Christmas cake
The idea of the cutoff age is taken quite seriously, with the tendency for women who remain unmarried past tekireiki to be treated as inferior. They are often compared to Japanese Christmas cake: fresh up until the twenty-fifth but becoming less appetizing with every day past this date. A newer expression replaces Christmas cake with "'toshikoshisoba"', a dish of noodles to see out the year on the thirty-first, thus creating motivation for Japanese ladies after the age of 25 to seek help in the form of omiai introductions from a marriage agency.