It is widely perceived that adultery is common in Japan, but what's the reality? Sure, there are lots of dating apps out there, including ones specifically for people already with partners. There's also a bustling cottage industry of private detectives whose entire raison d'ĂȘtre is to find out whether your spouse is cheating or not. It also depends on the definition of adultery and cheating. Prostitution is a large industry in Japan but would a session every now and then with a sex worker count as an affair or cheating? Well, a survey by the aptly named Love Is All of 1,966 married men ...

     Read More     

For all the constant media brouhaha about people not dating or having sex in Japan, it seems that at least one guy is determined to boost the national average. And challenge the laws about polygamy at the same time. It's a case that's surely not typical and shouldn't be used as a brush to paint all Japanese guys, but what a story it is. As featured in late December on Abema TV (sorry, folks, we missed it at the time), Ryuta Watanabe in Sapporo has four "wives" and three kids, and seems to live happily with them. In fact, 35-year-old Watanabe doesn't even work but is a househusband taking ...

     Read More     

The YouTuber Takashii, who provided the interesting video we reposted recently about Japanese women and their attraction toward foreign men (or non-attraction, as the case may be), has produced a couple more videos with interviews about the old saw: adultery. His latest provocative topic is on adultery in Japan, especially cheating on a partner with sex workers. He asks some women for their opinions and some men. They give a range of responses, but the general gist is that the women don't seem to mind if their men cheat on them with fuzoku (sex workers/services). In fact, this doesn't ...

     Read More     

This is a story that's been bubbling along in the background for a while and has now come more fully to light. Mariko Shinoda, the celebrity once one of the big original stars of AKB48, is locked in a legal battle with her estranged husband over the custody rights to their child. Shinoda graduated AKB48 in 2013 and got married in autumn 2019 to a man she had been dating for just a few months. In April 2020, she gave birth. She became something of a model of motherhood, devoting her Instagram to pictures of her parenting. This all seemed to stop in summer this year amid a tranche of ...

     Read More     

OK, our headline is a bit deceptive, but the gist is essentially true. It's been years in the offing and it might finally be happening: the law forbidding women from remarrying after a divorce is going to change. Currently, a woman in Japan is legally unable to remarry straight after a divorce. She has to wait 100 days. Her ex-husband, though, is free to marry someone new without waiting. The law was ostensibly introduced in the 19th century to the civil code to avoid disputes over a child's father. The "cooling-off" period, which was six months until 2016, was put in place in case the ...

     Read More     

Our post yesterday featuring the confessions of a foreign female about compensated dating in Tokyo led us to this case study (from early 2021) on legal website Bengo4, which sets out to answer a curious question: What happens to your assets if you divorce your wife for compensated dating? According to the author (a lawyer), an aggrieved husband consulted him about divorcing his wife, who had been caught doing compensated dating. Apparently, starting from around the time they got married, his wife was meeting another man around two times a month and having sex with him. For these dates, she ...

     Read More