Wakaresaseya: private agents hired to end relationships
bbc.com
bbc.com
In 2010, Takeshi Kuwabara was sentenced for the murder of his lover, Rie Isohata. What captured the world’s imagination was not the tragedy itself, but the fact that Kuwabara was a wakaresaseya – a professional hired by Isohata’s husband to break up their marriage.
Once Isohata learned of the deception, she angrily attempted to break off the relationship with Kuwabara. Unwilling to let her go, he strangled her with a piece of string. The following year, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
There is definitely a dark rom-com movie script to be made from this story.
Edit: I just remembered, there is an old Italian film which has a similar plot. It's called Divorce, Italian Style and is about a man who wants to divorce his wife, but can't due to the local laws. He spends the movie trying to get his wife to take a lover, so that he can shoot her "in a rage of jealousy" and get a reduced sentence for manslaughter. It's pretty funny, I highly recommend it.
I don't know where the line is or how it should be done, but I know as much as I know anything that it's not the proper solution if it ends with "and some innocent bystander live was (temporarily) ruined in the process".
(I used that exemple because it's the one I always remember as the court case marked my mind, but I'm sure most countries have an equivalent)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29743857
Trying to remember the name of the book it is covered in, too
Edit: Book was "Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police" iirc
"At least 20 of the undercover officers deceived women into intimate, sexual relationships.
The women had no idea that they were having relationships with men who were police spies. Some of the undercover officers had relationships with more than one woman during their undercover missions.
After the existence of the covert operation began to be exposed in 2010, the women grouped together and successfully took legal action against the police. So far, the police have paid compensation to at least 12 women who were deceived by the undercover officers."
"
The film has been remade in several countries, so I guess there is a market for your idea.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1465487/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_20
Here is an interview of one such agency by Niel Patel in his Indian startup show, where she(founder) proudly claims to end relationships on behalf of clients(parents). If you thought that was awful, wait till she tells at the end 'There are no regulations for Private Investigative Agencies in India' ! (Neil just laughs it off).
She cheated on me, so I get to keep the house.
The headline and framing of the story hides the greed/selfishness/manipulation/exploitation.
(Of course, the bigger part of the actual event is the murder, but the story minimizes that too.)
Not entirely unlike bosses who give employees they want to fire impossible tasks until they quit of their own volition.
If it was popular, wouldn't they try to hide how popular it is? ;)
But there article is very fair...there are LOTS of strange and novel Japanese phenomenon that fascinates people in other countries. Even in this article, they describe hiring actors to appear as family members at events. That certainly doesn't exist in the United States.
< stares >
< Goes back to watching 'Pretty Woman' >
The list isWisconsin, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Nebraska, Montana, Missouri, Minnesota, Michigan, Kentucky, Kansas, Iowa, Indiana, Hawaii, Florida, Colorado and California. In other states there are no fault divorces available, but you can also file a divorce based on various faults, including adultery.
That said the last state to support no fault divorces was New York in 2010, so you're right. (Though a no fault divorce option wasn't there for me when I was considering one in 2002.)
The first step is mediation with a court appointed mediator which can take a long time... If mediation doesn't work, the next step is to go to court in which case having some dirt on the spouse that doesn't want to divorce is crucial in influencing the judge deciding the case.
Bare in mind that Japan has no legal joint custody. Also, culturally it's normal for one parent to have zero contact with children after divorce.
Here is an account of the divorce process［1］. I do not know if all the information is still relevant today.
Previously couples had to apportion blame for the marriage breakdown, which encouraged it to be an adversarial and rancorous process.
No doubt there are positives but it's difficult to see how it isn't just another step along the path of the trivialising of marriage.
Perhaps we should be looking at other approaches to the problem of unhappy marriages, in particular the due diligence of people in choosing their partners - especially when there are children involved or intended.
I'm not suggesting a method or solution, just pointing out making divorce easier is not universally considered a good thing or moral win.
Maybe we've taken marriage too seriously for hundreds/thousands of years, and we're finally progressing as a global society to realize that till-death-do-us-part might be too big of a commitment for some 20-somethings. After all, what's really the difference between being married and living with your significant other besides some laws that are based on the old views of marriage.
