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Is a love confession necessary for a romantic relationship in Japan?【Survey】

Casey Baseel Oct 26, 2025
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Men and women show a difference in opinion on how strongly they need the cinematic romance staple in their real-life love life.

You can’t talk about dating in Japan without the concept of kokuhaku, or directly confessing one’s romantic feelings, coming up. But while a pivotal kokuhaku scene is a must in romance TV dramas and anime, is it something that Japanese singles think is absolutely necessary in real-life courtship?

To investigate, Japanese matchmaking service Zwei recently conducted a survey of 361 adults, 232 identifying themselves as men and 121 as women, regarding their kokuhaku history and aspirations. When asked how their previous relationships started, the respondents showed that confessions of feelings have indeed been a big part of their love lives. 69.8 percent of women said that their past relationships had been solidified with a kokuhaku to make them part of an official couple, and even more men, 73.1 percent, said the same.

However, those past patterns didn’t perfectly translate into an assumption that their next relationship has to have a formal declaration of feelings. When asked what their ideal way of starting a new relationship would be, a proper kokuhaku was still women’s top choice, from 52 percent of the respondents. 32 percent of them, though, said they’d be happiest with a relationship that starts as friendship, and then organically evolves into romantic love, followed by 16 percent who said their ideal would be a sudden sensation that they’d found their romantic match from the moment they met.

Kokuhaku were seen as even less mandatory by the men in the survey. Friendship that grows naturally into love was their top choice for how a relationship could start, at 40.4 percent. An explicit confession of love finished second in their ranking, at 38.6 percent, with 19.3 percent saying things clicking immediately upon the first meeting is best and 1.8 percent giving a mysterious answer of “other” when asked about the ideal way to become a couple.

▼ “We’d first connect through our shared life experiences from being born with traffic cone heads, and things would just sort of develop naturally from there,” would, ostensibly, fall into the “other” category.

Still, with the majority of women and nearly half of men saying that they think a relationship should have a kokuhaku, it’s not like the concept has become outdated. As for which side of the relationship has been doing the feeling-confessing, it’s overwhelmingly the guys. Out of the respondents whose past relationships began with a kokuhaku, the men said they were the one who first confessed their feelings 78.1 percent of the time, and women with kokuhaku in their dating past said that their boyfriends were the one who confessed their feelings 89.5 percent of the time.

So does this mean that it’s a man’s duty to do the kokuhaku? Not necessarily. Only 1.9 percent of the survey participants said that the confession of feelings is something that the woman should do, but also just 13.6 percent said it’s something the guy is supposed to do. The most common sentiment, by far, came from the 83.9 percent who said that it’s fine for either person to be the one who put their romantic feelings into words first.

Source: PR Times
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert images: Pakutaso (1, 2)
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