How many men and women clients do you have?

TMA currently has about 1,800 men clients and 1,800 women clients. In order to maximize the chances of success for both our men and women clients, we make sure that the ratio of men to women clients never falls seriously out of balance. We do this by adjusting the amount of advertising directed at men or women.

Back to Top

What are my chances of marrying a Japanese woman?

Your chances of marrying a Japanese woman depend on how attractive the women find you and the life you can offer them. For this reason, we suggest you send a good photo of yourself and do a careful job filling out your profile form. Please try to avoid photos that make you look intimidating, unfriendly, angry, goofy, depressed, or undignified.  (See our Guidelines for Effective Profile Writing and Photo Submission for some important tips that may help improve your chances.)

Back to Top

Women have always considered me below average in attractiveness. Do I have a chance to succeed?

Yes. TMA has seen many instances of men who were "below average" who succeeded in spite of initial low expectations. Physical attractiveness is only one thing the women look at. They'll also look at all the information on your profile as well as your personality. Once you've contacted a woman, it's up to you to convince her you're a good man she should consider marrying.

Back to Top

How long will it take for me to meet a lady?

This varies greatly from client to client. Sometimes the initial contacts take place very quickly. At other times, it takes a moderate or longer time to make a contact. It depends, again, on how attractive the women find you, but is also greatly affected by the way in which you approach them, as well as your requirements for the women. If you are too demanding, it'll often take longer to start a serious relationship, so we suggest you request to contact as many women as possible in order to maximize your chances of contacting them as quickly as possible.

Back to Top

Do you offer a money-back guarantee?

We guarantee to provide the profile mailing and request services described in our brochure and on our website, but we cannot guarantee that you'll succeed in finding a marriage partner. Success at that depends on many factors beyond our control. For example, it depends on how attractive the women find you and on your ability to form a relationship that will lead to marriage. It also depends on how demanding you are insofar as the characteristics and age of the woman are concerned. Since TMA has no control over those things, we are unable to offer a money-back guarantee.

Back to Top

Do you charge a "success fee" in the event I succeed in marrying a woman?

No. Unlike many marriage agencies which tack on a large additional fee if you succeed, TMA charges nothing extra. This means you don't even have to inform us of your success (and many clients don't) and it also means that there'll be no "post-success" conflicts over money between TMA and our clients.  However, if you do succeed, we'd certainly appreciate it if you'd recommend us to others.

Back to Top

It seems you only have about 180 ladies on your site. Is that all you have?

Not at all. There are many other TMA women clients whose profiles don't appear on our site. The profiles you see on our site are just a small sampling of our women clients. Over 90% of TMA clients prefer NOT to have their profiles publicly posted. The women whose profiles you see on our site have given us permission to post their profiles. To receive the paper profiles and photos of women who don't appear on our site, it's necessary to become a TMA client.  (You also have the option of receiving their profiles by email as pdf files.)

Back to Top

I live outside Japan. Will the ladies come to see me? How will we meet?

Yes, they'll come to see you, in most instances. The Japanese women clients who join TMA are specifically interested in meeting and marrying men from overseas. In this way, they aren't typical Japanese women. Many of them travel overseas frequently for vacation and business purposes. They use TMA to make contacts with men who they look forward to meeting while overseas. This doesn't mean, necessarily, that they'll agree to settle overseas. About half of them want to live overseas, and the other half want you to come and live in Japan with them. If your ideas on this conflict, you may be able to convince her to see it your way, or she may be able to convince you to see it her way. Failing that, you'll have to give up the relationship and look for someone else.

Back to Top

Do you arrange meetings with the Japanese women?

No, we don't. It's up to you and your potential marriage partner to agree on the time and place to meet. In order to keep our fees low, TMA doesn't get involved in the details of how and when our men and women clients meet.

Back to Top

I'm visiting Japan in one month. Can you help me meet some ladies while I'm there?

We may very well be able to do that, provided your profile and photo(s) are interesting to our lady clients. (So, we advise you to read our guidelines here.)  If your profile is well done, and if you give us one month's notice, we'll email an announcement to hundreds of our women clients announcing when and where you'll be in Japan.  The response you get depends on how attractive the women find you.  TMA has had great success with this method and you also may benefit from it, if you'll take the time to create a well-written profile with up to 3 photos on it.