(Granted, with kids things get tricky, but making sure parents stick around and help raise kids to me seems rather independent on whether a couple was married or not - seems more to do with someone's inner beliefs)
Marriage is not girlfriend/boyfriend.
It's far more serious, and making it a commitment to be contemplated deeply before entering - and not easily breakable - is the whole point of highlighting the problem of trivialising it.
Marriage is rooted in religion, for better or worse, and these thoughts about making marriage some unbreakable for-life bond are based on religious beliefs hundreds of years old. Catholics couldn't divorce, ever! We live in a more enlightened age, one where religious thoughts have less to do with forging our societal beliefs. Can't we progress with our thoughts on marriage as well? Marriage for life would mean for many an unhappy and unfulfilling life. Perhaps a life of violence or depression. Is that we want to force people into? A life without choice, a life without happiness?
So it’s not wrong to say marriage has its roots in religion, but the cause to create marriage hasn’t gone away even if religion isn’t a factor: Can you imagine how difficult it was for a single parent (especially women) to raise a child alone, a few millenia ago? I think it’s fair to say that it caused major problems.
Even today raising children is still extremely difficult. Raising a productive citizen is another order of magnitude of difficulty.
Ecclesiastical annulments are grossly misunderstood by most Catholics and non-Catholics alike[1]. They are not "Catholic divorce." And yes, the tribunal system can be gamed, but if you actually believe you should realize that God isn't going to be fooled. And if you don't believe then why do you even care what the Church thinks?
[1] See below reply
Because your friends/neighbours/relatives may be Catholics, and you may care about your appearances.
In my experience with religious folks, keeping God happy is not the sole driving force behind most of their lives to the exclusion of all else. It's a framework around their lives, but not always priority #1.
Given that, annulments are essentially a catholic divorce, with a little bit of magic added.
Around a billion people, give or take, in China would disagree with you.
Heck Japan isn't exactly a religious country.
With a few exceptions, the concept of marriage coincides with agricultural societies.
Also, parents invest a lot in their child's marriage, e.g. downpayment for a house, car, etc, for their child (singular!), so that adds even more pressure to "make things work".
How come you suddenly need 50% less emergency cash per person just because you're married?
Think about how many people within your own extended family do this? Take a guess, deliver this talk to them and track through life how many follow the path.
We chimps display a wide spectrum of Personality traits and an even wider spectrum of Needs, which are constantly changing through life and the events that effect it. Dangerous to assume whatever system you have accepted will be accepted by all.
Its easy to come up with all kinds of theories about "what works" and "how things should be" but that is usually based on our limited awareness of the spectrum.
The problem is that the legal one size fits all rule of marriage doesn't fit most. And, that size differs from country to country and even within countries (eg US states).
If you trust your partner to keep their word, there is comfort in knowing you are a team, no matter what crazy stuff happens.
If your partner refuses to make that promise (that promise being what makes it a marriage, IMO), well, you might want to re-evaluate how much you trust them and why.
Refusing to commit yourself seems more like perpetuating that problem than addressing it, to me.
Maybe I'm missing something.
One source tells me that 41% of first marriages end in divorce. Divorce today is not generally considered a pleasant process, yet they go through with it, which is evidence that there was something seriously wrong with the relationship. Put differently, 59% of marriages were sufficiently correct choices.
Suppose couples spent an additional year on scrutiny before getting married. How much would that improve the success ratio? To 70%? 80%? What about the remaining 20%? Once they discover their choice was sufficiently wrong to want to go through with one of today's divorces, what should they do? Stick it out no matter how bad it gets? Really? Or if they do divorce, then what have you achieved? If they delayed by three years and got to 90%, would that be worth it?
I do not think all marriage-ending issues are foreseeable. There are often red flags that are flagrantly ignored, but things like substance abuse and spousal abuse are not always predictable. They can begin unexpectedly well into a marriage.
I do not think you should always "stick it out". Keeping promises does not have the same moral weight as many bigger issues.
The obvious example is abuse - the victim should get out, then get a divorce (my understanding is that abusers rarely change their stripes, but are very prone to appear to do so long enough to lure their victims back).
I don't advocate for huge delays before marrying. I don't think that really helps a lot. Going really fast is not wise, but waiting for years does not magically solve problems.
Instead, I advocate for a totally different approach to dating than most US inhabitants take.
