Japanese Men May Have To Stop Ignoring Their Wives

Today I was looking up an address in my Gmail account when I found this link: Learn to Be Nice to Your Wife, or Pay the Price. The patience of Japanese wives always amazed me. They would live without their husbands for years because of an inconvient job transfer, or they would show up in the car at 2 a.m. after putting the kids to bed to pick up their husband from drinking parties — 5 nights a week. One guy I knew, who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons, was afraid to go home at night, and here’s why: One night he went home very drunk and enjoyed his wife. After the fun was over, he got up, laid a $50 bill on the table and turned to leave. He had forgotten where he was! Outraged, she got up and punched him, giving him a black eye. I met his wife and I can understand his fear — she was small, but she grinned through her teeth a lot.

Anyway, it appears a 2003 divorce law entitling a wife to 50% of her husband’s pension went into effect just last year — and has a lot of husbands running scared. Do I feel sorry for them? Hell, no. This law has been a long time coming.

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.
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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.”

(As an aside, I can attest to that last quote: a good male friend of mine from college often bemoaned the difficulty of getting away from work to see his new baby.)

I can certainly see that fewer of my young Japanese friends are marrying, and those that do are waiting longer and longer — but that’s not just a Japanese phenomenon. We’ve noticed that in many places in the U.S., having a baby at 26 (considered “old” in Idaho) was breathtakingly young. Now, at 32, I see many of my peers just starting to have kids. In a sense, I envy them. It is better to have an established career (if you’re going to have one) before you start having children. On the other hand, my first child will leave the house when I’m just 44, and my second when I’m 48 — still young. That’s when they will start envying me. And, when I’m 60, Maya will finally be old enough to date (I really don’t think 30 is so young to date, although Marti would like to wait another decade). So that works out great!