--- Eubulides <paraconsistent at comcast.net> wrote:
>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2007/11/25/ST2007112501768.html
>
> Learn to Be Nice to Your Wife, or Pay the Price
> Japan's Salarymen, With Pensions At Stake, Work on
> Their Marriages
"The Lady and the Monk", by Pico Iyer, is a fine fictional rendering of the traditional Japanese marriage that is now changing.
BobW
>
> By Blaine Harden
> Washington Post Foreign Service
> Monday, November 26, 2007; A01
>
> 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.
>
>
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