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Salarymen - the black-suited corporate warriors in Japan 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 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 in Fukuoka, Japan, 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.
The pork was scrumptious and the mood jolly, but the dinner meeting had 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, Amano said, he
has learned how to take out the trash, clean 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
Japan's divorce rate had been rising steadily for decades. Then in 2003 the
law was enacted 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 past April.
"Hundreds of thousands of women were waiting," said Hiromi Ikeuchi, a family
counselor with the Tokyo Family Laboratory, 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."
By BLAINE HARDEN
The Washington Post
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