When I first saw this article on “couple busters” in Japan, I dismissed it as the latest piece of Japanese-exoticism. (It seems that there is a story every day about some bizarre behavior of the Japanese…) However, last night I saw the 1939 hollywood movie Midnight, in which Claudette Colbert performs exactly the same service! It happens to be a wonderful mad-cap romantic comedy that really deserves to be listed as one of the best of its genre, so I thought this article in the Washington post would be a nice way to post something about the movie!
“But increasingly, these firms employ a version of bait-and-switch. A husband who wants to dump his wife will hire a couple-busters firm to engineer an”accidental” meeting between his wife and a good-looking, attentive man who is secretly an agent. Soon, the wife is in an affair with him, and willingly grants her husband a divorce. The agent then fades away, his cell phone turned off, the address he gave her vacant, his workplace number a fake.”
