From The Washington Post by Blaine Harden - 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.
