FUKUOKA (Japan) - Salarymen - the black-suited corporate warriors who work long hours, spend long evenings drinking with cronies and stumble home late to long-suffering wives - have danger waiting for them as they near retirement.

Divorce. A change in Japanese law this year allows a wife who is filing for divorce to claim as much as half her husband's company pension.

When the new law went into effect in April, divorce filings across Japan spiked 6.1 per cent. Many more split-ups are in the pipeline, marriage counsellors predict.

They say wives - hearts gone cold after decades of marital neglect - are using calculators to ponder pension tables, the new law and the big D.

Aware of the trouble they are in, 18 salarymen, many of them nearing retirement, gathered at a restaurant here recently for beer, boiled pork and marital triage.

The evening began with a defiantly defeatist toast. Husbands reminded themselves of what their organisation - the improbably named National Chauvinistic Husbands Association - preaches as a sound strategy for arguing with one's wife.

'I can't win. I won't win. I don't want to win,' they bellowed in unison, before tippling from tall schooners of draft beer.

The mood was jolly, but throughout the dinner meeting, there was an undertow of not-too-distant domestic disaster.

'The fact that a wife can now get 50 per cent has ignited guys to think about their fragile marriages,' said Mr Shuichi Amano, 55, founder of the association and a magazine publisher in this city of 1.3 million in western Japan.

The word chauvinist in the group's name, he says, is not intended to refer to bossy men. Instead, it invokes the original meaning of the Japanese word that today translates as chauvinist, kanpaku, a top assistant to the emperor.

Men near the end of their corporate lives, he said, are especially edgy. 'To be divorced is the equivalent of being declared dead - because we can't take care of ourselves.'

When his wife told him eight years ago that she was '99 per cent' certain she was going to dump him, he added, the only things he then knew how to do in the kitchen were to fry eggs and pour boiled water over noodles.

Since then, he has learnt how to listen and talk to a wife he had ignored for two decades and to cook.

Marriage in Japan is going through an increasingly rough patch. As in the United States and most wealthy industrialised countries, the age of first marriage is being pushed back in Japan.

Between 1962 and 2006, the average age at which a woman married for the first time slid from 24 to 28.

But for well-educated women in Japan, marriage is fast becoming a sociological rarity. In 1980, about three-quarters of Japan's college-educated women were married by the age of 29. Now, seven out of 10 are single at that age.

In the past 20 years, the percentage of women in this elite demographic category who do not want to marry at all has almost doubled - to about 29 per cent.

This wariness is a rational response to the drudgery of being a wife in Japan, says Ms Hiromi Ikeuchi, a family counsellor with the Tokyo Family Laboratory.

'I don't think it is the fault of men,' she said. 'It is the corporate culture that expects men to work late.'

Japan's divorce rate had been rising steadily for decades. Then, in 2003, the law was passed granting a divorcing wife the right to as much as half of her husband's pension. But the pension provision did not go into effect until last April.

'Hundreds of thousands of women were waiting,' said Ms Ikeuchi, who added that since April, about 95 per cent of divorce applications have come from women who apparently were done waiting. 'The divorce rate is going to go up.'

While many experts agree that there is a marriage crisis brewing in Japanese, the response of men has been tepid.

The National Chauvinistic Husbands Association has been widely covered in the Japanese news media in the past five years. But it has recruited just 4,300 members in a country of about 60 million men.

One of its members is Mr Yoshimichi Itahashi, 66, president of a concrete company in Fukuoka. He has been married for 38 years and has two daughters and a son.

For almost all of that time, he behaved selfishly towards his wife and children.

He said: 'My generation has grown up in a feudalistic era. I never said I was sorry. When I came home from work, I would say I want to eat dinner and I want to go to bed. I had no time to talk to my wife.'

His wife, Hisano, said: 'He didn't exist in the family. Not only was he not there, I also couldn't get in touch with him at all.'

He joined the association five years ago but kept it a secret from his wife for a year as he quietly taught himself to pay more attention to her.

'Japan is a peaceful country, but the household is at war,' he said.

Two years ago, he did something new - he bought his wife a birthday present.

'Up until my 60th birthday, he had not given me anything at all,' she said. 'But on my 60th, he sent me 60 flowers.'

She said that she is heartened that her husband is trying to make amends for the decades he ignored her. Still, she said, the war in her household is not over and her husband has lots of work to do.

'There was only one time he said he loved me,' she said. 'And that time, he was standing behind me.'

LAT-WP