The Solemnness of a Paid Japanese Blind Date "Party"

On the 4th floor of a nondescript office building, a five-minute walk from bustling Chiba train station is a series of small booths fronted by a reception. Those who are casually passing by may see that these booths resemble small meeting rooms, where those keen on privacy would be interviewed for jobs or thrash out the details of business ideas. That these booths are a "party space," as their operator calls them, would not be the first thing that would pop into the casual observers' minds. Their hidden secretive structure does not indicate their users wanting to talk to many people, as one would at a party.

Yet, it is in these small series of rooms that many romantic couples are formed, after paying good money. After those interested sign up for a "party for people looking to get married" (婚活パーティー), paying JPY 5,000 (for a man) or JPY 1,500 (for a woman) each, they are directed to these little booths, where they are told that they will, in quick succession each, meet seven eligible bachelors/bachelorettes in the span of an hour, after rotating through the rooms for an eight-minute introduction conversation with each member of the opposite sex. 

The event is a decidedly high-tech one that is fitting for the late 20s, early 30s age range of the 14 attendees. Just before the event starts, attendees are sent a link to a dedicated event for the webpage where detailed profiles of every person they will meet are recorded. Throughout the hour-long "party," attendees talk to each other while looking at their smartphones, rating and taking notes about each short rendevous on their phones. At the end of the one-hour party, attendees are invited to share their contact details and choose their coupling preferences, with the results announced to each individual on the same webpage.

But the event is completely lacking in spontaneity fitting for a nominal "party" in such a small space full of so many tech-savvy young people. The tuxedoed event operating staff members followed a strict schedule, explained via a lengthy set of instructions he read out from a tablet at the beginning of the event. Attendees are not only to move around only based on the schedule, but they also are not to exchange contact details outside the official event webpage, and not to chitchat outside the eight minutes assigned for each person unless they happened to be a match at the end of the event.

The robotic, following-the-formula attitude of the staff member is somehow mirrored in the attitudes of the attendees. None showed any particular enthusiasm for meeting new people for the sake of meeting new people, despite paying a good chunk of money to be there. All were busy staring at their smartphones to crosscheck the person they are speaking to with the profiles on the webpage. Perhaps it is up to the man to take the conversation somewhere, but the women, in general, were terse in their responses, providing the bare minimum effort to deepen the content of what is being said rather than simply slip back into staring at their smartphone screens.

Perhaps the lack of spontaneity says something about the attendees of the event. Of the seven women there, only one was a university graduate while all others were high school or technical school graduates. While it is hard to tell what exactly they are looking for in a marriage, many professed to be "serious" in their intent and hoping to get hitched as soon as possible. When prompted for the reason for their hurry to get married, many noted the need to be financially secure, with some explicitly stating that they want the opportunity to move away from their parents' homes.

Still, the fact that urgency and single-mindedness of finding a marriage partner translate to orderly solemnness in action say something about the culture behind the business model of the "blind date for marriage" industry. As a country where there is great social hesitance for adults who do not know each other to start talking, getting strangers to talk to each other for a fee is viable as a mass-market service. But given the natural cultural hesitance, the service needs to be packaged as a serious one, even if the name of the service is as frivolous as a "party." 

Moreover, because many Japanese people continue to see marriage as a life goal that needs to be achieved as a responsible adult, rather than something that can be had or avoided as equally respectable choices, the blind dates have to retain a sense of "looking for forever" even if it is just a one-hour meeting session with no results guaranteed. That veneer of respectability and promising an everlasting solution to a sociocultural problem drives the creation of an environment that differs in reality, quite significantly, from the spontaneous party it is advertised to be online.