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Long-ignored wives poised for divorce, piece of the pension

Date: 2007-11-30

"The fact that a wife can now get 50 percent
has ignited guys to think about their fragile marriages," says Shuichi
Amano, right, founder of a husbands association in Fukuoka, Japan.
Yoshimichi Itahashi, 66, left, joined the group five years ago and taught
himself to pay more attention to his wife and their now-grown children.

Fukuoka, Japan - 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 that today translates as chauvinist, kanpaku, 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. As in
the United States and most wealthy industrialized 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 slid from 24 to 28.

But for well-educated (and presumably well-informed) young women in
Japan, marriage is fast becoming a sociological rarity.

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.

"Hundreds of thousands of women were waiting," said Ikeuchi, who added
that since April about 95 percent of divorce applications have come from
women who apparently were done waiting. "Unfortunately, I think the divorce
rate is going to go up."

She 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," 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
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 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."

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

So far, the husbands association has unearthed only one "10."

He is Yoshimichi Itahashi, 66, president of a concrete company here 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 the beer and pork supper, Itahashi invited his wife, Hisano, to
explain some of the details of his misbehavior.

"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.

Two years ago, Itahashi did something new - he bought his wife 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."

Hisano Itahashi said that she is heartened that her husband is trying
to make amends for the decades he ignored her. Still, she said, the war in
her household is not over and her husband has lots of work to do.

"There was only one time he said he loved me," she said. "And that
time, he was standing behind me."

By Blaine Harden , The Washington Post

Source: http://www.theday.com/re.aspx?re=a83d2a16-4701-49a6-ad1b-37e43b22c0c7





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