Konkatsu Senryaku - strategy in the Japanese marriage hunting

I got a book that went viral on twitter (among Japanese folks) recently, and finished reading it. I already tweeted a few positive reviews about this book in Japanese, but here I want to be a bit more critical (being critical is much easier in English than Japanese somehow). 

The title of the book is Konkatsu Senryaku (Strategy in marriage hunting), written by a management scholar who ended up diving into Konkatsu by himself. The book is based on the author's own experience in Konkatsu (marriage hunting) experience.

Konkatsu is a term coined by sociologist Masahiro Yamada, who has advocated this idea in response to increasing non-marriage rates, which in turn leads to low fertility in Japan, where marriage and childbearing are (still) tightly connected. One may think Konkatsu is similar to other newly emerged meeting opportunities such as online dating, but this is critically different from them in that Konkatsu emphasizes finding a marriage partner, rather than pursuing more casual dating. The term has made a whole new industry, where singles now do not hesitate anymore to say they are looking for a future partner via Konkatsu. The book is a few of (semi-) academic efforts to investigate how participants experience mate selection processes in the newly formed market. 

One critically important finding in this study is that participants’ experience is highly gendered. This is partly structural, as I discuss below, and partly organizational. For the organizational side, the author made a strong case that the gendered experience is a product of how the Konkatsu market is organized. Specifically, in the market he observed and participated in, male participants are first screened based on their income (and sometimes age). By contrast, Konkatsu agencies do not necessarily require such income criteria for female participants. The author recalled that he was once more confident in finding a partner because of his relatively high earnings (roughly about 10 million yen, which will be a top 10% of income in his age), but he realized that his higher income does not make any difference in the market, because every male participant, who joined the Konkatsu party with the author, are more or less in the same income brackets. Instead, what makes a difference (conditional on their income) is their looks (or age). In the Konkatsu market, appearance and age become currency, instead of income. He himself admits he does not look sexually attractive, and he did not get requests from female participants (he got a few, but the book described how awful the experience with the women was). 

As his experience indicates, money does not really matter for mate selection in the Konkatsu market, because it’s simply used as a screening criterion. Competition starts after the initial screening, which is a source of stress for unattractive male participants, he argues, because Konkatsu agencies he contacted do not share any detailed feedback on why he did not get a request and vaguely suggest what he should do next (like “try to be clean and tidy”).

Regardless of what he experienced, I feel this book did a great job in describing such an organizational source that makes participants’ experience more gendered than we might have expected.

One negative side, though, is that readers may feel the author’s argument is a bit misogynistic. The author, a never-married single guy in his mid-40s who entered the field - out of half-curiosity and half-necessity to find a partner - found that women in the Konkatsu market tend to be more strategic about finding a “right” partner (i.e., those who have higher income, with better looks if possible). 

This is more structural, I would say, as women in Japan have to anticipate that their careers can be interrupted during their life course. However, since the approach he took was auto-ethnography, the author did not pay careful attention to the sources of women’s strategic behaviors. Instead, he mainly discussed how men’s and women’s experiences in the market differ, and how relatively unattractive men, including himself, tend to suffer from exposure to such environments, both in terms of the chance of finding a partner and self-worth. 

I appreciate that he shared his experience in a semi-academic format, which eventually went viral in a country with very low marriage rates and fertility, but I feel that a thick description of women’s reasoning in the market is critically warranted. The asymmetrical experience by gender in such settings may be more or less the same in many societies, but the Japanese marriage market is still highly gendered, with expectation towards men as a breadwinner while women as a secondary earner (with an unequal division of household labor), which suggests that their experience in the marriage hunting market reflects preexisting gender norms and relations in Japan, but the author did not touch on this important context.