Some 50 young, educated Japanese women will travel to New York this month and pay thousands of dollars for the opportunity to drink tea, go out to dinner, and, with any luck, begin a relationship with an American, or a Japanese man living abroad.

They are part of a booming business for DestinaJapan, a matchmaking service founded in New York in 1996 that sets up Japanese women with men abroad. The company’s president, Hiroko Ozawa, said the key to her success has been tapping into a market of women frustrated by the limited role for women in Japanese society and looking to New York for “the more global-minded male.”

Unlike DestinaJapan’s clients, most Japanese women who migrate to New York come independently, but the reason is often similar: social and professional freedom. This draw has made New York into a hot spot for Japanese women – and has fostered a sharp gender imbalance.

There are almost two Japanese women between 25 and 34 for every Japanese man living in New York, according to the Asian American Federation Census Information Center. From 1990 to 2000, Japanese women in that age group, according to U.S. Census statistics, jumped by 78% while the number of Japanese men rose barely 12%.

“The Japanese girls are curious about New York and adventurous,” said Isang Yamamoto, 37, a waiter at Kasadela, a Japanese restaurants in the East Village. In the 15 years he has lived in Queens, Mr. Yamamoto has watched women arrive in increasing numbers, even if only to stay for a few months. He said it’s obvious why young women come in greater numbers than men: it is easier for them to escape the obligations placed upon them by Japanese society and travel abroad.

While Japanese men are expected to begin working for a company immediately out of college, often for life, women are still often expected to live at home.

“For men, you have to get married, you have to settle down,you have to have a decent job, so less Japanese men come here,” said Hiroyuki Takenaga, a Japanese journalist who wrote a book published last year on New York’s Japanese community. “Women don’t have to settle down. They have more choices.”

While in San Francisco and Los Angeles there are multigenerational Japanese communities with their own Japan towns, the immigration to New York is more recent and smaller in numbers. There are just more than 22,000 Japanese residents in New York, according to the 2000 census.

Many Japanese businessmen went back home because of the recession in Japan during the 1990s, but the new generation of Japanese migrants come right after high school or college, arriving on a student visa and waitressing to make ends meet.

There is still no Japantown in the city, but in the East Village and Astoria there are “Japan Streets,” with hair salons, karaoke bars, and markets selling sesame pudding and videos, as well as advertisements in Japanese for apartments and jobs.

“It generally works out that the newer the group, the more likely there’s going to be a gender gap,” said Tim Calabrese, a research assistant at the Department of City Planning, citing Mexicans as a group that tends to be heavily male-dominated, while other groups, such as Filipino and West Indians, are female-dominated.

When Yoko Shioya, the director of performing arts at the Japan Society, moved to New York in 1988, she said most of the women were in their 30s, and came for the same reasons that drive women to join DestinaJapan, to find a husband and live in a less structured environment. “Japan is a country which admits that everyone perceives it as a man first country,” Ms. Shioya said. “In order to escape from the pressures they came here.”

Since then, she said, women are arriving for more diverse reasons.

Noriko Komura, 39, a producer for Japanese television, moved to America nine years ago after she decided to change professions, a liberty frowned upon in Japan. “My case is not unique,” Ms. Komura said, explaining Japanese society does not encourage talented women to explore their careers. “Many of the 30- to 40-year-old women in New York came here because they were pursuing the second chance.”

While Ms. Komura said she saw the matchmaking service as more a throw back to the booming 1980s, when Japanese men stationed in New York were looking for wives, she said there were some commonalities in motives between the young artists hoping to achieve their professional dreams here and women hoping to find a husband who is exposed to a more equal culture.

“In short, Japan is still a patriarchal society,” Ms. Komura said. “Women are still expected to do housework, raise kids at home, and behave modestly. It’s an unwritten but still powerful concept.”