Almost half of Japanese women have experience of dating foreigners

Dokujo, an online magazine in Japan for single women, recently introduced the results of a survey of its female Japanese readers about dating foreign men.

It asked readers around Japan about their experiences of dating foreigners. It collected the results of 404 readers and published the results. What do they reveal?

209 women (51%) said that they had never dated a foreigner.

82 women (20%) said that they had dated a foreigner in the past.

72 women (17%) said they were dating a foreigner at present.

And 41 (10%) said that they had never dated a Japanese man.

While this is hardly a large sample, if we put the final three figures together (the article explaining the survey results does not presume overlap or multiple answers, which may well be an error, but it’s hard to know without seeing the original questionnaire), then potentially 195 out of the 404 have had some sort of sort of relationship with a non-Japanese man. That’s just under 50% of the women.

Does this sound too high? Or is it just high when we consider the metropolitan single women likely to be readers of Dokujo? Probably these are the kind of women who will have experience living and traveling abroad, and also dating widely in their search for Mr Perfect (whatever the color of his skin).

Of course, this is just a “relationship” or “dating”. It doesn’t include one-night stands and the like. Surely this would bump up the numbers even more.

So all this must mean that those English teachers are keeping themselves pretty busy with extra-curricular activities.