Recently, I went to an old, long-term Japanese friend's wedding and it was really something else! It included a party of over 200 people, wine from the bubble era of the late '80s/early '90s, some well-known Japanese TV celebrities and far too much gourmet food. Indeed, it was quite a wonderful and rare occasion to behold, especially right here in Tokyo.
However, believe it or not, Japan's current marriage rate has recently declined to 5.8 per 1,000 people. This negative trend has spun off such inventions like Japanese Web Sex Technology, and the Japanese Husband Hunting Bra, the Tokyo Love Doll Call Girl Service, as well as i-doloids! Love Dolls for Japan and the rest of the world - the Playboy mag for LOVE DOLLS! Yes, folks, its all too true here in Japan's Adult Toys Robot Nation.
So what the flock of seagulls could possibly be causing all of this? Well, one big reason can be seen in the now very popular 'wakaresase-ya' or the 'breakup service industry':
Sex, lies and splitting up
May 10, 2010
Via Times Online
By Richard Lloyd Parry
"Until the unexpected phone call comes and she learns the breathtaking truth, Rika Suzuki will remember it as a night of fun and excitement in a cheerless and humdrum life. It began with an invitation from a young female friend, Kaori, whom she’d met by chance a few weeks earlier. A group of friends were going out for the evening and, unexpectedly, Rika — 40, and unhappily married — was invited to join them.
They met in one of Tokyo’s smartest restaurants; the beer and saké flowed. Kaori’s friends were flatteringly interested in her, none more so than a man of her own age named Osamu Ota, a successful businessman with a droll and confident charm. When the bar at which they ended up closed for the night, it was Osamu who suggested that they all take a room in an hotel so that the party could continue. And as the others said their goodbyes several hours later, it was he and Rika (not her real name) who were left behind.
The photographs taken the morning after tell the story of what happened next: the discarded clothes and screwed up tissues and Rika, looking bashful but happy, sitting among the churned up sheets of the hotel bed. “These are her earrings on the bedside table, and that’s her belt,” says Ota, who is showing me the photographs. “And these . . . bodily liquids on the sheet — well, these are the proof of what happened.”
In other circumstances, this would be unsavoury, but predictable, sexual bragging. But Rika was the victim, not of a straightforward womaniser, but something more chilling: a meticulously planned professional sting operation.
Everyone involved in that wild evening — from the young “friend” who invited her, to the guests in the restaurant — was an actor, an employee of an agency that specialises in sexual entrapment. The chance meeting with “Kaori” weeks before, the dinner invitation and the act of seduction were commissioned and paid for by someone Rika has never met — the lover of her husband, a woman who yearns for the failure of Rika’s marriage.
The whole thing was masterminded by Mr “Ota” — real name Osamu Tomiya — a member of a peculiarly Japanese profession, part-private investigator, part-prostitute, known as wakaresase-ya — the “splitter-uppers”."
Continued...