Japan for the horny desperate housewives!

It turns out Japanese married couples like sex as much as anyone, but not so much with each other.


In the last year headlines about how celibacy is trending in Japan have gained attention around the world: “No sex please, we’re Japanese,” reports the BBC. But, wait a minute. This is a country where an estimated two trillion yen ($19.3 billion) are spent each year on the legal sex industry. And now it looks like the land of the rising sun is also the land of rising adultery. Ashley Madison—the international web site for married people who want to fool around—is taking Japan by storm.

“Life is short. Have an affair,” the site advises its clients, and when it launched in Japan on June 24 of last year it signed up over 120, 000 members in just ten days. As of March 27 of this year, that membership had grown to 1,074,075 people.

Out of all the markets Ashley Madison has penetrated, Japan was the fastest to reach one million members. If the numbers continue to grow at the current pace, by the end of the year one per cent of the entire Japanese population will have joined. Those numbers do not immediately negate Japan’s sexless marriage problem, but they do suggest that there are over a million people trying to get some action, and the problem may not be so much that married couples don’t want to have sex as that they don’t want to have sex with each other.

The ratio of women to men on the site is about two to one, which shows that many of Japan’s desperate housewives are determined to be desperate no more.

“There’s no doubt in an intelligent Japanese woman’s mind that her husband, who probably isn’t making love to her all that often, is somehow partaking in sexual encounters somewhere out there,” said Noel Biderman, the founder and CEO of Ashley Madison. “And to her, in what is becoming a more equitable society, that seems like BS,” he told The Daily Beast. “She doesn’t want a life of celibacy—that’s not how she’s engineered either.”

In a survey to be released on April 2, which targeted 75,000 users around the world (3, 500 in Japan), there are some interesting statistics.

First of all, Japanese women lead the world in their rush to have affairs, and, yes, 55 percent of Japanese women have an affair because they’re not having enough sex with their husband. This matches the results of a national survey of 14,000 people by condom-maker Sagami, which found that 55 percent of married couples considered their relationship sexless. By comparison, the women surveyed in other parts of the world cited lack of sex as the reason for an affair only 40 percent of the time.

It seems that Japanese people also don’t feel much guilt about their affairs: 8 percent of women and 19 percent of men throughout the world said in the survey that they felt bad about their adultery. (Remember, the people surveyed have already signed up for a fling.) But in Japan, hey, the guilt quotient is only 8 percent for men and for women just 2 percent, or about a quarter of the world average.

And not only are people in Japan not guilty about their affairs, they’re also proud of them.

“In America lots of women use Ashley Madison, but I don’t think they tell their friends about it. I think they’re telling their friends about it here. I think there’s some ‘virality’ going on. Not only are they unashamed, they are, in a sense, proud,” said Biderman.

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