Greedy grannies grinning about skinning grumpy old gramps
By Masuo Kamiyama
Contributing Writer
April 15, 2005
A survey of 1,000 adults finds that 55.2 percent of middle aged couples aged 40 and over are essentially sexless, snores Shukan Bunshun (4/14).
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Masako, in her late fifties, doesn't hate her husband; on the contrary, they've always gotten along reasonably well, and he will probably be surprised, come April 2007, to be confronted with her determination to divorce him.
Why does she want a divorce? For various reasons, which we'll come to in a moment. Why April 2007? Because that's when a pension law reform kicks in allocating to wives a portion of their husbands'retirement pensions. Look out, warns Shukan Asahi (4/22). A "divorce boom" is in the offing as wives in their fifties and sixties, with little enough to show for decades of marriage, savor for the first time in their lives the prospect of financial independence. Retirement-age husbands across the country won't know what hit them.
Masako seems a fairly typical Tokyo housewife. Married in her twenties to a man who worked for the same finance company, she duly quit her job and devoted the rest of her life to doing the housework and raising the couple's two children. She was content, and asked for nothing her husband didn't willingly give her. His retirement, however, brought discord. With nothing to do all day he grew irritable; quarrels broke out over nothing, and Masako tells Shukan Asahi she couldn't think of the future without tears coming to her eyes: "Is it going to be like this for the next 20 years?"
Vague thoughts of divorce were checked by a purely financial concern - her inability to support herself. She has a part-time job, but it hardly pays enough. A friend told her about the new law. Her husband had been in the high income bracket and is now drawing an ample monthly pension - of which, she discovered when she did a little research, roughly half, as of April 2007, will go into her account.
"Every month I'm secretly putting 30,000 yen aside," she says. Her savings plus the pension will assure her a modest independent life. It's all she wants. Her husband knows nothing of this.
Masako has plenty of company, Shukan Asahi discovers. A random nationwide survey of 309 women over 50 shows 66.7 percent more or less seriously considering divorce -- 22.7 percent "constantly thinking about it," 44 percent "sometimes thinking about it." Do their husbands suspect? Not at all, say 26.5 percent. Maybe vaguely, say 32 percent.
The tension set to explode in two years has been building for some time. Divorce had been rising steadily until 2002, when according to the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry the number of divorced couples peaked at 289,836. Then it began to fall. By 2004 it was down to around 267,000. Why the drop? The new legislation, passed in June 2004 but under consideration for some time before that, seems a big part of the explanation: Shukan Asahi's poll shows 78.7 percent of those contemplating divorce prepared to wait two more years for the law to take effect.
The inability of many older women to support themselves has always served as a brake on late divorce. Its removal introduces a whole new element into post-retirement life. Elderly men may find more than their careers gone when they hit 60. Their newly empowered wives are hatching plans of which they know nothing. For some, April 2007 is going to be a dreadful shock.
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