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Sick of their husbands in graying Japan
By Anthony Faiola (Washington Post)
Updated: 2005-10-17 11:30
Sakura Terakawa, 63, describes her four decades of married life in a small
urban apartment as a gradual transition from wife to mother to servant.
Communication with her husband started with love letters and wooing words under
pink cherry blossoms. It devolved over time, she said, into mostly demands for
his evening meals and nitpicking over the quality of her housework.
Retired banker
Tomohisa Kotake, second from left, participates in a cooking class at a
Men in the Kitchen support group meeting in western Tokyo. [Photo Courtesy
Of Men In The Kitchen] |
So when he came home one afternoon three years ago, beaming, and announced he
was ready to retire, Terakawa despaired.
" 'This is it,' I remember thinking. 'I am going to have to divorce him now,'
" Terakawa recalled. "It was bad enough that I had to wait on him when he came
home from work. But having him around the house all the time was more than I
could possibly bear."
Concerned about her financial future if she divorced, Terakawa stuck with
their marriage -- only to become one of an extraordinary number of elderly
Japanese women stricken with a disorder that experts here have recently begun
diagnosing as retired husband syndrome, or RHS.
Feeling chained to the tradition of older women remaining utterly dedicated
to their husbands' well-being, Terakawa said, she devoted herself to her spouse.
Retirement cut him off from his longtime office social network, leaving him
virtually friendless and her with the strain of filling his empty time. Within a
few weeks, she said, he was hardly leaving the house, watching television and
reading the newspaper -- and barking orders at her. He often forbade her to go
out with her friends. When he did let her go, Terakawa said, she had to prepare
all his meals before leaving.
After several months, she developed stomach ulcers, her speech began to slur
and rashes broke out around her eyes. When doctors discovered polyps in her
throat but could find no medical reason for her sudden burst of ailments, she
was referred to a psychiatrist who diagnosed stress-related RHS.
Terakawa began receiving therapy from Nobuo Kurokawa, a physician who is one
of Japan's leading RHS experts. Kurokawa coined the term retired husband
syndrome in a presentation to the Japanese Society of Psychosomatic Medicine in
1991, leading to its use in books, journals and mainstream media here.
Confirming Terakawa's account in an interview, Kurokawa said he offered her the
same advice he has given numerous other older women in the same position.
"Come to therapy," he said. "Then spend as much time as possible away from
your husband."
In Japan, retirement has become a risky business for many wives, who are
finding the stress of their husband's presence at home unendurable. Though
after-retirement stress is a common problem in most developed countries as
husbands and wives try to balance relationships in their twilight years,
analysts say Japan has become extraordinary for myriad reasons -- including the
fact that one-fifth of Japanese are now over 65, the highest percentage in the
world.
Even as gender roles have changed for younger people here, with women
entering the workforce in record numbers, older Japanese have remained far more
rigid. As with most Japanese men of his generation, Terakawa's husband demanded
strict obedience from her, she said, even while he spent his life almost
entirely apart from her and their three children. He left home for the office
just after dawn and stayed out late socializing after work. He even took most of
his vacations with colleagues and clients. Those long absences, she said, made
his presence around the house after retirement even more jolting.
"I had developed my own life, my own way of doing things, in the years when
he was never home," Terakawa said. She said she cannot even stand to look at her
husband across the dinner table now and sits at an angle so she can stare out a
window instead.
Part of the problem is that the nature of Japanese family life has changed
dramatically over the past two decades. The tradition of retired parents living
with their married adult children is rapidly disappearing, with new generations
remaining single well into their forties and modern young couples choosing
greater privacy. As older couples are forced to spend more time alone together,
the divorce rate among those married more than 20 years -- a group that includes
most of Japan's married senior citizens -- is now the fastest-growing in the
country, more than doubling to 41,958 divorces in 2000 compared with 20,435
cases in 1985, according to government statistics.
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