Ashley Madison gets over 1 million users in under nine months

The overseas media tends to report on the Japanese and sex as one of either two extremes: “No sex please, we’re Japanese” — i.e., a totally sexless and sex-starved nation — or as a culture of fetishes and weird sex, with a gigantic sex industry (which is quasi-legal) and even more gigantic porn industry (twice the size of America’s).

Of course, here at Tokyo Kinky we contribute to this discourse, especially the latter. We like to champion the two trillion yen ($19.3 billion) spent annually on the legal sex industry. We think it’s healthy and necessary to society.

But here’s something that speaks clearly enough, though it kind of falls into either of the two narratives.

The Canadian infidelity social networking site Ashley Madison launched in Japan in summer 2013, as we reported as the time.

Its initial targets were 100,000 members in the first month, and 1.2 million in the first year. It got 120,000 members in ten days and over 1 million by March this year. Talk about exceeding your goals.

Media reports are citing Japan as Ashley Madison’s fastest market to reach the 1 million users, hitting the number in a mere eight and a half months.

So, this could mean that everyone is very sex-driven in Japan — or that the housewives and women of the country are so deprived of action that they have been bursting to get their hands on a service like Ashley Madison.

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, founder and CEO of Ashley Madison, told The Daily Beast. “And to her, in what is becoming a more equitable society, that seems like BS… She doesn’t want a life of celibacy—that’s not how she’s engineered either.”

While Japanese men are notorious for their very plastic attitude towards using prostitutes or having affairs, a survey of AM users globally found that 55% of Japanese women are having affairs too.

Japan is also largely free of Christian notions of sin too, meaning that adulterous men and women are less likely to feel guilty about their affairs (no doubt because they have a reason to have one!). Apparently the survey found the only 8% of men feel guilty and a mere 2% of women just 2 percent — a quarter of the world average. 84% of Japanese women in the survey actually believed having an affair was a positive thing for their marriage in the longterm.

AM has tapped into a massively under-developed demographic. While there are more fuzoku sex clubs, hostess bars, strip clubs and call girl services for men that you could even try to count, the equivalents for women are few and far between. Meanwhile, the women are often housewives with control over the household finances. This means they have time and money to burn, which is a potent combination.