By MICHAEL HOFFMAN
Nisaburo and Hiroko Ohata are a typical new senior couple. "I know the sorrow of being alone," says Hiroko, "and so does he. That's why we're together." He's 60, she's 58; they've been married three years.
Late-life divorce soared last year, spurred by baby boomers retiring en masse as they turn 60 and a new law entitling wives to a share of their husbands' pensions. Less noticed has been late-life marriage, which Shukan Asahi (Jan. 25) finds is also rising.Senior citizens are of growing media interest these days, if only because of their new demographic prominence in a society aging with unprecedented rapidity. Even the manifestly young-adult-oriented Shukan Jitsuwa (Jan. 24 and again Jan. 31) has deigned to notice seniors, though its theme is senior sex rather than senior marriage. We'll return to that shortly.
Shukan Asahi opens its coverage at a Tokyo hotel miai — a party for people seeking marriage partners. Miai are generally associated with young people. Here, most of the 20 participants are in their 50s and 60s. The oldest man is aged 75, the oldest woman 73.
Senior marriages, unlike their junior equivalents, are spiced by the rich life experiences the partners enjoyed or overcame separately before coming together. Nisaburo Ohata, Shukan Asahi relates, lost his wife to cancer at 41. He raised their three children on his own. The children grew up, and he was left alone.
"I'd come home to a dark empty room, eat convenience store fare for dinner, watch TV and drink until bedtime," he says.
Hiroko, originally from the Kanagawa Prefecture countryside, left home in her 20s with a boyfriend and settled in Tokyo. At age 43 she returned home, alone.
"I turned 50," she says, "and began dreading the idea of growing old and dying in solitude."
The two met at a miai. The emotional connection was instantaneous. Two months later they married.
Senior marriages typically lack one adhesive force common to young marriage — children. A kind of substitute for the Ohatas has been the fields they tend at their Kanagawa country house.
"We reclaimed the land ourselves," says Nisaburo. "We worked very hard at it. We get very emotionally involved in it. It makes us happy."
And sex? Don't expect from Shukan Asahi the naked revelation that is more Shukan Jitsuwa's style. Never mind. Small hints go a long way. One is that they bathe together every night.
"We met late," says Hiroko. "We want to get as much out of our conjugal life as we can."
Shukan Jitsuwa's expose, spanning two issues, is in the form of a survey of 1,679 Japanese men aged 55 and over, the key discovery of which is that 73 percent claim their marriage "has no sex at all in it." Add to that the 19 percent who "have sex occasionally," and you're left with a mere 8 percent who enjoy reasonably full marital relations.
But marital sexlessness is not sexlessness, there being no end of outlets outside marriage. The one most favored by older married men, Shukan Jitsuwa finds, is — surprisingly, perhaps — older married women.
Seventy-two percent of the magazine's respondents "would have sex with women other than their wives, given the opportunity;" 42 percent actually have. The casual observer is apt to imagine much younger women as the love object of choice, but no, 57 percent of respondents have been drawn to married women in their 50s; 24 percent to women in their 60s.
What qualities can these married women claim that are lacking in a man's own wife?
"A certain gentleness," suggests one 66-year-old man. "Very likely if we were actually living together it would be different. But in a purely sexual relationship, good sex is all that matters."
Sexual daring, ventures a 58-year-old — symbolized, in his case, by mirrors. "Nobuko (his 53-year-old lover) likes to be on top, and she likes to see us reflected in mirrors. Her husband hates mirrors. Well, naturally. Probably it's the same in any family. I never used mirrors with my wife either."
(C) The Japan Times
