I’ve heard that men who do papa-katsu (compensated dating in Japan) want to have some fun before getting married, or that sex with their wives isn’t enough and they want to date younger women to feel young themselves. Is that really true?

I think there are people like that, but there are also cases where the husband is still working while the wife has retired from being a wife.

Isn’t that true not only of papa-katsu (compensated dating in Japan), but also of ordinary romance and affairs? Relationships between men and women are inherently mysterious. Once money enters the picture, papa-katsu becomes a world capable of fulfilling all kinds of desires and arrangements. That said, it could also be described as a world limited to a very small number of people who need it. Because it’s an underground world where people can’t openly say on TV that they’re in a papa-katsu relationship, it can also become a world where both men and women get deeply hooked and feel fulfilled to an almost unbelievable degree—something extraordinary they could never experience openly.

There are people like that too, of course, and there are also lonely older divorcees like me who live alone.