The explosive success of 'affair dating' website Ashley Madison in Japan revealed just how widespread adultery is in the country.
The gate to Kabukichō, Tokyo's largest red-light district. Photo: Basile Morin / CC BY-SA 4.0
Sex in Japan has made a splash in the media recently, this time via the explosion of Ashley Madison, the world's largest "affair dating" website. Its success in Japan has pulled back the curtain on the widespread adultery in the country, where the approach to marriage seems to accommodate infidelity.
According to Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman, the site's success the world over is proof of a simple, if hard to accept, fact of humanity: "We're not monogamous. We pretend to be. We pay lip service, but we're not, and we have proof that we're not. So let's stop pretending," he told Motherboard. To date, more than 25 million members across 38 countries have crafted profiles on the site.
The popularity of the controversial matchmaking site is especially explosive in Japan, Ashley Madison's fastest growing market worldwide. Japan broke one million members faster than any other country — in just eight months — in a nation that prides itself on social status and proper appearances.
"Infidelity exists in every culture, but there are nuances. And they're sizable," said Biderman. But nowhere are these nuances more pronounced than in Japan, where the "infidelity economy," as he calls it, thrives alongside a culture that strongly emphasizes marriage and raising children.
"Japan actually has a healthy appetite for sex. They just go about it in a really dichotomous kind of way and make it hard for themselves."
The historical roots run deep. According to Jennifer Robertson, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, "monogamy was introduced in the first modern Constitution/Civil Code of 1890." Until the postwar Constitution of 1946, adultery was solely defined as a crime committed by married women. Romance, Robertson notes, "is not at all the main motive for the legal institution of marriage, which brings two extended families into alliance" and ensures "the continuity of the household lineage."
This intensely practical attitude often confounds the Western media, which loves to suggest that Japanese have all but stopped doing the deed. The reality on the street tells a vastly different story. Standing outside any one of the nation's estimated 30,000 "love hotels," the unending stream of couples — some married, some not — slipping in and out undetected is telling. So too is a random corner of Kabukicho, Shinjuku's red-light district, and the throngs of tipsy salarymen filing into a multibillion-dollar paid-sex industry.
The full feature digs into the eye-opening survey numbers — including the 84 percent of Japanese women who called their affairs beneficial to their marriages — the scale of Japan's sex industry, the religious roots of its attitudes, and whether its pragmatic model is one other societies might emulate.
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