What happens to your assets if you divorce your wife for compensated dating?

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 would receive tens of thousands of yen from her partner.

She told the man that she was single. In fact, she had been married four years and was nominally a housewife. She had no children with her husband, who now wanted a divorce but was worried about his assets.

As a basic principle, joint assets must be divided in half when a couple in Japan divorces.

The husband was concerned about his savings. Since the allegedly shopaholic wife had already been spending their savings on clothing and cosmetics, thus reducing their joint assets, the author speculates that it is possible to give us her less than half their savings.

In this particular case, the husband could also demand palimony from the wife due to her adultery, thus further reducing the amount of assets he must hand over to her.

In Japan, one of the quirkier consequences of adultery is that a spouse can sue the adulterous spouse’s partner for such “consolation money.” This is another reason that detective agencies specializing in adultery abound, since wives who suspect their husbands of having an affair and want proof to guarantee a good divorce settlement from the husband and payment from the mistress.

Only, it seems that sometimes it’s the wives who are the ones doing the cheating . . . and so liable to pay.