Champions of conventional concepts of matrimony may well be shocked -- dismayed, even -- by the current slew of stories in Japanese magazines detailing just how likely the nation's married women are to have sex outside their marriages.

"Get over it," says Myongan Kim, founder of the sex-therapy clinic Sei, which is Japanese for "sex." Kim, who is also an academic authority on sexual behavior, believes that any man who won't give his wife a backrub every now and then, or hold her hand, or tell her she's beautiful -- let alone make love with her -- doesn't deserve her loyalty anyhow.

So, in stark contrast to medically based sex counselors, who tend to prescribe anti-depressants or sleeping pills to ease the effects of sexlessness, Kim prescribes . . . men.

Kim has a stable of 30 "volunteer" males, aged 28 to 60, who perform "rehabilitation sex" with women clients who he believes have absolutely no chance of scoring at home.

Kim says that his volunteers must pass HIV screening and promise to use condoms. Four out of five of the men are themselves married, but only half are sexless.

The men are not paid, a criterion that apparently keeps the whole thing legal. (Women and the volunteers split the bill for a romantic meal and take the rest from there.)

Affection-starved wives, says Kim, "come back to life."

Happy to hear it. But is this fair to the volunteers' wives?

"If we worried about that, nothing would ever get solved. This world would be the exclusive domain of singles," he retorts. Kim, who was born in Kobe to South Korean parents, adds that as a subscriber to Buddhism, Taoism and Shinto -- rather than Christianity or Islam -- he feels little compunction about chipping away at the institution of marriage in Japan.

OK, but do the husbands deserve no sympathy at all?

Forget about it. "Women whose husbands adamantly refuse to be affectionate shouldn't be married to them in the first place," he declares.

After all, he says, there are women who can't divorce due to economic dependency or a lack of self-esteem.

So a volunteer is "the only salvation."