Follow The Yen

Culture shock moments still happen, even when I expect them.

For example, I know that in Japan, it is usually the woman’s job to handle the family's finances and that she often decides on what kind of “allowance” her husband gets for things like lunches and drinking and so on. This is such a common setup that many men’s paychecks are deposited in the account that the wife sets up, and the husband doesn’t see the money beyond his allowance. The allowance is such a well-defined quantity that many Tokyo restaurants recently began offering lower-priced set lunches when a newspaper reported that the average allowance had dropped to just a few yen over about a hundred dollars (ten thousand yen) a week.

It all sounds like a joke, doesn’t it? The woman handling all the money? Well, here are two things: One is that in Japan, women are considered to be the sex who are good with numbers, good at math. And, two, if you think that the woman handles only the small things (bill paying, grocery shopping, etc.), think again. It’s rare that men participate decisions that involve large sums of money, for example, the kind of money that involves purchasing a car or a house. I read of one case where the wife had to draw her husband a map to their new house because she picked it, arranged everything with the bank, and all he did was leave the old house that morning and follow the map to the new house that night.

Anyway, on Thursday I was teaching a high-level class in which we were discussing rules and requirements. There were a couple of students, a man in his late thirties and a woman in her late forties, both married, both parents. The class was not very exciting as the scintillating discussion I had envisioned about spoiled children never materialized, and I was sitting there a bit helplessly as the students admitted that yes, there are spoiled children in Japan. I asked what rules children should have to follow and there was the usual talk about bedtimes and school, but the students didn’t seem to find it very interesting to talk about child-rearing.

Finally, I told them that I had read a survey that asked, “What are you not allowed to do after you are married?” They both looked at me curiously. I gave the example that men are not allowed to leave the toilet seat up. They laughed. I asked the woman what she was not allowed to do and she said, “I am not allowed to go out drinking as often as before.” I asked the man and he said the same. He said he had a curfew now. I laughed and asked him what time his curfew was. “Twelve o’clock,” he said. “What happens if you break your curfew?” He said he had to call and explain.

Then the woman asked, “What is your allowance?”

Yes, even knowing that, in Japan, women (whether they work or not) control the family’s money and men usually get an allowance, it was still a bit of a shock to hear his matter-of-fact answer.

“My allowance is thirty-thousand yen per month,” he said. About three hundred dollars, or probably about six or eight percent of his income.

I asked her what she gave her husband. “Sixty-thousand yen,” she answered.

I said, “Sounds like someone’s going to be asking for a raise.”

Think about that: How many American husbands would just trust their wives with the money? Just hand over the paycheck and take your allowance and be able to trust that all the bills would get paid and the important things (houses and cars) would be financed accordingly. How many men would just accept that their “allowance” was part of those decisions made by the wife?

Hmmm, maybe more than you might think. I remember one woman in one of my science classes who told me that one day she looked blue and her husband asked her what was wrong. She said to him sadly, “You never bring me flowers anymore,” and he replied, “You don’t let me have enough money to bring you flowers!”

In fact, in further regards to money, I was just reading an article about how much money Japanese wives “hide” from their husbands. Nearly half of the married women who responded have about $40,000 hidden from their husbands. (That’s dollars, not yen.) The number increases as the age of the wife increases, with women in their late forties having more than $100,000 (or 1 million yen) hidden away.

There’s a story behind all that hidden yen, I think. I wonder what it is.