 

As for where to meet a lady once you're in Japan, offer to take her to a cafe or restaurant of her choice.

Back to Top

I know there are lots of websites out there that have scammers. What do you do to make sure that these women are for real?

TMA has never had a single fake woman in all our years of operating since 1994. Our women clients pay significant fees which no scammer would dare part with. TMA's registration materials for women are all in Japanese -- imagine the difficulties this creates for scammers, almost all of whom are from outside Japan.  Our women clients also submit detailed information about themselves and sign a contract affirming its truthfulness. We have photos of all our women clients, and we are in frequent contact with them by email, phone, postal mail, and on the web. We have their home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and dates of birth.

 

Japanese women are not poor. The Japanese as a whole are very honest people. They aren't like the many scammers from Russia and various poor countries. The economic and social conditions that exist in those countries simply are not present in Japan. Our Japanese women join for one reason -- to find a marriage partner. They are not economic basket cases desperate for a Sugar Daddy. There is virtually no possibility that any of our women clients would ever try to scam you.

Back to Top

Will you help with travel arrangements?

In order to keep our fees reasonable, we don't get involved in helping our clients with travel arrangements. However, we can recommend some websites to you which will be of assistance.

Back to Top

Will you help with visa arrangements?

TMA does not get involved in matters related to visas. However, we can recommend some websites which might be of use to you in that respect.

Back to Top

Once I meet a lady and we like each other, how long will it take for us to actually get married?

This depends entirely on you and the lady. However, we'd recommend that you take your time. It's important that you really get to know the woman before committing to marriage.

Back to Top

Why is there such a wide range in the guaranteed minimum number of profiles men receive for each membership type?

There's a wide range for three reasons:

1.) if the age range you specify for the women is wider, you'll naturally be able to receive more women's profiles
2.) if you get a lot of requests from women, you'll receive more profiles
3.) if the age range you specify for the women is very high or very low, we'll have fewer profiles to send you.

Back to Top

I'm only 20. Are any of your ladies only interested in dating?

If you are only 20, you are in the very lowest age group of TMA's men clients. As such, the number of women clients we have who are around your age is not so large. you'll need to consider women in their mid to upper 20s in order to have a large number to select from. As for dating, yes, our Japanese women clients who are in their 20s are, for the most part, happy to date for a long period before getting married.

Back to Top

How good is the English of these ladies?

TMA's Japanese women clients can generally communicate reasonably well in English. English is widely studied in Japan and is the most common second language, by far, of Japanese people. A large number of our women clients speak very good English. However, a small percentage of our women clients speak little or no English. With those, you'll either need some knowledge of Japanese, or you can use translation software until one or both of you becomes reasonably competent in the other's language.

Back to Top

I'm over 50. What are my chances of meeting and marrying a Japanese woman?

Your chances of success depend on how attractive the women find you and the life you can offer them. But, there are other factors involved — age is only one factor. Naturally, the older you are, the more difficult it becomes, but it never becomes impossible, especially if you keep your expectations realistic and are willing to consider women who are a bit older than you might consider ideal.

Back to Top

I'm over 50, but only want ladies in their 20s and 30s. What are my chances?

TMA's Japanese women clients are not "mail order brides." Japan is one of the world's most economically advanced countries, so our women clients are not economic refugees such as you might find in the countries of the former Soviet Union or in such underdeveloped countries like Thailand or the Philippines. Japan itself is a very safe country with a high standard of living, so our Japanese women clients aren't seeking marriage simply to escape Japan and get a visa to enter the U.S. or some other country. They seek marriage for companionship, love, family, and children and, as such, they generally seek men a few years older than themselves but not more than 15 years their senior. If you are over 50 and seek a woman in her 20s and 30s, we won't tell you it's impossible, but you should understand it's unlikely you'll succeed in marrying a Japanese woman in her 20s, though there is a much greater chance of marrying one who's in her 30s.

