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The story
Columnist Kazuhisa Arakawa points out that in Japan, unmarried middle-aged men outnumber unmarried women by 1.87 million, and names “time-delayed polygamy” as one cause: a subset of men who repeatedly divorce and remarry end up marrying multiple times, while first-marriage opportunities for everyone else keep shrinking. The 5ch thread that followed debated whether looks, personality, or luck is what separates “men who can marry” from those who can’t, with disagreement over how to read the statistics and the gender gap behind them.
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■ The first marriages that “time-delayed polygamy men” steal
On top of that, another factor that has accelerated the surplus of unmarried middle-aged men over the past 40 years is a phenomenon called “time-delayed polygamy.”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
Doesn't he have anything better to do?
People love a good flex/one-upping contest (マウント), so it's plenty profitable as a business.
Yeah, that's real, lol
Guys get a mysterious popularity phase around 20 and again around 35
Maybe there's another one later too, like around 50
Never happened to me, not even once…
> "men who can marry" marry over and over
Just tax the hell out of these guys.
There's nothing after that
Even at 35 you're only barely seen as "better than the sketchy guys in their 20s"
Don't go dreaming
Let's fund it with tax money, lol
Honestly, that'd be the quickest fix
Though whether the kids turn out okay is a gamble
Polish up your look and manner to appeal to women and anyone can be popular
It's not that easy
I know a Waseda associate professor who's past 40 with zero luck with women
He's not great-looking either, but worse, he's awful with careless/offensive remarks
If he hated women I'd get it, but he actually really wants to marry
In the end what decides it is personality, and just enough social sense not to get branded "KY" (clueless/tone-deaf)
People who want to marry but can't
I get the image that a lot of them can't read the room and have intense fixations — like being really into trains —
lack empathy for others, and don't bother with their looks
Why is that, I wonder?
On the flip side, who wants sketchy, problematic "new" goods?? These days it's all about going secondhand (セカスト, a nod to the used-goods chain Second Street)
When you wake up freaked out from a nightmare about ghosts, you can just crawl into your wife's futon instead of facing the fear alone
I'm actually down with a cold right now, and she's nursing me back to health
It's basic human instinct
Dating is basically a hobby only good-looking guys and women get to have
Average-or-below guys just don't get to play, that's all
An average-looking guy just dressing up a bit is probably about the right level for women to date — and have kids with — without feeling wary
The popular ones are a fixed few, and most get zero attention from men
You're missing the point
This isn't about unpopular men vs. women in general — the article is saying the number of them is overwhelmingly higher among men
Men : Women = 1 : 9
Centenarians in other developed nations (from population pyramids)
US = Men : Women = 1 : 3
UK = 1 : 3.5
France = 1 : 5.5
Canada = 1 : 4
Germany = 1 : 4.5
Italy = 1 : 5
Japan's centenarian population topped 100,000 for the first time ever… nearly 90% are women, the oldest being a 114-year-old in Kyoto
In other words, Japanese men are being suppressed — effectively "killed off" — at a rate beyond the normal gender gap
Isn't the raw number of centenarians just different between Japan and other countries to begin with?
These days women's rights are protected so heavily you can't even approach one
This kind of resentment toward women is spreading to the younger generation too
You all want to deny it, but face reality
In Japan, women clearly have it easier than in other countries
That's why women live 9 times longer than men [by this centenarian ratio]
Japan's social system is built to suppress men — effectively "kill them off"
The era today's centenarian women lived through wasn't exactly easy though
War, farming while raising a bunch of kids, barely any decent food
No household appliances either
Men had it rough too, but wasn't everything incredibly hard back then?
Yeah, people had a full set of dentures by 50 back then
This ratio might shift going forward
Though since the postwar era has kept pushing to improve women's rights, it might widen even more
Background and key points of this discussion
The “time-delayed polygamy” Kazuhisa Arakawa describes doesn’t mean marrying multiple people at once — it refers to the structure where men who repeatedly divorce and remarry end up married to several different partners over time, which in turn shrinks the pool of women available in the first-marriage market. The 1.87-million gap comes from the difference between men’s and women’s unmarried counts in national population statistics, not from any newly released survey. The thread split between those who see it as a matter of “looks or personality” and those who see it as “a structural issue where opportunity concentrates on a handful of men” — neither view actually denies the article’s core point about the skewed distribution. It’s also worth noting that the comparison of male-to-female ratios among centenarians doesn’t account for the differing social backdrop of postwar Japan versus other countries, so reading it as straightforward evidence of gender discrimination risks being misleading.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “Japan has 1.87 million more unmarried middle-aged men than women… yet the ‘men who can marry’ keep marrying again and again, a wild reality (Kazuhisa Arakawa).”
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