It started with an email from a 20-year-old college student called Emi, who told me she was looking for a Showa umare no dansei (昭和生まれの男性, a man born in Showa, i.e., born before 1989). Next was Norika, a bored housewife in her early thirties asking me to spend some himajikan (ヒマ時間, spare time) with her. She informed me that she was willing to pay for all expenses, including restaurant and hotel bills. I was even more surprised when only a couple of days later, a 33-year-old chief executive named Saori offered me a larger sum of money if I was willing to enter a tokubetsu na kankei (特別な関係 special relationship) with her. Though being a married man, I couldn't help wondering about this new trend of Japanese women looking for partners in such straightforward ways.

If you get such messages too, you may ask yourself the same question. The simple answer is, these women don't exist. They are a product of the strange world of Japanese meiwaku mēru (迷惑メール, spam mail). The Japanese musician Kenzo Saeki took the trouble to react to a larger number of such messages in order to see what happens if someone should take them for real. What he found was that, as expected, all of his attempts to get in touch with some real applicant at the other end of the line quickly took him to a stage where he was requested to reveal personal information about himself, including mobile phone number and credit card details.

According to Saeki's account, published in his book "Supamu mēru taishō" (『スパムメール大賞』 "Spam Mail Grand Prix," Tatsumi Publishing 2005), spam mails with fictive women looking for sex have been around since the early 2000s. The first messages that offered money to male dating partners, thus reversing the well-known pattern of enjo kōsai (援助交際, compensated dating) into gyaku enjo kōsai (逆援助交際), occurred in 2005. They have been spamming around ever since, sometimes with offers of absurdly large remuneration for prospective males.