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Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex?

Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex?
Ai Aoyama is a sex and relationship counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back street. Her first name means "love" in Japanese, and is a keepsake from her earlier days as a professional dominatrix. Back then, about 15 years ago, she was Queen Ai, or Queen Love, and she did "all the usual things" like tying people up and dripping hot wax on their nipples. Her work today, she says, is far more challenging. Japan's under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. The sign outside her building says "Clinic". Inside, she takes me upstairs to her "relaxation room" – a bedroom with no furniture except a double futon. The number of single people has reached a record high. Many people who seek her out, says Aoyama, are deeply confused. Official alarmism doesn't help. Japan's under-40s won't go forth and multiply out of duty, as postwar generations did. Marriage has become a minefield of unattractive choices. They don't seem concerned. Related:  Read, Write, Reflect

If He Hollers Let Him Go - by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah Discussed: Ohio’s Rolling Farmland, Hippies in Tie-Dye, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Kanye West, Oprah, A Simpler Way of Life, Seventy-Year-Old Comparative Literature Professors in Birkenstocks, Negritude,Thurgood Marshall, Black Activism, Patrice Lumumba, Stepin Fetchit, Richard Pryor, Dick Gregory, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Hemp Stores, Reuben Sandwiches, Dusk in Yellow Springs Although the city of Dayton is small and has been hit hard by the decline of industry, in Xenia and Yellow Springs the land is green, fecund, and alive, even in the relentless heat of summer. Xenia is three miles from where the first private black college, Wilberforce, opened, in 1856, to meet the educational needs of the growing population of freed blacks that crossed the Ohio River. Yellow Springs, a stop on the Underground Railroad, was initially established as a utopian community in 1825. In 1852, Horace Mann founded Antioch College and served as its president. Chappelle’s comedy found fans in many worlds.

Difficult Loves SOMETIME IN 1998, the documentary filmmaker Rahul Roy started to spend time in the company of four young men called Bunty, Kamal, Sanju and Sanjay in the rough Delhi neighbourhood of Jahangirpuri. When Four Friends Meet (WFFM), the film that emerged two years later, in 2000, was a remarkably frank portrait of working-class masculinity. These were young men who had dropped out of school and, in many cases, had been working since they were very young, though they continued to live with parents. Girls were a hot topic, but none of the four friends seemed to have actually had a relationship with one. Despite these views, Roy’s protagonists were unsure enough to seem vulnerable. The language of cinema was the surround sound of these lives. At the end of the documentary, Roy asked the boys if he should come back ten years later. A LITTLE OVER A DECADE LATER, Roy did return, to shoot Till We Meet Again (TWMA), completed this year. In contrast to these men, Hari offers us hope.

Pirámide para contener la central de Fukushima; la arquitectura del pasado sirve de modelo a arquitectos japoneses Foto: Cooking Ideas Ciudad de México, 9 de diciembre (SinEmbargo).– Dos años después del tsunami que provocó la fusión de un reactor de la central nuclear de Fukushima, Japón, aún no sabe cómo manejar los efectos devastadores de esta tragedia. Sin embargo, un equipo de arquitectos nipones han decidido poner sus ojos en la arquitectura de épocas pasadas, para enterrar para siempre el núcleo radiactivo de la central, con lo cual Fukushima quedaría aislada bajo una literalmente faraónica cubierta en forma de pirámide. La idea forma parte del proyecto “Aprende de un milenio. Vuelve a la vida. De esta manera, el equipo de Tsukamoto está recurriendo a las construcciones que conforman la lista del Patrimonio de la Humanidad de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura (UNESCO), para bregar con los problemas actuales y mitigar los que están por llegar.

Hey Mama by Kiese Laymon A black mother and her son talk about language and love in the South. Image by Jennifer Packer, Mario II, 2012. Courtesy the artist Hey Mama, I’m feeling alone this morning. Hey Kie, I’m tired. Mama, you always say that. You hug yourself by not allowing haters to distract you and by believing in yourself. Oh, lord. Don’t say “ain’t got” Kie. Or what? Or nothing. Nah, I’m serious. It depends on the judges. Mama, how have we been having the same conversation about language for thirty years? You are a grown man, but you’re still a black boy from Mississippi to people that want to hurt you. I have pictures of the look on my grandma’s face the first time she held my first two books. Hiding won’t protect us. I’m not talking about hiding. I don’t even really do Twitter, Mama. My friends tell me you write crazy-talk on that Facebook, and that Twitter. Mama. They’re trying to fix black boys on the cheap, without reckoning with white supremacy. What have you been thinking? I’ve been thinking too much.