Back to Top

What percentage of the ladies wish to remain living in Japan?

This is always difficult for us to quantify, but based on anecdotal evidence and our intuitive understanding of our women clients, we estimate that about 50% of them want to stay in Japan, and about 50% of them want to live overseas, almost always in an advanced Western country like the U.S.A., Canada, Western Europe, Australia, or New Zealand. They may consider other countries, but that would be unusual.

Back to Top

What percentage of the ladies would like to live in USA? Europe? Australia?

We think that about 50% of them would be willing to move overseas and live in a Western country. Of those, the plurality would end up living in the U.S.A., but many also go to Canada, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and, in rare cases, other countries. As for whether or not you can persuade her to come and live in your country, that depends on you, Romeo.

Back to Top

I'm looking for a beautiful Japanese bride and have visited many sites. When I saw the price you are asking I was quite surprised. It is very very high compared to all the other sites. Can you please tell me why your site is so much better than any other site to justify the higher cost?

Our prices are very low for a marriage agency. Our prices are particularly low for men. We even offer a free membership to qualified men applicants. Please do not confuse TMA with online dating sites. Our women clients are seriously interested in marriage. Dating sites that cost about $5 per month to join are completely inferior to our service if it's marriage partner you're looking for.

Dating sites that charge about $5 per month are top heavy with women who are just messing around, either not serious about marriage, or looking for extramarital affairs. They also have lots of fake women's profiles put online by scammers. Since TMA began operations in 1994, we have never had a single fake woman's profile, nor have any of our women clients ever scammed a man out of money the way many Russian women (or fake Russian women) have. Comparing the TMA site to those online dating sites is like comparing a sports car to a bicycle and wondering why the sports car is so much more expensive, even though it only provides transportation, just like the bicycle. The comparison is bogus.

We also charge a fee to men because, if a man is looking for a marriage partner, he certainly had better have the means to cover a small fee, else how could he possibly support a wife? The fee also helps us to screen out men who are penny wise but pound foolish. We can save a man a LOT of time, trouble and expense, dwarfing our modest fees. If the man lacks the sense to recognize this, we can't really recommend him to our women clients.

The fees we charge are about 4-10 times lower than what typical marriage agencies charge, in spite of the fact that TMA's services are superior, so much so that we find we have a problem with other agencies copying our profiles and distributing them fraudulently. In summary, we disagree with the premise that we are expensive. On the contrary, we are very inexpensive and offer a lot of value for money.

Back to Top

Why doesn't TMA send me ALL the profiles in my preferred age range instead of sending them in smaller monthly profile sets?

Do you think YOUR profile will be more likely to be noticed by our women clients if we send it together with 900 other men's profiles, or if we send it together with 30 other men's profiles?  Of course, you have a much better chance of being noticed by a woman client if she's only looking at 30 profiles compared to 900 profiles.  What happens when people get 900 profiles at once is, they ignore almost all of them except for a few of the most attractive ones.  This means, almost everybody gets ignored, and the most attractive ones get all the contact requests.  That is a hopeless system with a high failure rate, and we feel it also disrespects both men and women.  It treats people like data entries, with photos, on a hard disk.  It's a cold and heartless system, and TMA never used it.  The search for a marriage partner should be done slowly and with appropriate consideration.  This is why we send out our profiles gradually, in monthly doses of reasonable size, so that everybody's profile gets appropriate attention, and everybody's chances of success are higher as a result.

Back to Top

Why doesn't TMA allow me to search its entire database of women for characteristics like height and weight, etc.?

Because our women clients prefer a more romantic approach to finding a lifetime partner. If database search criteria are important to you, consider that TMA's women clients already meet a number of important search criteria: 1.) they are Japanese, 2.) they are marriage-minded, 3.) they are interested in men from outside Japan, 4.) they are of suitable age for you.

The search for a partner through TMA does not begin with a database search for personal characteristics. It begins by looking at the woman's photo and reading her profile. Men will almost always know if they're attracted to a particular woman after doing this. This is most efficient because it skips the unnecessary database search. A database search usually turns up results that don't live up to expectations, while completely overlooking the very woman who'd make the ideal match. The personal chemistry that mysteriously determines who is attracted to whom cannot possibly be captured by a mechanical database search -- only the person can know for sure.

