These kinds of "look how weird Japan is!" articles are an unintentional personal attack on an entire country. And the articles always come up more frequently in the software engineering / computer science social scene.<p>> Though it started slow, his website has roughly 45 ossan rentals a day now, or 10,000 encounters per year<p>Really? That's it? There are no statistics on the rate of occurrence of this per population, yet this researcher has taken it upon them to tell the whole world that middle-aged men are for rent in Japan.<p>Someone should research why Americans have an infatuation with a few cultural aspects of Japanese culture. And it's always things like "young people don't want to date!" or "you can buy hentai at vending machines". Anecdotally, some Americans fetishize these aspects of Japanese culture, and I think that skews everyone's perceptions of the country. I think some fraction of Americans want so bad for Japan to be as weird as the anime they watch.<p>Everyone I've met from Japan seems completely normal in relation to these articles.
80% of the users are women, and according to the researcher:<p>..."All of this indicates to me that this is likely a casual dating site without saying so," she said, adding that "sex and romance" could be an "expectation on all sides involved."<p>Looks like the creator of the site wrote a dating column, so a sort of undercover hiding in plain sight dating website, that could be a simple explanation.
I find it funny how they basically value the marginally informed opinion of a researcher in the USA over the word of someone actually involved in the story へ‿(ツ)‿ㄏ
> Urban citizens may be desperate to get advice from an older, wiser person, but they don't want to turn to the guy they've worked with for years or the uncle who remembers the tears shed over a broken toy truck. Someone familiar might judge them.<p>Maybe it's a cultural difference, but excepting dysfunctional relationships the idea that your close friends and family are the wrong people to give you advice is almost dystopian.