Although things have been changing in recent years — as more Japanese women continue to work after marriage — in Japan it is still usually women who are expected to prepare meals for the family. And whether it be making bento (lunch boxes) for their husbands or children, or preparing the evening meal, Japanese homemakers are known to turn to the Internet to find new recipes.

It is perhaps not so strange then to discover that what is arguably the world's most successful online recipe service is Japanese.

Cookpad.com, which lists 870,000 free user-generated recipes, boasts more than 10 million users: 96.5 percent of whom are female (75.3 percent of those are married). The site gets 445 million page views per month, which is close to the same web-traffic as major U.S. recipe sites such as AllRecipes.com and the Food Network — not bad for a site that can only be read by Japanese speakers, and that only really targets one half of the population. (Imagine how successful they would be if more men started cooking!)