Dating should be about figuring out if you should get married, not about having fun or impressing the other person. The last two goals form a tiny, tiny subset of the first one, and I can't tell that most people I have seen dating are aware of that.
There's a phrase I love from the recent Picard show - "the way of absolute candor". When we first met, we engaged in something not unlike it (we called it "brutal honesty"), and it was a lot of what drew us to each other.
While our marriage has been full of hardships and difficulties (and, yes, plenty of surprises), we both had a decent idea what we were signing up for before we said our vows. That was largely due to the way we approached dating, and our extreme honesty with each other.
So far, we have stuck with it. At this point I have a hard time seeing what could break us apart, apart from major personality and behavioral shifts due to neurological failures (injury, mental illness, etc).
That's in large part due to how much work we did before getting married, both on the relationship and on solving difficult, ugly problems together. Marriage, especially parenting, is mostly about doing hard, unpleasant work together.
God / the universe helped us on that front, by dropping multiple hard things on us while dating. One example would be the time her apartment got destroyed in a flash flood weeks after she moved so we could live in the same area and see each other regularly.
That sucked, but boy did we get to understand each other better. Taught us a lot more about how married life might go than playing video games or going out for French cuisine.
Not saying you should destroy your girlfriend's apartment to see how she copes, but you can seek out hard, frustrating, meaningful things to do together regularly while dating, instead of a steady diet of all fun, all the time.
You can also be rigorously honest up front - my wife had as good an understanding of my failings as I could give her within weeks of meeting each other (many of the unpleasant surprises we've had in our marriage have come down to things we didn't realize about ourselves, so both parties were surprised by the discovery).
Take those approaches and add a reasonable amount of time before marriage (we dated for a year then were engaged for six months), and I think you could significantly lower the divorce rate.
Granted, you'd probably lower the marriage rate a lot too. That might not be such a bad outcome, though.
Also if you've been together for 5 years and then marry, why would that change the chance to be divorced after another 5 years versus marrying after 2 and then divorcing after 8?
Most peasants were married through arranged marriages that benefitted their families.
It’s working quite well for us for now. We’ve been together longer than any of my old, married (and since divorced) friends have.
As someone who's been through a divorce, I think this is the wrong perspective.
The law should always be considered a backstop for when other solutions fail, not a first solution to aim for.
For instance, if you have a disagreement with your neighbor about a fence or a tree or something, you should always go and talk to them first. If you're a business and have a disagreement about the contract with some other business, you should always go and try to sort it out without lawyers first.
Making it possible to sue your neighbor or your business partner when discussion fails to produce results doesn't mean that you're "trivializing neighborhood relations". Well-written and consistently-applied laws means, ideally, that when you have those conversations with your neighbor or your business partner, you never end up going to court, because everyone knows exactly what's going to happen.
The law in the UK is already written to try to encourage people to save their marriage: In the absence of adultery or physical abuse, you can generally only file for a divorce after you've been separated for 2 years; and this includes provisions for short stints of living together to give it a second chance. (E.g., if you separate for 6 months, come back together for 3 months, and then separate again, the "clock" doesn't start over, and you can file for divorce after another 15 months.)
By the time that people move out, the relationship is almost always in a really bad state; and by the time you've lived separately for 2 years, there's almost zero chance you're going to get back together. At that point what you have is no longer a marriage, and the divorce proceedings is only recognizing legally what has already happened relationally.
I mean, yes, we as a society should also be trying to prevent disaster-in-waiting marriages from happening; and should be investing time trying to strengthen marriages -- even marriages which are relatively stable.
Making divorce difficult won't save marriages, but it does add all kinds of perverse incentives. If you have to prove adultery or abuse to file, then suddenly you have to bring in private investigators to spy on people, and sling around reputation-destroying accusations in public, making the whole thing a lot more nasty.
On the surface this strikes me as insane, but from the perspective of the opposite situation it sort of makes sense (e.g. if the poster's income fell it makes sense they would pay less in alimony). It might be a bias against alimony in general, but it seems strange that alimony would increase post-divorce.
