know?”

“But you kept your options open,” interjected another woman.

“Yeah,” said Marilyn. “Because you never know, right?”

• • •

Casual sex was, predictably, everywhere. In Argentina women in relationships often have a chongo, which literally means “strong man” or “muscleman,” but is also a catchall term for a casual sexual partner, one that can refer to a friend with benefits, a regular hookup, or someone whom you’re seeing on the side while in a serious relationship. Used in a sentence: “Nah, we’re not serious. He’s my chongo.”

One married woman at a focus group told us that during her previous relationship she’d had a chongo whom she saw regularly for several years. “It was just skin,” she explained, to make sure we understood that she wasn’t cheating on her relationship, only meeting a sexual need. “I didn’t even know his parents’ names.”

I hope I’m never in a casual relationship with someone in Argentina and catch feelings. Imagine how much it would suck to hear, “What? Relationship?! Are you serious? This is just for skin. Come on, I thought I was very clear: You’re my chongo, nothing more.”

Amazingly, the widespread interest in casual sex has shaped the buildings and neighborhoods of Buenos Aires as well as the culture. The city is teeming with telos, love hotels with no detectable stigma, where rooms are available by the hour. Telos, which exist at all price ranges and are available in the roughest as well as the most high-end neighborhoods, are designed for maximum privacy. The people we interviewed described a variety of techniques that ensure user discretion: In one telo guests drive into the parking lot, ask for a room, and then park in a spot numbered so that their open car doors are adjacent to the door to their room. In another there’s a small chamber between the front door and the room where hotel staff can deliver room-service items without seeing the patrons.

That said, at some hotels maintaining privacy during peak hours is impossible. In Buenos Aires most young single people live with their parents in relatively small apartments, as do children, of course. What that means is that nearly everyone who wants to have sex winds up using a telo on occasion, and late nights can be especially busy. Eduardo, the thirty-one-year-old who messages thirty women per week, told us that occasionally he’s had to sit in a waiting room when he arrives at three or four o’clock in the morning, along with everyone else who’s come in from bars and clubs. One expat who lived next door to a telo said that she’d noticed a lot of traffic during lunch hours, when, her host mother speculated, “bosses like to screw their secretaries.”

If, on the one hand, the whole telo and casual-sex scene sounds fun and liberated, on the other hand, for at least half the population Buenos Aires can be pretty tough. In our focus groups people reported that they’d often see young women crying hysterically in public places, like park benches and bus stops. When Eric asked why it was so common, the response was always the same: men.

The dating culture in Buenos Aires is extremely exciting and sensual, full of flirtation, pursuit, and casual sex. There is also an undeniably darker side, though, with unwanted aggression, manipulation, and infidelity. Everyone suffers the pain of love in Buenos Aires, but I couldn’t help but conclude that things were a lot rougher for women than they were for chongos.