This year’s top answer is one to two million yen less than a year ago.
Japanese matchmaking company Sunmarie conducts an annual survey on what Japanese singles are looking for in a marriage partner, and in the interest of having all the cards on the table, asks respondents how much they hope for their potential spouse to earn. After all, sharing a life means sharing finances, and so your husband or wife’s earning power has a direct effect on your own lifestyle,
For this year’s survey, responses were collected from 196 men and women between the ages of 20 and 69, with 49 percent of the female respondents being in their 20s or 30s, and another 29 percent in their 40s. When questioned as to how much they hope for their husband to earn, the most common answer was four million yen (US$37,000). This is a marked drop from last year’s survey, when five million and six million yen tied for the most common responses from women.
What’s more, the second-most common response from women in 2018, at 20 percent, is “I’m not concerned with how much money he makes.” It’s only when you get down to number three in the rankings that a desired husbandly income of five million yen pops up (at 19 percent of responses), followed by six million yen with 15 percent of the votes.
Meanwhile, the most common response from men in the 2018 survey, by far, was “I’m not concerned with how much she makes” (43 percent), with three million yen (32 percent), four million yen (14 percent), and five million yen (4 percent) rounding out the top four.
Given the small sample size, we can’t really say that four million yen is the magic number women nationwide look for when judging if a guy is marriage material or not. However, Sunmarie does say that over the past few years it’s been seeing a steady closing of the gap in income expectations between men and women, which it attributes to Japanese women achieving greater financial independence than their predecessors of generations past.
Source: Konkatsu52 via Niconico News via Jin
Top image: Pakutaso