French Polymath Paul Valéry on “The Three-Body Problem” by Maria Popova “Everything that is masks for us something that might be.” “It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive. … The body becomes irrelevant,” Dani Shapiro wrote in her beautiful meditation on the pleasures and perils of the creative life. That’s precisely what legendary French polymath Paul Valéry (October 30, 1871–July 20, 1945) explores in his 1943 essay “Some Simple Reflections on the Body,” found in the altogether fantastic 1989 anthology Zone 4: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 2 (public library), in which he poses “the three-body problem” — the trifecta of bodily realities that we each inhabit and struggle to integrate. Illustration from 'The Human Body,' 1959. He begins with the First Body, which possesses us more than we possess it and serves as a reference point to the world: There’s a particular amorphousness to this First Body:

Un anciano japonés muere después de ser rechazado en 25 hospitales El anciano, residente en la ciudad de Kuki, sintió dificultades al respirar y llamó a una ambulancia. Los médicos hicieron decenas de llamadas a los 25 hospitales de la prefectura de Saitama, pero ninguno pudo aceptar al paciente. El motivo del rechazo fue la falta de camas y especialistas para atenderlo. Entonces la ambulancia llevó al anciano a un hospital de la vecina prefectura de Ibaraki, a unos 20 minutos del lugar de su residencia. Tras el incidente, las autoridades de Kuki ordenaron a los hospitales públicos locales que mejoren la capacidad de sus unidades de cuidados intensivos. A pesar de la buena calidad de los servicios médicos en general en Japón, algunos especialistas advierten que con el aumento de las personas de edad avanzada y la escasez de especialistas jóvenes, la situación podría empeorar en las próximas décadas.

Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic | | Notebook Maureen Tkacik [from The Baffler No. 19, 2012] Shepherd, show me how to go O’er the hillside steep, How to gather, how to sow,— How to feed Thy sheep. –Mary Baker Eddy Not long before The Atlantic’s parent company announced its swing into a profit-making business model despite operating in the most moribund corner of a publishing industry, I sat in a glass-paneled press room next to a small auditorium on the second floor of the Washington Newseum and took in the incipient profitability. The din of younger colleagues tapping keyboards is never soothing, but sitting in the press room of the Ideas Forum felt like a human rights violation. [New York Times financial correspondent] rankles [Treasury Secretary] with questions such as “What do you think is the most important thing the team has gotten right?” Omniscience is the operating principle by which everyone understands everyone else in Washington, D.C. Quinn wore a light beige pantsuit with a pink blouse that conjured the seventies.

Love in the Time of Bollywood At nine every morning, Sana dons her burqa and rides pillion on her father’s scooter. He drops her off at the all-women’s college in Bhopal where she is completing a Master’s degree in English literature. On most days, though, Sana does not attend classes. Sana’s hometown is the sleepy capital of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Despite the new additions to Bhopal’s landscape, though, it still is not easy to carry on an illicit romance. To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Register Register now to get three articles each month. As a subscriber, you get unrestricted access to ForeignAffairs.com. Register for free to continue reading. Registered users get access to three free articles every month. Have an account?

Japón suspende operaciones de avión como el que compró la Presidencia de México Las aerolíneas japonesas ANA y JAL decidieron suspender temporalmente las operaciones de sus Boeing 787, luego de seis fallas de este modelo en 10 días. La Presidencia de México compró un avión similar. Aviones modelo Boeing 787, igual al que compró el gobierno mexicano para los traslados del presidente Enrique Peña Nieto, han registrado seis fallas en 10 días, por lo que las aerolíneas japonesas ANA y JAL decidieron suspender temporalmente las operaciones de estas aeronaves. El diario 24 Horas publica este miércoles que All Nippon Airways (ANA) dejará en tierra sus 17 Boeing 787, después de que su vuelo 692 entre Yamaguchi (suroeste) y Tokio realizó un aterrizaje de emergencia en el aeropuerto de Takamatsu por un problema en una batería. El portavoz de Boeing, Marc Birtel, dijo: “Hemos visto los reportes, estamos al tanto de los hechos y estamos trabajando con nuestro cliente”.

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