Japan's digital millennials are losing their mojo...

 

Japan’s plummeting birth rate is being partly blamed on young males called “Otaku” who show more interest in computers and comic books, than sex.

Tokyo’s Akihabara district (below) is filled with gadget and manga book stores and is the favorite hangout for Otaku, reports Anita Rani, for the BBC: The Japanese men who prefer virtual girlfriends to sex

Unless something happens to boost Japan's birth rate, its population will shrink by a third between now and 2060. One reason for the lack of babies is the emergence of a new breed of Japanese men, the otaku, who love manga, anime and computers — and sometimes show little interest in sex…

Akihabara, an area of the city dedicated to the manga and anime subculture provides one clue to the country’s problems. Akihabara is heaven for otaku.

Kunio Kitamara, of the Japan Family Planning Association, describes many young Japanese men as "herbivores" — passive and lacking carnal desire.

A survey by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in 2010 found 36% of Japanese males aged 16 to 19 had no interest in sex — a figure that had doubled in the space of two years.

Even Japanese men in a relationship don’t have much sex, a recent survey found that less than 27% had sex at least once a week.

The lack of sexual desire could be linked to the poor economic prospects of millennials in Japan compared with their parent’s generation. Their lousy socioeconomic position seems to have led to a collective loss of libido — they’ve lost their mojo.

Roland Kelts, a Tokyo-based social commentator, said:

"If you compare China or Vietnam, most of those kids on scooters going to nightclubs, and dancing their heart away and perhaps having sex — they know it's getting better, they know they are probably going to rock their parents' income," he says. "No-one in Japan feels that way."

Life-size Manga characters and anatomically correct robot in an Akihabara store

Does the US have a similar Otaku sub-culture? We should look because there's lots about the Japanese story that is similar to here. Our male millennials love comic books, gadgets, and computers; their job prospects are lousy; plus they carry huge college debt loads; and many have to rely on their parents. 

The same lousy cultural and socioeconomic factors are at play for US, and also European millennials. I’d be surprised if a survey didn’t find a sizable population of Otaku.

And how can we help them find their mojo? Because a related problem is hikikomori: young men who shut themselves away in their bedroom for years. A Japanese Cabinet Office survey from 2010 found 700,000 but there could be as many as 1 million hikikomori.

Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?

It won't be needed by Otaku - a man’s tie with a USB-powered fan to cool you off if you get hot under the collar - seen in an Akihabara store.

Western Digital Q1: Scrapes past Wall Street expectations

Summary: Chief executive Steve Milligan said the storage supplier "continued to perform well," but barely scraped through Wall Street expectations on earnings per share and revenue.

Western Digital makes storage and networked-storage units (Image: CNET)

Western Digital on Thursday announced its first quarter earnings, scraping through analyst expectations on what was a relatively quiet three-month period.

The storage supplier reported first fiscal quarter earnings of $2.05 per share on revenue of $3.8 billion (statement), compared to $2.06 per share and $4 billion in revenue on the same quarter a year earlier. Non-GAAP earnings were $2.12 per share.

Wall Street was looking for first quarter earnings of $2.05 a share on revenue of $3.78 billion.

Western Digital generated $680 million in cash from its operations, ending with $4.9 billion in cash and equivalents. During the three-month period, the company spent $150 million to buy back 2.3 million shares.

Chief executive Steve Milligan said in prepared remarks:

"We continued to perform well in the September quarter as we remained focused on delivering value to our customers through differentiated and innovative storage solutions in all of our served markets."

"Our HGST and WD subsidiaries continued to execute very well. Outstanding linearity drove strong operating results, with gross margins above the midpoint of our model range and earnings per share well above the high end of our guidance. Longer term, we are very excited about our ability to enable the ongoing creation, storage and management of digital content by consumers and businesses."

Western Digital ($WDC) was up 0.6 percent at market close. In after-hours trading, its stock was down about 2.2 percent.

$WDC on the Nasdaq after market close on Thursday (Image: Google Finance)

Zack Whittaker writes for ZDNet, CNET, and CBS News. He is based in New York City.

Paper isn't dead (yet): Post-it Note goes digital with Evernote

SAN FRANCISCO---With a intuitive, cloud-based arsenal of note-taking and productivity apps, Evernote is already better positioned than most rising software companies to replace paper altogether.

Then why is the app maker so insistent on keeping paper alive?

Rather than abandoning the age-old medium becoming more archaic by the minute, the app maker seems keen on revolutionizing paper instead -- a headscratcher of a strategy, but sometimes those oddball ideas are the ones that really pay off in the end anyway.

A little over 13 months ago, Evernote teamed up with a paper company that still retains a reputation for sophistication (at least among hipsters): Moleskine.

That was definitely a smart move on Evernote's part, given that it's hard to hate on a notebook brand once beloved by the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Vincent Van Gogh.

Given that one of the big trends in tech over the last two years has been to make everything "smarter" (thus the whole wearables trend, in a nutshell), Evernote basically applied that same logic to paper. The result was the Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine, in which users could use the Evernote mobile apps to snap photos of their notes on the specially ruled and squared sheets for archiving, picking up handwriting recognition and more.

This year, Evernote is looking to upgrade another iconic paper form factor that arguably has a wider audience and more casual purpose in life: the Post-It Note.

In partnership with its maker, 3M, Evernote will be rolling out a special Post-it Note Camera feature for its iOS 7 app only. (No word on when -- or if -- this will come to Android.)

Essentially, instead of using Post-It Notes in everyday life and then using digital sticky notes on a smartphone, the Evernote/Post-It Note mashup consolidates the required tools to any Post-It (regardless of size and color) and the mobile app.

All the user has to do is snap a photo of the Post-It with the Evernote app, which should recognize, analyze and then archive the note by color, subject, and even due date assigned. The content can be text, a to-do list, a reminder, or even sketches.

To facilitate things even further, Evernote promises that the Post-Its will be searchable on its cloud-based platform. The obvious benefit here for Evernote is that it has the possibility to wrangle in more users with hopes of transforming them into Premium subscribers.

Evernote and Post-It are even rolling out a collection of specially-branded Post-It products that will include a free 30-day Evernote Premium subscription.

For Post-It, they can both push more paper and try to stay relevant at the same time.

Images via Evernote