Shuichi Amano, right, founded a husbands' association. Yoshimichi Itahashi, 66, left, joined five years ago. Photo: Nancy Donaldson/Washington PostFUKUOKA, Japan (Cincinnati Post), November 27, 2007:
Salarymen -- the black-suited corporate warriors who work long hours, spend long evenings drinking with cronies and stumble home late to 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 percent. Many more split-ups are in the pipeline, marriage counselors predict. They say wives -- hearts gone cold after decades of marital neglect -- are using calculators to ponder pension tables, the new law and the big D.
Skittishly aware of the trouble they're in, 18 salarymen, many of them nearing retirement, gathered at a restaurant here recently for beer, boiled pork and marital triage.
The evening began with a defiantly defeatist toast. Husbands reminded themselves of what their organization -- 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 in unison, before tippling from tall schooners of draft beer.
The pork 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 percent has ignited guys to think about their fragile marriages," said Shuichi Amano, 55, founder of the association and a magazine publisher in this city of 1.3 million in western Japan. The word chauvinist in the group's name, Amano says, is not intended to refer to bossy men. Instead, it invokes the original meaning of the Japanese word meaning a top assistant to the emperor.
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 percent" 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 a wife he had ignored for two decades, Amano said, he has learned how to take out the trash, clean the house and cook.
Marriage in Japan is going through an increasingly rough patch. In 1980, about three-quarters of Japan's college-educated women were married by age 29. Now, seven out of 10 are single at that age. In the past 20 years, the percentage of women in this elite demographic category who do not want to marry at all has almost doubled -- to about 29 percent.
This wariness is a rational response to the isolation and drudgery of being a wife in Japan, according to Hiromi Ikeuchi, a family counselor 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.
Ikeuchi said the situation is particularly worrisome for married men nearing retirement -- men who are soon to return full time to the bosom of families they have financially supported but emotionally ignored.
"This husband who comes back is an alien," she 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 Japanese, 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 have no conception if their wife is happy."
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 behavior that he truly loves her -- and even manages to spit out the words "I love you."
So far, the husbands association has unearthed only one "10." Two years ago, Yoshimichi Itahashi, 66, did something new -- he bought his wife Hisano a birthday present.
"Up until my 60th birthday, he had not given me anything at all," she said. "But on my 60th, he sent me 60 flowers."
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post
