Lexicon ·
konkatsu
noun · Japanese, 婚活
- Stated meaning
- Translated from the dictionary: doing various things in order to find the ideal partner and make a happy marriage.
- Operating meaning
- The job hunt applied to marriage under its own name, so that both parties are candidates and recruiters at once, and neither is obliged to pretend otherwise.
- Origin
- Japanese, short for kekkon katsudō, "marriage activity", on the pattern of shūkatsu, the job hunt. A buzzword from a book by Masahiro Yamada and Momoko Shirakawa.
The word is an abbreviation, and the dictionary (opens in a new window) gives its reasoning in a note. Women entered the workforce, people married later, and lives diversified, so men and women stopped marrying as a matter of course. Marriage, it followed, now took the active effort a job does. The model was shūkatsu, the job hunt, and the word went into circulation from a book Masahiro Yamada and Momoko Shirakawa wrote together.
Most vocabulary in this file earns its entry by the distance between what it says and what it does. This one says what it does. The process has applicants, criteria, rounds and an offer, and the word is the name of a process. By 2016 doing it online (opens in a new window) was the subject of a journal article.
Under load, two people who both know the word arrive at a first meeting as candidate and recruiter at once, each assessing the other against criteria the other also holds. English runs the same interview as intentional dating and files the criteria under wife material. Both describe the hiring and call it something else. Konkatsu calls it hiring. Nothing about the meeting changes, except that afterward neither party can claim it was a coincidence.