 

The TMA System is much more romantic, adventurous, and exciting than a cold and heartless database search.  The TMA System goes back long before 1994 to the very dawn of mankind when men and women first looked at each other and became attracted to each other.  They didn't need computers and databases then, and for something as personal as finding a lifetime partner, they don't need them now.  All you need is to look at her photo(s) and read her profile.

Back to Top

Why doesn't TMA allow me to edit my profile directly? Why do I have to ask TMA staff to do it?

TMA is not an online dating site where members can write whatever they want, regardless of its appropriateness or truthfulness. All TMA profile content is scrutinized by TMA staff for appropriateness. We do not allow the type of spam, nonsense, and illicit solicitations you'll find in great abundance at a typical dating site. At such sites you even find men posing as women, all manner of fraud and mischief, as well as large numbers of obsolete & abandoned profiles. This is what happens when members can edit their own profiles directly, with little or no oversight.

 

TMA cannot guarantee that all the information on all our profiles is factual, but we can assure you, we have never had even one fake woman's profile in all our years of operation since 1994. All our women's profiles and photos come directly from the woman herself.

Back to Top

What are TMA's credentials and business references?  How do I know that TMA is not just another scam operation?

It's true there are many scam operations on the web. TMA, however, is not one of them, as we will now demonstrate:

1. TMA has operated under the same name since its founding in 1994.  Scam companies have to change their names frequently because, as one scam gets uncovered, they have to "flee silently into the night," only to reopen later under a different name.  If TMA were a scam operation, we wouldn't have been able to keep the same name since 1994.

2. The TMA websites have been in existence from almost the beginning of the World Wide Web.  We were among the first international matchmakers to utilize the Internet and the Web.  Before our website was first uploaded in 1997, we used print advertising, postal mail, fax, telephone, command line email, and Usenet to provide our services.

3. Click here to do a WhoIs lookup of TMA's main domains:

tma-marriage.com
marriage-agency.net

These are public records and they show that our "tma-marriage.com" domain was created on January 14, 1997 and our "marriage-agency.net" domain was created on Sept. 1, 1999.  You can also see the name of our Customer Relations staff member, our postal address, as well as our phone number, etc.  This information is the same as what you find on the contact pages of both our English and Japanese websites.

4. Publicly available archives of the "tma-marriage.com" site going back to January 9, 1998 can be seen here.  The "tma-marriage.com" site existed before 1998 but no archive was made before then.  You can see from these archives that TMA's name has been the same during all those years, and our service offerings have been essentially the same (except that we stopped offering introductions to Russian women many years ago).

5. Publicly available archives of the "marriage-agency.net" site going back to 1999 can be seen here.  Once again, you can see that we used the same name then as now.

6. To examine our site for Japanese women, click here.  Notice how this is a very large and beautiful site with hundreds of men's profiles.  (Since many Japanese women use cell phones, we also have a cell phone site in Japanese.)  The service description pages and registration materials are all in Japanese.  Very few scammers know Japanese, so it's virtually impossible for them to join posing as women, especially when you consider the fees they'd have to pay to do so.  Look at some of the men's profiles.  Do they look fake to you?  A man with keen judgment and discernment wouldn't think so.

7. Look at some of our profiles of Japanese women by clicking here.  Read the profiles and look at the photos.  Ask yourself if you really think these photos and profiles could possibly be faked.  Does what the women write look sincere?  Do the women have different styles expressing themselves, or did a few clever scammers write all these profiles?  A man with clear perception and good intuition wouldn't think so.  An overly suspicious man might.

8. Look at some of the countless photos of men and women on both our sites.  Do you understand the legal implications of posting someone's photo without their permission?  Do you think TMA could possibly get away with publicly posting many thousands of photos since 1997 without permission and still stay in business?  We can assure you we would NEVER consider doing such a foolish and dishonest thing.

