By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday,
October 17, 2005; A01
TOKYO -- 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. 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. Kurokawa estimates that as many as 60 percent of the wives of retired men may
suffer from some degree of RHS. With a record number of Japanese men set to retire -- almost 7 million from
2007 to 2009 -- experts warn that the disorder has the potential to explode. The
Japanese boast the longest lifespan on Earth, yet older Japanese men still cling
to the outmoded idea of wives as servile attendants -- leaving many elderly
women to view their longevity as more of a curse than a blessing. One survey
from the Tokyo-based advertising firm Hakuhodo showed that while 85 percent of
soon-to-retire husbands are delighted by the idea of retirement, 40 percent of
their wives described themselves as "depressed" by the prospect. Fear of husbands coming home to roost has become a hot topic in Japan.
Bookstores are loaded with self-help titles for elderly women attempting to cope
with spouses who have turned into sodaigomi -- or bulky trash. "This is a severe problem for us," said Sayoko Nishida, 63, an author of two
books on the topic who has organized Zen retreats to help older couples deal
with RHS. "One of the main issues is that we are not a culture where people
directly express their feelings, and many older women have nowhere to turn to
share their anxiety." Tomohisa Kotake, a 66-year-old retired banker, knows the story well. "At
first, I was a typical retired Japanese husband -- I didn't do anything for
myself and asked my wife to serve me," he said. It immediately strained his
marriage. Part of the problem, he said, was that his wife still had many female
friends, but most of his friends had been work acquaintances. Pushed by his
wife, he finally joined one of the more than 3,000 support groups that have
recently sprouted up nationwide, aimed at "re-training" retired Japanese men to
be more independent and communicative with their wives. Kotake's group -- Men in the Kitchen -- taught him how to shop, cook and
clean for himself. He now does the dishes and cooks for his wife at least once a
week. "I will never forget the look of happiness in her eyes the first time I
cleaned the house while she was taking a bath," he said. Kotake's wife, Nobuko Kotake, 62, now speaks glowingly of her husband. She
said she had given up many outings with female friends to spend more time with
him. "By Japanese standards, we are still relatively young even though we are
retired," Tomohisa Kotake said. "We have a long life ahead of us. It is better
that we spend that time enjoying each other. Doing more around the house is a
small price for me to pay."
