Dangerous Liaisons.(promiscuity among Japanese youth)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)

Masami strides out the main gate at Tokyo University, her mobile phone in hand. The pretty 21-year-old economics major speed-dials a male student, and the two agree to meet at a nearby coffee shop. A study break? Hardly. "I'm meeting him to have sex," says Masami. "He's one of my sex friends." Masami has sex with several of her pals, she admits, rotating among partners who themselves enjoy numerous liaisons. Her promiscuity is not uncommon: Surveys suggest that many young Japanese maintain multiple sekusutomo--literally "sex friends." According to a joint study by the University of California San Francisco and Hiroshima University, of 602 teens (age 15 to 19) surveyed in the Shibuya section of Tokyo recently, 43 percent said they keep five or more sex friends at a time. In a similar survey of 16-year-olds in two rural prefectures, 20 percent of boys and 18 percent of girls said they have at least five sex partners. "To many young Japanese people, everything about sex is casual," says Masako Ono-Kihara, a public-health expert at Hiroshima University School of Medicine. "Girls now share their boyfriends like they'd share chips. Everyone's hand is in the bag."

Among other reasons, young Japanese sleep around because they assume sex is safe. Their logic: Japan is largely HIV-free, so by having sex within a closed circle of cohorts they can enjoy lifestyles reminiscent of the West after the advent of the birth-control pill but before the emergence of AIDS. That flawed reasoning reflects the unwillingness of older Japanese, particularly parents and schools, to educate kids about the risks of promiscuous behavior. The result, new research shows, is a significant rise in the rate of sexually transmitted diseases among young Japanese. According to the Ministry of Health, between 1998 and 2000 (the latest figures available), the STD infection rate rose 21 percent for Japanese men under 24 and 14 percent for women in the same age group. And while Japan's HIV rate remains one of the world's lowest, the International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific has forecast that the number of full-blown AIDS cases in Japan, now at 14,000, could top 50,000 by 2010.

Japan's new sex culture dates to the collapse of the "bubble economy" in the early 1990s. Until then, Japan Inc. absorbed most university and ...