More than a wife to lose

Salarymen — the black-suited corporate warriors who work long hours and stumble home late to their long-suffering wives — have danger waiting for them as they near retirement.

Divorce. A change in Japanese law this year allows a wife who is filing for divorce to claim as much as half her husband's company pension.

When the new law went into effect in April, divorce filings across Japan spiked 6.1 per cent. Many more split-ups are in the pipeline, marriage counsellors predict.

Skittishly aware of the trouble they are in, 18 salarymen, many of them nearing retirement, gathered at a restaurant in Fukuoka recently for some marital triage.

The evening began with a defeatist toast. Husbands reminded themselves of what their organisation — the improbably named National Chauvinistic Husbands Association — preaches as a sound strategy for arguing with one's wife.

“I can't win. I won't win. I don't want to win,'' they bellowed. The food was scrumptious and the mood jolly but throughout the dinner meeting there was an undertow of not-too-distant domestic disaster.

“The fact that a wife can now get 50 per cent has ignited guys to think about their fragile marriages,'' said Shuichi Amano, 55, founder of the association and a magazine publisher.

Men near the end of their corporate lives, he said, are especially edgy. “To be divorced is the equivalent of being declared dead — because we can't take care of ourselves,'' Amano said.

When his wife told him eight years ago that she was “99 per cent'' certain she was going to dump him, Amano said, the only things he then knew how to do in the kitchen were to fry eggs and pour boiled water over noodles.

Since then, in addition to learning how to listen and talk to his wife, Amano said, he has learned how to take out the garbage, clean the house and cook.

Marriage in Japan is going through a rough patch. As in the United States and most wealthy industrialised countries, the age of first marriage is being pushed back in Japan.

Between 1962 and 2006, the average age at which a woman married for the first time has slid from 24 to 28.For well-educated (and presumably well-informed) young women in Japan, marriage is fast becoming a sociological rarity.

This wariness is a rational response to the isolation and drudgery of being a wife in Japan, according to Hiromi Ikeuchi, a family counsellor with the Tokyo Family Laboratory.

“I don't think it is the fault of men,'' she said. “It is the corporate culture that expects men to work late.''

Japan's divorce rate had been rising steadily for decades. Then, in 2003, the law was passed granting a divorcing wife the right to as much as half of her husband's pension.

But the pension provision did not go into effect until this April.
Since April about 95 per cent of divorce applications have come from women who apparently were done waiting, Ikeuchi said.

She added the situation is particularly worrisome for married men nearing retirement — men who are soon to return full time to the families they have financially supported but emotionally ignored.

“This husband who comes back is an alien,'' Ikeuchi said. “For a wife to accept this alien is going to be very, very difficult.''

While many experts agree that there is a marriage crisis brewing in Japan, the response of men has been tepid.

The National Chauvinist Husbands Association has been widely covered in the Japanese news media in the past five years.

But it has recruited just 4,300 members in a country of about 60 million men. Most married men in Japan are simply not paying attention, Ikeuchi said.

“They think their wives will take care of them, like they took care of the children,'' she said. “They have no conception if their wife is happy.''

Matrimonial score

The husbands association ranks its members on a scale of 1 to 10. A “1'' is a well-meaning but clueless guy who has done little more than show up at a group meeting.

A “10'' is a husband who has reached a Zen-like state of being able to show his wife through his daily behaviour that he truly loves her — and even manages to spit out the words “I love you''.

It is not common in Japanese culture for men or women to say those words, even in happy marriages, according to marriage counsellors.

So far, the husbands association has unearthed only one “10''. He is Yoshimichi Itahashi, 66, president of a concrete company in Fukuoka. He has been married for 38 years and has two daughters and a son.

For almost all of that time, he behaved coldly and selfishly toward his wife and children. “I think my generation especially has grown up in a very feudalistic era,'' he said.

“I never said I was sorry. When I came home from work, I would say I want to eat dinner, I want a bath and I want to go to bed. I had no time to talk to my wife.''

Before supper at the husbands association meeting, Itahashi invited his wife, Hisano, to explain some of the details of his misbehaviour.

“He didn't exist in the family,'' she said. “It was almost like a family of mother and children, like there was no father. Not only was he not there, I couldn't get in touch with him at all.''

Itahashi joined the husbands association five years ago but kept it a secret from his wife for a year, as he quietly taught himself to pay more attention to her and the now-grown children.

He said the 2003 divorce law helped focus his mind and see domestic relations in Japan for what he now believes they are — a volatile mess. “Japan is a peaceful country but the household is at war,'' he said.