Mainichi’s WaiWai comments on a topic that’s come up in the MF comments section:

Japan is sitting on a divorce time bomb, according to Shukan Jitsuwa (2/22).

Even though the country’s divorce rate, already low by Western standards, has witnessed a fall over the past few years as the number of marriages ending dropped from about 290,000 annually to around 260,000, pundits say this is only the calm before the storm.

The country is filled with, so the men’s weekly claims, “masked couples.” That is, sham marriages maintained purely and simply for cosmetic purposes.

But those keeping tabs on the situation say that revisions to the Basic Pension Law due to come into effect from April, which permits housewives to claim up to three times as much of their retiring husbands’ pension payments as they can now, is a powerful inducement to end an unhappy marriage.

I have a feeling that the media coverage of this phenomenon is also just seeing a calm before the storm.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Culture, Current Events, Japan, Law, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.