A middle-school health class. The teacher stops just short of explaining how fertilisation works. “We don’t cover this part,” he says, and turns to the next page on “emotional change in puberty”. The pupils, taking notes, register that the crucial part has been left blank. This was the standard scene of the Heisei era. Japanese sex education, beginning with Meiji-era venereal-disease teaching, has swung between promotion and restraint across the postwar decades.

The history of sex education in Japan is the historical development of sex education in the country. It passes through Meiji-era reproductive hygiene, postwar purity education, the reform of the 1970s, AIDS-prevention education in the late 1990s, the backlash of the 2000s, and the debate over comprehensive sexuality education in the 2020s, advancing under a persistent contest between advocates, cautious moderates and restrictionists. This article covers the main events of each period, the related law and policy, and the structure of the controversy.

Meiji and Taishō: the origin in venereal-disease teaching

Modern sex education in Japan begins with Meiji-era venereal-disease control. From the 1900s, prevention teaching aimed at the army and male students was organised as public-health education dealing with the medical side of reproduction and infection. As the banning of Mori Ōgai’s Vita Sexualis (1909) symbolises, the field was limited to the hygienic, and the psychological and ethical sides of sexuality were not treated as educational matter. In the Taishō period, sexual content increased in women’s magazines and childcare books as part of maternal education. The pioneering sex-education lectures of Yamamoto Senji (1889–1929), which included contraceptive knowledge, were carried out under police surveillance, and he was assassinated in 1929.

Early postwar: the age of purity education

In 1947 the Ministry of Education’s social-education bureau issued a notice “On the implementation of purity education”, placing the basic line of early postwar sex education on “the keeping of purity”. Under Occupation conditions in which venereal disease and prostitution were pressing social problems, sex education was institutionalised as an ethical education centred on chastity. A Purity Education Committee was set up in 1949, and in 1972 an official ruling equated purity education with sex education.

The mark of the period was the treatment of sex chiefly as a “zone to be guarded against”. Normative content, disease prevention, avoidance of extramarital relations, the keeping of an ethical distance between the sexes, dominated, while systematic scientific knowledge was deferred.

The 1970s: reform and the “first year of sex education”

In the 1970s the criticism of purity education and the drive for reform took hold. The Japan Association for Sex Education (JASE) was founded in 1972 and advanced a sex education centred on scientific and human-rights perspectives, through research, materials and international exchange. In 1982 a further body led by Yamamoto Naohide and others took on the training of classroom teachers. The year 1979 is sometimes called Japan’s “first year of sex education”, when reformers turned away from purity teaching and built materials that taught menstruation, ejaculation, conception and contraception systematically. The 1977 revision of the national curriculum guidelines wrote in “bodily change in puberty” and “fertilisation”, setting the basic frame that continues today.

The 1990s: AIDS-prevention education

The HIV/AIDS crisis of the late 1980s and 1990s was the turning point that pushed sex education forward institutionally. In the early 1990s the ministry adopted a policy of building “AIDS-prevention education” into schooling, and content on the prevention of sexually transmitted infection, condom use and the scientific understanding of sexual contact came to be taught within health and physical education. In the same period, education on the sexuality of people with disabilities was systematised in special-needs schools; the practice at the Nanao special-needs school in Hino, Tokyo, was valued at home and abroad as concrete, systematic sex education for children with intellectual disabilities.

The 2000s: the sex-education backlash

In 2003 the “Nanao special-needs school incident” arose through the Tokyo metropolitan assembly and the Sankei Shimbun. The school’s teaching materials, which included anatomically detailed dolls, were attacked as “extreme sex education”, and the metropolitan board of education confiscated the materials and disciplined teachers. A lawsuit followed; in 2009 the Tokyo District Court found the confiscation and discipline unlawful, and the ruling became final at the Supreme Court in 2013.

The incident was not isolated but the symbolic case of a backlash that spread nationwide through the 2000s. Conservative groups and politicians built a campaign against the “radicalisation” of sex education and induced a chilling effect among teachers. The 1998 and 2003 curriculum revisions strengthened a “brake provision”, writing in the restriction that “sexual intercourse is not to be treated” and “the course of pregnancy is not to be treated”. The backlash structurally shrank school sex education, with effects reaching into the 2010s.

The 2010s–2020s: toward comprehensive sexuality education

From the late 2010s, prompted by the translation of UNESCO’s International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education (first edition 2009, revised 2018), debate over comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) grew active. A movement for a broad sex education covering sexual consent, gender diversity, relationships and violence prevention has been raised by researchers, citizens’ groups and teachers. In 2020 “life-safety education” began through cooperation between the education ministry and the Cabinet Office: a graduated programme from early childhood as part of measures against sexual crime and violence. This is a limited measure focused on the prevention of sexual-violence harm rather than a comprehensive expansion, but it is positioned as a practical turning point in the postwar frame. The 2017 middle-school curriculum still states that “the course of pregnancy is not to be treated”, so scientific explanation of intercourse remains excluded from the standard curriculum, and calls for review of the brake provision continue.

International comparison

Compared with the comprehensive-education leaders of northern Europe, the Netherlands and Germany, Japanese sex education is assessed as heavily restricted in content. A continuing gap from the UNESCO guidance is repeatedly noted as a national problem. In the English-speaking world, religious influence (the American purity movement) and the advance of liberal movements (the legislation of comprehensive education from the 2010s) have shaped a different trajectory, and the Japanese debate unfolds under the influence of these international currents.

Connection to neighbouring topics

The history of sex education borders on the controversies over manga regulation and freedom of expression. Sexual expression in schooling and sexual expression in commercial publishing and subculture are handled under separate legal frames, but both share the axis of how far information about sex may be publicly permitted. In the pre-modern era, the transmission of sexual knowledge ran through informal channels in the household, the village community and the pleasure quarter, forming the history before the modern standardisation of school education.

See also

• Sex education
• Modern history of venereal disease
• Freedom of expression