DMM恋活 (DMM Koikatsu)

» see dmm.com/koikatsu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Japanese shutdowns usually come with a clock attached and this one is no exception: 2016年3月31日（木）15時00分. Fifteen hundred hours on Thursday 31 March 2016, and the thirty-first really was a Thursday, which is worth checking because these notices get their own weekday wrong more often than you would expect.

DMM恋活 was a 恋活 service, which is a specific Japanese category sitting between the hookup sites and the marriage bureaus: dating with a relationship in mind, no wedding assumed. Registration was free and your real name was never shown. DMM said it verified identity properly and kept the service monitored around the clock, and its terms barred anyone under eighteen along with anyone already married.

It launched quietly enough that no announcement of it survives anywhere I could reach. The earliest dated thing the service produced is a post on its own news page from 25 February 2014, and the bare address without its trailing slash was still returning a 404 to the archive's crawler a week after that. By October that year it was running a campaign called the Cinderella Project with an application window, so it had found its feet.

~ the record ~

~ how the matching worked ~

Mutual いいね, then a match, then private messages. Women could send likes without limit. You could sign up through Facebook, with your real name and your timeline kept hidden, and from 2015 the marketing led with the fact that you did not need a Facebook account at all, a line only worth printing in a market where needing one was the norm.

Money came in two shapes. There was a monthly plan and there were 恋活チケット, tickets, sold in packs running from a thousand up to ten thousand. There was a web version alongside apps on both iOS and Android, and the small print listed the browsers it expected you to be using, which included Internet Explorer 9.

The only numbers DMM ever published arrived in a press release dated 22 May 2015: as of the sixteenth, matches had passed 400,000 pairs and membership had passed 370,000. The same release reported a survey saying just over half of members had met a match in person. Nothing was published after that, and nothing was published about why it closed ten months later.

~ the refund window ~

From 1 April 2016 the address stopped being a dating service and became a notice under 資金決済に関する法律第20条第1項, article 20 of Japan's Payment Services Act. Tickets were prepaid instruments, so DMM was legally obliged to offer the unused balance back.

The terms are exact in the way only a statutory notice is. Claims could be filed from 11:00 on 1 April until 23:59 on 30 June. Only paid-for, unused balance qualified. You filled in your name, phone number, email and bank account on a form reached by logging into the dead service, or from inside the app if that was where you had bought. Payment came by transfer to a Japanese bank account afterwards, with DMM covering the transfer fee, and the notice warns that anyone missing the window is excluded from the process entirely.

You can watch the sequence happen in the size of the archived records. They sit around 11,500 while the service was running, drop to about 10,900 in April when the marketing became a refund form, and fall again to roughly 9,300 in July once the window had closed and the page could finally be the plain 「DMM恋活 サービス終了のお知らせ」 it stayed as into the autumn.

~ the number on the footer ~

At the bottom of that April notice, under the list of supported browsers, sits a line reading インターネット異性紹介事業者番号 / 30140003009. Japan has regulated internet dating services since 2003. Every operator must register with the public safety commission and show its number on the site, and that is why one of the few hard facts left about this product is a license reference printed under a browser compatibility list.

A grave for a dating service is normally reconstructed from marketing. This one is reconstructed almost entirely from compliance paperwork: a registration number, a refund procedure, a statutory article and a closing time precise to the hour. The service told you almost nothing about itself. The law made it tell you everything else.

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