Love in the age of spam: online dating sites are slashing the sleaze to help grownups find mates

Japan, Inc., Feb, 2003 by Debbi Gardiner

Among the PC-based dating services, big players are MSN Japan as well as Excite, Nifty and Infoseek. Yahoo Personals launched a service in Japan in April. There are a few dating sites in English catering to Japanese as well: Lavalife from Toronto, Friendfinder Asia, a subsidiary of the California-based Friendfinder Network with sites in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore; and newcomer Kazudate Japan, owned by Dating Network, a two-person company based in Atlanta whose owner says he has already made a profit in just one month.

Kobe University's Funk says Match.com is a very late entrant, and its success will depend on "whether it has some new thing to offer."

In Japan, the online dating industry has gotten a bad rap both from the media and the police, who promote it as a risque place to meet people, says Risa Nakanishi, public relations manager for Yahoo Japan. In 2002, the national police reported 793 crimes in Tokyo. Many of those (including kidnapping and blackmailing) were related to deaikai, she says. Nakanishi says the Japan personals at Yahoo are doing "okay."

The press coverage has gotten so bad that NTT DoCoMo doesn't even want to talk about dating sites. "NTT DoCoMo does not offer 'dating' or 'flirting' services on its i-mode official sites for ethical reasons," Miki Nakajima McCants of the company's international public relations department writes in an email. The company takes great pains to distance itself from the plethora of unofficial dating sites available on imode.

Another deterrent from using mobile dating sites is the annoying spams, which have tarnished the image of the industry, says Cohen of Match.com. The spring 2002 issue of the Japan Internet Report wrote that of the 900 million messages that go through DoCoMo's servers each day, 880 million (98 percent) are spam. But Japan's dating sites are often about a lot more than finding love. They're about community. People sign up on services to find friends and pen pals as well as dates. One New York engineer visiting Tokyo for a karate tournament posted an ad on Match.com Japan to meet friends to show him around. A surgeon named Masa wrote that he "wasn't after sex"; he just wanted to meet "sincere and nice foreign friends."

The site, so far, promotes itself as a place for finding love and a fun site to come and meet people, says Pam Grevler, who manages the Match.com Japan site from the Soulmates Technology Sydney office.

A good match for Japan

Users seem to like the service so far. A Match.com Japan user who goes by the name "Metal Fatigue" says he went to a PC-based site like Match.com because emailing by cellular phone drives him nuts. "Everyone's doing it," he groans. He thinks Match.com will do well because its questionnaires are more probing and Japanese are not as outgoing as Americans. "Writing personal emails will make it easier for Japanese to open up," he says.

The signup rate in Japan is 10 percent higher than other Match.com sites in Asia, Grevler says. And unlike the company's other Asian sites, where the predominant age group of users is 18-25, in Japan the main user group is professionals in their late 20s to mid-30s.