Twenty years ago there was no divorce in Japan. Oh I suppose there was some (statistics indicate that divorce has been on a slow but steady rise since 1969) but just enough to be virtually unheard of. Relationships, nuptial or otherwise, were simply taken for granted to be permanent. I will never forget how many times male acquaintances would introduce me to their lovers, (no one was ever actually seen with his wife other than at family events), and then casually mention that they had been together for 20 years!

Male to male relationships were the same and I always felt privileged to be inducted into a group whose members had all been friends since junior high school. However, from the beginning, one sensed that something was terribly lacking from a Western point of view. That something may be thought of as brevity. It took me many years to realize how tightly confined relationships are in Japan. It may be as true today as it was 20 years ago that Japanese have an uncanny ability to sort, separate and strictly confine each relationship to one and only one place in their lives. Therefore the school buddies were confined to being drinking buddies, perhaps in conjunction with the same pub. They had nothing to do with friends from work or even from another pub. One might even argue that lovers were more like friends with the addition of an occasional stop at a love hotel before returning home in the wee hours.

Fellow workers, who often drank together after work, were never mixed with this type of "personal" friend. And wives? Well, as I alluded to, they were simply invisible. Japanese men married more than 10 years or so were fond of telling you they had absolutely no relationship with their wives at all. What they meant was that they had no emotional relationship, (except for occasional sparks of anger or shared pride or worry for their kids), and no physical relationship. The paycheck went from the company into the bank account accessed by the wife, who managed the money and gave her husband an allowance for the month. The husband came home everyday very late at night. Maybe she was waiting for him with something to eat or something to report (receiving personal calls at work was taboo). Maybe she was asleep with the kids when he slumped into the waiting ofuro to divest some of the alcohol buildup before sleeping. In the morning, he ate a hasty and silent breakfast, deftly avoiding any attempt to be drawn into conversation and the potential to get involved in emotional matters. Then a sprint to the door, deflecting away a last minute barrage of questions like a running back with the ball on the 10 and heading for daylight. Weekends were golf dates from about 3 am on Saturday until late at night. Sunday was half the day sleeping, half the day with the kids or at the Pachinko Parlor. Sunday dinner held in front of the TV maybe with the grandparents or another relative. The sleeping arrangements were separate futons, single beds or entirely separate rooms. The children, if they were young, slept in the wife's futon. If the apartment was small, parents and children slept in close quarters in the same room but without any but accidental contact.

As for wives, they had responsibility for everything other than bringing home the money. When the kids were old enough to leave home, they had clubs and dates with other wives for dinner at a new French restaurant if they were active. If they were not, they watched TV, took too much care of the house, went shopping and waited. They waited for the day when the husband would retire and put an end to that last insurmountable excuse for enforced separation; his work. It always seemed to me, in those days, that the wife never gave up the hope of once again having a husband in more than name only, just once more before they passed on.

I use to look on this arrangement with horror. Being the romantic Westerner that I am, I viewed a loveless, sexless marriage as a slow death sentence. Yes, it dawned on me, even then, that keeping each other at arms length was in fact the very reason people were able to keep relationships as long as they did. Such an ability to keep one's distance has merits and demerits impossible to sort out. Even if one could, one would be hard-pressed to change old habits, It will suffice here to speak of the results: longevity and security - for better or worse. Everything had a place and a time. Everyone had a position in society that they clearly understood and respected. And though what was asked of a person to maintain that place was sometimes too much and sometimes too little, I doubt anyone would say the directionless mayhem of today is any better (certainly not someone like me who has been through three divorces). But what can be said is that the same quality that enabled everything from factories to savings to relationships to thrive, in one way or another, was neither brains nor brawn nor good looks. It was stamina; a quality the Japanese had by the basketball. The ability to "endure the unendurable" (quoting from a gentleman who knew something about the subject). And with endurance and longevity come a certain glow of wisdom and a calmness that was palatable.

Somewhere along the way, the speed of life just seemed to pick up in a general way. Products came out of factories quicker and in more varieties. The pressure to snap up these products increased apace as did the pressure to dispose of otherwise perfectly fine (but suddenly out of fashion), products. Companies could not get enough staff to keep up with demand and started 'headhunting' other company's staff. The grass looked greener and greener whether it was the company over there or the property over here. Why wait? Why endure even the slightest deprivation when everything one ever waited for was easily snatched up right now? Most people seemed to consider it their just due for the collective brilliance of the Japanese people since the end of the war (another unfortunate case of believing your own PR as it turned out).

And so, although the house was bigger than before, who could endure any longer living with the mother in law's fussing or the father in law's gruff manner? Off to the old age home! Who could endure studying when there was so much new stuff to play with (and who could endure being told by the teacher how to behave when you had your first BMW at the age of 18!) And, finally, who could endure marriage to that unappreciative, unattractive, worn out old spouse? The answer increasingly became no one.

It started off slowly. The 'Nartia Divorce' took its name from Japan's largest international airport where newly affluent young couples would fly off on honeymoons to distant and exotic places finding, not the expected paradise, but disillusion, disappointment and (immediately on return to Narita), divorce. It was a big joke and everybody laughed. I believe there was even a case where the newly betrothed never made it on the plane before they decided to untie the knot. Then came the increasing incidence of older women waiting for the day their husbands retired to announce that they too wanted a divorce. This delay was apparently due to their being vested in the retirement scheme and therefore entitled to receive benefits. It was also said that after a lifetime of barely meeting each other, having to face each other all day every day was too much to bear. So here we had both ends of the spectrum suddenly faltering (though one was obviously more sudden than the other in terms of time on the job), and both equally shocking. Yet these pioneering women were only the tip of an iceberg which has now fully emerged.

Today, the divorce rate is about 1 in 3 (35% in 2001 as opposed to 7.4% in 1963), with the number of divorces doubling since 1990. Combined with the fact that people are getting married at a much later age (the mean average for men is 28.8 years old, for woman 27.2), the average number of years that couples are married is rapidly dropping. One statistic which has gone the other way numerically is the age of young women, with or without husbands, giving birth. Yet how many of these young ladies will have the stamina it takes to raise those children? While Japan has yet to see a rise in the number of children put up for adoption, can that phenomena be far off? Certainly the rise in reported child abuse cases is precipitous (a 17 fold increase between 1990 and 2000), as well as the number of families in which the child is virtually unsupervised, abandoned for long periods at a time, or, increasingly, murdered by one or more of the parents or their lovers. And since the enactment of the Child Abuse Prevention Law in 2000, an increasing number of children are living out their adolescence in state sponsored shelters.

"Time waits for no man" goes the expression and it is certainly true. But in a world of all rabbits and no turtles, will anyone be left to win the race or will we all be exhausted well before the finish line? Where it concerns marriage at least, Japanese endurance has long since run out.