9. Read some of the testimonials satisfied customers sent us by clicking here.  Ask yourself if you really think all of these testimonials, each with its own unique message and style, could have been fraudulently written by scam artists, or if they do indeed sound sincere and read like true stories.

10. Search YouTube for "japanmarriageagency" and see an actual video of the wedding ceremony of two TMA clients (Ian & Yuki).  Does this video look and sound fake to you?  Note that the ceremony is conducted in both Japanese and English.  Read the couple's comments under the video.  Do their comments look fabricated?  Can all this evidence possibly be the work of scam artists?

11. TMA has been a member in good standing of the Japan Banner Exchange since June 27, 2004.  We've been at or near the top of their rankings for many years.  If TMA was a scam operation, do you think the Japan Banner Exchange would tolerate its membership?  Doing so would tarnish the reputation of the Japan Banner Exchange and they'd be forced to kick TMA out.

12. TMA has been a member in good standing of Topsites Japan for many years.  We've been at or near the top of their rankings for a long time.  If TMA was a scam operation, do you think Topsites Japan would tolerate its membership?  Doing so would damage Topsites Japan's reputation and they'd have to kick TMA out.

13. TMA makes no exaggerated claims about its services.  Read our service description pages starting here.  We tell you honestly and up front that we cannot guarantee success and that, for paying members, there's no money-back guarantee and no refund if you fail.  Is this the way scam artists operate?  Of course not.  Scam artists make exaggerated claims or lie outright just to rope you in long enough to get their hands in your pockets.

 

14. TMA has accepted payment by credit card since March of 1998.  We currently accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and JCB cards.  Online payments via credit card are encrypted using 256 bit encryption on our secure server.  You can confirm our secure certificate by clicking on the GeoTrust seal on the left side of this page.  TMA has also accepted payments via PayPal for years.  The business address of our PayPal account is the same as the address on our contact page.

15. TMA has sponsored international matchmaking parties in Japan for many years.  The schedules for these parties are updated regularly in both English and Japanese.  Go ahead and contact the party organizers by phone or email and ask them their opinion of TMA.  We have nothing to fear.
 

 

16. Other websites where TMA has been an advertiser in good standing for many years include Tokyo Notice Board, Metropolis (originally Tokyo Classifieds), Hiragana Times, Kansai Flea Market, and Kansai Scene.  We have also advertised for many years in the print versions of those websites.  A partial list of other print media TMA has advertised extensively in are Pado (delivered free to households all over Japan), Japanzine, Tokyo Journal, Tokyo YY, Kansai Time Out, the International Herald Tribune, USA Today, Rolling Stone, plus a number of smaller/regional/international "advertising only" papers.

17. TMA has received positive media coverage in many publications in Japan and outside Japan, mostly in Japanese but also sometimes in English, German, and other languages.  To see a sampling of this media coverage, click here.

 

18. Search Facebook for "Mieko Matsunaga II" to find TMA's Facebook page.  You can see from TMA's web and print media presence that we make every effort to reach both potential men clients as well as Japanese women, and we do so in the most cost efficient manner possible.  TMA keeps its costs low and passes the savings on to its customers.  If you think our fees are high, read this.

19. The TMA logo has been essentially the same since TMA's founding in 1994.  There have been only minor changes to the original logo since then.  In about 2004, we added the words "Since 1994" just under the little angel delivering a love letter in the garden.  In 2007 we changed the fonts.  If TMA were a scam operation, we wouldn't have been able to keep the same basic logo for so many years.  Scam operations have to change their names and logos frequently to disguise themselves and resume their criminal activities.

20. No TMA staff member has any desire whatsoever to scam anybody.  On the contrary, it has always been our stated aim to provide the best possible service at the lowest possible price.  We give you our WORD of HONOR that we're an upright, honest service dedicated to helping our clients in a confidential and discreet manner at a reasonable price.

 

21. The TMA motto (Making it easier to find your ideal mate...) has been the same since TMA's founding in 1994.  It has always been our aim to provide the best quality service at the lowest possible price.

These are our credentials and business references.  If you find them convincing, you may want to apply for a TMA membership.  If your application and photos are up to our standards, we'll be able to accept you as a member.

Back to Top