Nainai's Matchmaking Operation
ナイナイのお見合い大作戦！
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
Women travel to depopulating towns to meet local bachelors — the marriage market as regional policy.
Nainai's Matchmaking Operation was a run of TBS specials hosted by the comedy duo Ninety-nine, Takashi Okamura and Hiroyuki Yabe. It grew out of a popular segment of their show Mote Mote Ninety-nine, and after that programme ended in March 2014 it aired nineteen times, irregularly, until June 2019. Each special went to a place whose men were struggling to find wives, often a farming or fishing town, and recruited women from the public to come and meet them. Over the course of the event the men and women talked one to one, the women visited the homes of the men they liked, and on the last day came free time and then the confessions: a man stepped forward, said his piece and waited for an answer. On-site matchmakers, most often the actor B-saku Sato and the television personality Noriko Kato, kept the event moving, while Ninety-nine and a panel of guests watched from the studio. Okamura sometimes went ahead to interview the men.
The last special, broadcast in June 2019, was the fourth 'Self-Defence Force brides' edition, held in Okinawa over two days in May. Forty men from the Ground, Maritime and Air Self-Defence Forces and eighty-two women took part. Most of the men lived in barracks, so instead of home visits each had a booth where someone who knew him made his case. Two F-15 pilots found themselves after the same woman. The youngest man, a 21-year-old soldier who had never had a girlfriend, set his heart on a 20-year-old who sold tapioca drinks in Tokyo, and could not follow her explanation of tapioca; a 23-year-old from the Air Self-Defence Force, equally new to love, pursued her too. Just before the last free time she said the younger man, who had listened so earnestly, now interested her. But in that free time he fell by chance into conversation with a medical receptionist, and at the confessions he chose her, and she said yes. The tapioca seller accepted his rival. Twenty-five couples were made.
Starring
Takashi OkamuraHost
Of the duo Ninety-nine, the studio host who sometimes travels ahead as 'matchmaking chairman' to interview the men.
Hiroyuki YabeHost
The other half of Ninety-nine, co-hosting from the studio as the couples meet and the confessions play out.
B-saku SatoHost
An actor and the most frequent on-site matchmaker, reporting from the event and keeping it moving.
Noriko KatoHost
A television personality who most often partners B-saku Sato as on-site matchmaker, including at the 2019 Okinawa event.
Fumiko NishikawaPanel
A doctor and television personality, the most frequent studio panellist, who sometimes coaches the men before an event.
Why it matters
Nainai's Matchmaking Operation made a rural shortage into prime-time entertainment. Its premise, men in farming and fishing towns who cannot find wives, went out on network television at seven or eight in the evening, and it asked, without quite saying so, what the women were being invited to take on: a place, a family, a way of life. The format is gentle beside the dating shows that followed it. Ordinary people, their family kitchens, comedians' jokes, a confession accepted or declined. It is also a market run at scale, with twenty-five couples made in a single round of confessions. The 2019 special caught its truest moment by accident. A young soldier who had never had a girlfriend lost the woman he first chose and found another in a conversation he had not planned. The show promised that love could be organised. Its best scenes suggest how much of it cannot be.