Additional note to Representative Kida. I have to wonder: isn’t the “transportation allowance paid in advance” rule (a best-efforts obligation) a half-hearted measure for avoiding transportation-fee disputes, and one that goes against users’ instincts? On this point, I’ve long felt that the club’s goodwill hasn’t been working very well.

Thank you for your question. Our representative, Kida, will answer. Ideally, offering to cover transportation costs should be an unwritten gentleman’s rule. I believe that’s what it originally was. In a more exclusive members-only service, I imagine there would be just one sentence framed and hung on the wall: “Be a gentleman.” The members would then desperately wonder, “What exactly does being a gentleman mean? Is touching her allowed? Dirty jokes probably aren’t, right?” Think of it as the period shortly before Shima Kōsaku was promoted to department manager. But as time passed, the good old “mysterious, urban-legend-like dating clubs where no one knew how to join or how much it cost” gradually disappeared, and clubs like ours—“It’s wholesome. It’s called Universe.”—became more prevalent. I suppose that’s when the whole gentleman’s-rule concept went out the window. Anyway, to get back to the point: Under our current policy, if a man deliberately fails to pay the transportation costs, he is immediately banned. The only exception is when he pays right away, in which case he receives a yellow card. We also transfer the transportation costs to the woman immediately while confirming the facts. It’s the platform operator’s responsibility, so of course we take care of it. As for the unwritten gentleman’s rule I mentioned at the beginning, I take that back after all. Even Shima Kōsaku got up to all kinds of things, so perhaps men are actually more gentlemanly now than they were back then.