#Anime Love Succeeds as Japanese Otaku Marriage Service Reveals 480 Wed Couples in 4 Years

Unlike anime, which usually involves getting hit by some sort of truck or an overly large study group to find the perfect partner, it can be hard in real life to find someone to spend the rest of your life with who has the same interests as you; it’s even harder when you live in one of Japan’s major cities and don’t have any time to yourself. That’s where services such as Toracon comes in, the company helps Japanese otaku find love – and according to Japanese news website Daily, they’ve wed over 480 anime-loving couples since the service started in 2017! How sweet!

Matchmaking services in Japan help people find love when they don’t really have the time to, with Toracon having registered around 700 members to the inter-agency database of over 62,000 people around the country. Toracon also revealed that members are married within two months of starting the service, and you can’t blame them when it costs more than 143,000 yen (US$1,311) to even get started with the service with a monthly fee of 11,000 yen (US$101) (and that’s the cheaper women plan!). 

In 2020 alone, 185 marriages were registered using Toracon with a marriage rate of 61.6% for its members, making the it the highest-achieving services in the country, and putting in the top 10 agencies in Japan out of 2,650. A representative for Toracon stated that because most of the people using the service were already nerds, pivoting to online-based matchmaking wasn’t as difficult and even saw an increase of sign-ups using their new “online matchmaking service.”

Looking at Toracon’s website, the ratio of male to female is in the female favor, with the women using the service out earning their male counterparts, and agreeing, on average, that more money should be spent on “otaku” hobbies. No matter what though, it’s always sweet to see people coming together, especially in these unprecedented times, and helping increase marriage rates in the inter-agency system year over year in Japan! The stats don’t include divorce rates.

Sources: Daily, Toracon Website

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Daryl Harding is a Japan Correspondent for Crunchyroll News. He also runs a YouTube channel about Japan stuff called TheDoctorDazza, tweets at @DoctorDazza, and posts photos of his travels on Instagram.