That’s why “female masturbation” is taboo… “Female body parts” hidden by Japanese sex education In the Netherlands, it is listed in junior high school biology textbooks | PRESIDENT Online (President Online)

PRESIDENT Online

2023/05/21 15:00

What does Japanese sex education teach? Yukihiro Murase, a researcher in sex education, said, “Even now, there is a guideline that teaches women about menstruation but not about the process leading up to pregnancy. It says. Introducing a conversation with Ms. Yoko Tajima from the Graduate School of Women’s Studies.

*This article is a partial re-editing of Yukihiro Murase et al.’s “Sex Education from 50” (Kawade Shinsho).

Sex education in Japan was not enough

[Murase]When thinking about sex from the age of 50, I definitely wanted to talk to Mr. Tajima.

[Tajima]thank you. Mr. Murase, you have been involved in sex education for over 40 years. Before I even thought about the problems with sex education in Japan, I thought that there was almost no such thing. What do you think, Mr. Murase?

[Murase]That’s a perfectly correct perception. In the last three or four years, the need for sex education in Japan has finally come to the fore not only in schools but also in the media and politics. In the early 2000s, there was a movement called gender backlash, which denounced sex education as “extreme” and “going too far.”

People around the age of 50 now spent their junior high and high school days on the eve of that period.

[Tajima]I see sex education as human education. You can call it a lifelong education. Even so, in Japan there are still some politicians who say silly things like, “If you teach children about sex, everyone will start having sex!”

Students at a boys’ school seriously listening to stories about sex

[Murase]I was often told not to wake a sleeping child. Learning about sex through sex education—it’s not wrong, but I thought it was time to learn about relationships in general, including sex, and about myself.

What to know and how to think about “life” as well as “sex” is missing, and it’s not just about how to have sex! I still talk about it to high school and college students. There are also boys’ schools. I often feel that they are seriously listening to me.

[Tajima]It must be serious, because few people have ever spoken to me like that before. Scales from my eyes, I’m sure. Sex education is at the heart of everything in life, and we ignore it, we leave our children ignorant, I believe, because the country is fundamentally distorted.