My case is somewhat complicated. I foolishly signed a bad agreement on the advice of a disinterested lawyer because I just wanted to get my divorce over with(after dragging on for 18 months due to an incompetent and biased mediator at the beginning). The ex has 'Steve Jobs cancer', although she had the primary tumor removed at 18, years before I met her. They found more tumors years later during a medical procedure needed because of her poor self-care, and we went through 6 years of seeing an oncologist only to be told that her tumors were shrinking and she would live a long life and die of something else. After I asked for a divorce, she got a small town doc to declare her a cancer patient, incapable of working. It's bullshit, but it will cost me a lot of money to disprove now.
I could go on and on about the unfairness in the legal system, but I'll just say that anyone thinking of getting married should understand what that entails. It's not about love, it's a legal contract. If you allow an exploitative relationship to exist, the state can step in and prevent you from escaping it. My ex is now 52. There is some precedent that a judge may deem I pay her until I retire in twenty years(or more, depending on the average retirement age in twenty or so years).
We never had kids. I was a 21 year old virgin and in a religious cult(in which she grew up and brought me into) when we got married. She was 27 and knew what she was doing when she trapped me.
If you're getting divorced, wait until it finalizes no matter how hot she is.
unintended consequences... policy decisions have real world implications. Marriage should not be a slave contract.
I'm genuinely curious how many of these relationships could actually be salvaged by good counseling, once they've reached the point where someone is willing to hire a saboteur.
they probably haven't reached that point, compared to other societies, their law just makes evidence a requirement if the divorce is contested.
so the incentives are misaligned for different behavior.
In Denmark, you can divorce by electronic signature and without any reason. If both spouses agree, they can be divorced immediately. Immediate divorce is also possible in case of
- adultery,
- two year physical separation due to disagreements violence,
- sexual assault,
- bigamy,
- child abduction.
Otherwise, a 6 months separation period is needed.
In most divorce cases, no law suits are needed.
Does this include an agreement on alimony/child support/custody? Or are there automatic arrangements for that in Denmark?
That seems to be where things get nasty in the US for the most part. It's not the literal divorce but the second order effects due to it.
Seems like a crazy amount of deception and effort to avoid confrontation, but perhaps that also hints at the root cause?
The article also notes that the marriage can’t be terminated easily if contested, which suggests to me that it can also be easily terminated if both parties agree.
According to the article, that is also the case in Japan. It is only contested divorces that require proof of adultery. Now, it may further be the case that contested divorces without something like adultery are easier in Denmark, and that might be the better system, but avoiding outlier cases like this hardly seems like the reason.
Still seems very cheap?
I am not your lawyer. This is not legal advice. If your partner is actively sabotaging your relationship, it may not be a good idea to stay with that person.
[1] in Texas: In order to prove fraud, a plaintiff must show that (1) the defendant made a material representation that was false, (2) the defendant knew the representation was false or made it recklessly as a positive assertion without any knowledge of its truth, (3) the defendant intended to induce the plaintiff to act upon the representation, and (4) the plaintiff actually and justifiably relied on the representation, which caused the injury. Ernst & Young, L.L.P. v. Pac. Mut. Life Ins. Co., 51 S.W.3d 573, 577 (Tex. 2001).
But I see your point, it feels fraudulent since you prove one side is bad by doing something (possibly) equally as bad, but only one thing is regarded in court. Though it will probably look bad if it's found out.
> I am not your lawyer. This is not legal advice.
Me neither, but I think it's an interesting topic.
> If your partner is actively sabotaging your relationship, it may not be a good idea to stay with that person.
Of course. But that was the point all along, I guess ;)
It is already illegal, for example, to engage in long term stalking/harassment.
And the actions of these people feel to be very similar.
These things are sad and immoral, on that we agree. However, government and legality should not be arbiters of human morality; it's a huge and inefficient and stupid mechanism that should only be used to solved issues that absolutely cannot be solved without it and it's monopoly on violence.
This kind of thing is better solved by society itself, and, judging by slowly, but steadily improving social norms, declining violence and improving human rights all around the globe, it is.
Then what is the point of having government and legality at all?
But I see some positive things as well, from the article: "assistance with romantic reconciliation", "preventing revenge porn", "help a wronged spouse collect consolation money" and "obtain evidence of adultery".
I think when most people hear "life sentence" they think the person will spend the rest of their life behind bars, so the phrase "life sentence" doesn't clearly communicate what actually happens.