Wakaresaseya: Japan's Hired "Marriage Wreckers"

by Richard Lloyd Parry in Tokyo

He was charming and single, she was bored and stuck in a sterile marriage, and their encounter in the aisles of a local supermarket seemed like a chance for them to change their lives for the better.

But the affair ended in betrayal, recrimination and death after a sequence of events as lurid as the plot of a pulp novel.

Prosecutors in Tokyo called yesterday for a 17-year sentence for Takeshi Kuwabara for murdering his lover, Rie Isohata, last year.

But the most extraordinary thing about the case was not the killing — by strangulation, after a bitter argument last April — but the circumstances in which the couple met.

Although Kuwabara inadvertently fell in love with Mrs Isohata, he had been paid to track her down and seduce her as a professional wakaresaseya — or “splitter upper” — hired by her husband to provide him with grounds for a divorce.

The case is raising questions about the ethics and legality of “splitter uppers” — shady, but seemingly widespread operatives to whom a surprising number of Japanese turn.

As Mrs Isohata’s father said during the trial: “I can never forgive a business that toys with the emotions of human beings.”

Wakaresaseya perform a variety of functions, but all of them arise from the Japanese dislike of direct confrontation. Rather than pleading with him face to face, a woman whose husband is having an affair may hire a splitter-upper to seduce his mistress away from him. Parents may engage their services to prise off the unsuitable lover of a son or daughter. Dozens of wakaresaseya companies advertise on the internet, under names such as Lady’s Secret Service and Office Shadow. They employ models, actors and personable people of different backgrounds first to trail and then to seduce their quarry. The classic wakaresaseya operation was the one commissioned by Mrs Isohata’s husband.

Kuwabara approached the 32-year-old mother in a supermarket in Tochigi Prefecture, north of Tokyo, in the guise of a chatty stranger, and asked her if she could recommend a place that sold good cheesecake.

Before long they were lovers. He used the false identity “Hajime” and made no mention of his own wife and children. By arrangement, a colleague photographed them covertly as they entered a “love hotel” where rooms are rented by the hour — and Mrs Isohata’s husband used this as evidence to divorce her in November 2007. By this time, however, she and Kuwabara were in love.

But when the truth came out in April 2009 the couple had a furious row and she announced that she was leaving him. It ended with her being strangled with a piece of household string. Kuwabara surrendered to the police that same night. “At the beginning, I thought of it as just a job,” he told the court. “But I came to really love her. I told lie after lie out of fear that she would hate me. I was driven into a corner. I still love her.”

Mrs Isohata’s father told reporters: “For the rest of my life, I will never forgive the defendant, or my daughter’s ex-husband who hired him, or the wakaresaseya business itself.

“This has devastated not just my daughter’s life, but those of my grandchildren and me.”

Parting shots
Wakaresaseya (pronounced Wack-Array-Sass-Sayer) are private detectives who bring to an end relationships of all kinds

As well as breaking up couples, entrapping someone into an affair can be useful to an employer who wants to secure the “resignation” of an employee or a businessman seeking “favourable terms”

Five years ago there were about a dozen companies, but there are now many more on the internet. The industry relies upon the power of shame and is unregulated

Cost is a question of time and complexity. An initial consultation might be Y10,000 (£71), but the average case takes three months and costs can easily mount

The wakaresaseya say that men are the easiest targets. “They never seem to smell a rat when, despite the fact they’re middle-aged, a beautiful young woman falls for them,” one said

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article7021033.ece