Lonely Researcher, 20,000 Love Hotels -- Lonely Researcher Explores Rampant Infidelity In Japan

TOKYO - On most weekday afternoons, businessmen in their trademark gray and blue suits can be seen climbing the curved, hilly streets of Tokyo's quiet Maruyama district that is famous for its many rabu hoteru, or love hotels. Their favorite female office clerk usually follows a discreet few steps behind.

Once inside the rabu hoteru, these refugees from the office enter a world of heart-shaped beds, tawdry lighting, pornographic videos and, if they want to pay extra, sumptuous food. The cost for two hours is 5,000 yen (about $60). For 20 percent extra, they can spend the whole day or night.

There are more than 20,000 love hotels. Their presence offers incontrovertible evidence that extramarital affairs are commonplace.

But unlike the United States, where a survey on sex habits made front-page news, the media, academics and government health service seem indifferent to the sexual activities of their compatriots.

"There are fewer than five sexologists in Japan," said Naohide Yamamoto, director of the Japan Institute for Research on the Education and Culture of Human Sexuality.

Yamamoto, a freelance researcher and writer on Japanese sexuality, has plied his lonely trade for more than three decades. His office is cluttered with artwork from all over the world celebrating human sexuality and fertility.

When asked about infidelity, he pulled out a 13-year-old survey, the last time anyone took a scientific look at Japanese sexuality.

The survey revealed that 22 percent of men either married or living with a woman had been unfaithful. The comparable figure for women was 8 percent.

When it was suggested that the figures didn't seem that high and wouldn't support the thriving love-hotel industry, Yamamoto said, "These figures are for one year. I think one in five married men having an affair each year is quite high."

Some have suggested that Japanese men's propensity for extramarital affairs stems from cultural traits. "The Japanese believe we all have two coexisting souls," an Australian travel writer wrote recently. "One is spiritual, timeless, and uplifting - this is the soul that works long, arduous hours and puts one's company and family obligations first.

"The other soul is earthbound and pleasure-seeking. The Japanese do not believe the pleasures of the flesh are evil. On the contrary, Japanese men believe it is their right to enjoy sex."

Yamamoto scoffed at such mystifications and launched into his favorite topic: the impoverished emotional state of most Japanese marriages.

"In Japan, the basis of marriage and the reason to stay together has nothing to do with love," he said. "You have to have a husband or wife to be socially credible. You need to raise children. And then there's economics.

"Instead of divorce, many men and more and more women have affairs. They don't have the courage to divorce, but they have the courage to have affairs."

Japan's divorce rate, while rising, remains low by Western standards. In 1993, marriages outnumbered the 188,000 divorces by more than four to one.

Besides the social and financial pressures to stay together, the Japanese workplace encourages male infidelity. Men often spend their evening hours drinking and carousing with office compatriots, many of them young women who are known as office ladies.

Office lady is a distinct occupational category in Japan. Most companies employ small armies of young women, some even college-trained, to perform clerical tasks and to make the afternoon tea.

After these long nights out, men often arrive home too drunk or exhausted for sex with their wives, who probably don't want to have anything to do with them at that point anyway. They then wake up early the next morning to make the long commutes that begin the process again.

It is a pattern that many women, especially younger women who are more likely than their parents to have chosen their marriage partner, are less willing to accept. "Things are getting shaky. Even though they don't divorce, they have a konnai rekkon, or `inside marriage divorce,' " Yamamoto said.

This emotional impoverishment leads directly to the high rate of infidelity, Yamamoto said. (The recent U.S. sex survey found that fewer than two in five American men had an affair over their lifetime.)