So a married guy in his 60s drops roughly ¥10 million over five years on a woman in her 20s, they break up, and now he wants his money back. Good luck with that.
The setup is pretty standard papakatsu territory. He started seeing her while she was still a student, covering living expenses and tuition along the way. Things eventually went south, he called it quits, and then decided the cash should come home with him. He even kept a diary of what he handed over and what was said at the time. What he didn’t have was any actual loan agreement.
She refused, arguing the money was tied to an extramarital relationship and therefore didn’t need to be returned. He admitted he originally meant it as a gift — the kind of support that came with her time and company.
Under Japanese civil law, a gift is pretty much what it sounds like: one person freely decides to hand over money or property with no expectation of getting it back, and the other person accepts it. No repayment schedule, no contract, no clear understanding that it was a loan. Once that money has already been transferred, it’s generally hard to claw it back just because the relationship ends or the giver has regrets. A gift that isn’t put in writing can sometimes be rescinded in theory, but not after it’s already been completed.
There’s also the separate issue of giving money for an “illegal cause.” If a married person is handing over cash specifically to maintain an affair, the law often treats that as something the giver can’t later demand back. Not every payment from a married man to a younger partner automatically falls into that category — it depends on the purpose and how closely it was linked to the relationship. Even if only part of the ¥10 million counted as support for living costs or school, the core problem remains: it looks a lot more like a gift than a loan.
Bottom line, once the money is gone and there’s no clear agreement that it was ever meant to be repaid, getting it returned after a breakup is an uphill battle. The diary might document the amounts, but it doesn’t magically turn a gift into a debt.
