The Eyes Have It

In the U.S., it is no longer papa but the computer who knows best how to help boy meet girl. Not so, as yet at any rate, in Japan, where the professional matchmaker still plies his ancient and honorable trade with a gusto no computer could possibly match. Perhaps the most successful in Japan today is wispy, 73-year-old Genkichi Ishizaka, who is perfectly certain that he knows the secret of making a marriage stick.

"The most important thing," he told inquiring TIME Correspondent S. Chang last week, "is to get the right boy for the right girl so that their sex engines will go bang and keep on going bang." So far in his 41-year career in the marriage business, he has totted up a total of 2,882 self-sustaining chain reactions.

Breakneck Pace. Almost daily, letters pour into his home at Matsumoto from men looking for "a girl as pure as the limpid waters in the brooks of the Japan alps" or a young lady "with the most charming eyes," and from girls seeking the "right boy." Ishizaka, who insists upon interviewing all candidates at their homes, works at a breakneck pace: he engineered a mate for the alpinist in only a week and found the necessary charming-eyed lovely in 24 hours. He never asks a fee, leaving that to the generosity of the persons concerned. The largest sum he has received is $833; the smallest, zero. His average monthly income is $850, and business is getting better all the time. He will admit to only five failures among the marriages he has arranged: two because the husbands went off to prison and three because the young men (to his great disgust) turned out to be inscrutable. Why did the failures occur? "I couldn't test their engines in advance," he says. Now his male applicants must supply medical certificates attesting to their likely potency. From that point on, Ishizaka relies on intuition.

In pairing his customers, Ishizaka looks for several points. He seeks a "combination of the opposites in physique and temperament," but insists that couples come from similar backgrounds.

He refuses to help any boy without a college degree, or a girl without a high school education. Once the initial screening is over, Ishizaka gets down to basics. "The luster of the eyes," he says, "often indicates the sexual abilities or inabilities of their owners." The shinier the eyes, the better, and the sprightliest girls of all, he asserts, "are those with eyes that are glistening but look at the same time somewhat wet." It is enough to make a girl want to cry.

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