Rise of the "grass-eaters", fall of Japan

A new survey reveals that the Japanese national sex drive continues to plummet.

The survey, conducted by the Japan Family Planning Association, found that 36% of males aged 16 to 19 said that they had "no interest" in or even "despised" sex. That's almost a 19% increase since the survey was last conducted in 2008.

It's the rise of the "grass-eaters".

Many commentators in the Japanese and international media have laid the problem squarely at the feet of soshoku danshi -- "herbivore men" -- a term coined by pop culture columnist Maki Fukasawa in 2006. It refers to Japanese young men who have rejected their culture's traditional definition of masculinity, and seemingly eschew relationships with the opposite sex as part.

CNN spoke to a Midori Saida, a 24-year-old Japanese woman who described "herbivore men" as "flaky and weak."

"We like manly men," she said. "We are not interested in those boys -- at all."

Countries that fail to harness the most powerful motivational force in the world will die out.  Japan's population is already shrinking.  This is not a culture that will survive the Digital Age.

Seppuku (切腹, "stomach-cutting") is a form of Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment. Seppuku was originally reserved only for samurai. Part of the samurai bushido honor code, seppuku was either used voluntarily by samurai to die with honor rather than fall into the hands of their enemies, (and likely suffer torture), or as a form of capital punishment for samurai who had committed serious offenses, or performed for other reasons that had brought shame to them. The ceremonial disembowelment, which is usually part of a more elaborate ritual and performed in front of spectators, consists of plunging a short blade, traditionally a tantō, into the abdomen and moving the blade from left to right in a slicing motion.

But this isn't seppuku.  Seppuku is an honorable death reserved for warriors.  Seppuku is death by disembowelment.  What we're witnessing is death by castration, the slow-motion suicide of a nation.

Here's the full article.