| The story below is originally published on Mainichi Daily News by Mainichi Shinbun (http://mdn.mainichi.jp). |
| They admitted inventing its kinky features, or rather deliberately mistranslating them from the original gossip magazine. |
| In fact, this is far from the general Japanese' behavior or sense of worth. |
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| ※ この和訳はあくまでもボランティアの方々による一例であり、翻訳の正確さについては各自判断してください。 もし誤訳（の疑い）を発見した場合には、直接ページを編集して訂正するか翻訳者連絡掲示板に報告してください。 |
Disgruntled old nags bolt the gate on spoiled gray stallions 2006,01,17
Shukan Post 1/13-20 By Ryann Connell
It may well be a case of shutting the gate after the horse has bolted, but growing numbers of middle-aged Japanese men unceremoniously dumped by long-suffering wives are discovering that what they had believed were old nags are actually thoroughbreds, according to Shukan Post (1/13-20).
Six years ago, Kenji Suzuki's wife suddenly walked out on him. The 57-year-old man has been lonely ever since.
He's still not entirely sure why she dumped him, but thinks it could have been because he refused to let her go out to work.
She took most of his money, too, leaving him with the bulk of their debts.
"Looking back now, I wish I had listened to her," Suzuki, not his real name, tells Shukan Post.
Middle-aged divorces are one of the hottest trends in Japan at the moment.
It has provided fodder for the weeklies, tabloid TV shows and even one of the currently most popular small screen dramas in the country.
A vast majority of gray divorces of being instigated by women frustrated at decades of silently bearing often demanding husbands' orders.
And guys like Suzuki are starting to discover what it was they've lost. He's hurting, getting older and doing so alone, his solitude made worse by lack of regular work.
A vast majority of gray divorces of being instigated by women frustrated at decades of silently bearing often demanding husbands' orders.
"You've gotta have steady employment.
Everybody says how good it is to be single again and how you have the chance to play around with young women, but there's not a women on the planet who's going to be around a middle-aged guy if he's unemployed and has no money," Suzuki tells Shukan Post, providing the first of his three conditions for living as a mid-life divorcee.
"The second condition is that you've got to know how to do housework.
If you're cooking for yourself, you're also gonna be healthier. After you've got past the eating, you've got to know how to clean your home, take out the trash and all that stuff.
It's tougher work than it looks. My kitchen is filthy."
A large proportion of Japanese men like Suzuki have been spoiled rotten, allowed to concentrate on work without ever contributing around the home.
It often means the fail to realize how good their wives are giving it to them, which leads us to Suzuki's third condition of living as a dumped divorcee.
"Do whatever it takes to woo your wife back home, even if that means kowtowing before her in apology," he says.
"Middle-aged divorce is that hard to handle."
Kensuke Sanada, operator of Rikonavi, a site with 22,000 unique users a month that provides information on any aspect involved in ending a marriage,says that most men in a situation such as Suzuki's have no idea what has hit them.
"Women instigate middle-aged divorces in about 80 to 90 percent of cases.
Most of the time, the final straw has not been any single incident, but comes after years of pent-up frustration," Sanada tells Shukan Post.
"A survey our site carried out showed that it was often only little things that a husband had failed to do over decades that had prompted women's decisions to divorce, such as failing to call them by their first name, forgetting wedding anniversaries or birthdays, and failing to complement them on changed hairstyles or appearance." (By Ryann Connell)
（Mainichi Japan） January 17, 2006
