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https://scmp.com/week-asia/lifestyle-culture/article/3105343/several-million-yen-and-botox-married-japanese-confess Lifestyle & Culture
‘Several million yen’ and Botox: married Japanese confess to hiding at least one major secret from their spouse
- A new survey by Tokyo-based Matsui Securities Co. shows that 32 per cent of husbands and wives across the country keep some issues on the down low
- Money came top of all secrets, with women more vague than men as to the sources of their earnings and how much money they keep stashed away
A Japanese couple strolls through Kyoto. Husbands and wives surveyed in the country said the most common issue they kept secret from each other had to do with money. Photo: EPA
Fully one-third of all married Japanese admit to keeping secrets from their spouses, with matters related to money the most common undivulged issue and infidelity running a distant second.
A new survey by Tokyo-based Matsui Securities Co. has revealed that two-thirds of the 800 people taking part claimed they never hide anything from their husbands or wives, but 32 per cent confessed to hiding at least one major secret – with many admitting to several.
Out of all the respondents, 21 per cent said they kept money matters close to their chests, while 9 per cent would not reveal extramarital affairs, perhaps understandably. An additional 7 per cent said they managed to keep their hobbies quiet, although the study did not reveal what those hobbies were or why they needed to be kept secret. Another 4 per cent cited issues at work that they would never tell their partners.
When it comes to money, 13 per cent of the respondents claimed to their partners that they earned less than they actually do, while 25 per cent said they did not reveal their earnings at all. And women are more secretive than men on the subject, with 41 per cent of the women who named money as their top secret being deliberately vague about their earnings, as opposed to 37 per cent of men.
It’s a similar story with savings, with 58 per cent of women either refusing to reveal how much they have stashed away to their husbands or pretending to have less than they actually have. The figure was around 50 per cent for men.
“I never made a conscious effort to keep anything secret, but I’m sure there are things that I do not know about my wife and I know there are things that she does not know about me,” Jun Okumura, a retired bureaucrat, told This Week in Asia in response to the survey.
“In my case, my wife never asked about my wages and I never raised the topic, so I guess it was always a bit of a mystery,” he said, adding that as long as the bills were paid and there was money in the account when either of them needed to take some cash out of the ATM, then everything was fine.
Asked if his wife had any other matters that she had deliberately kept from him, Okumura admitted, “I’m sure she does, but I will never know because I would never look through her mobile phone or anything like that.
“And who cares anyway?” he asked. “I do not mind if there are things that she has kept from me and, now that I think about it, I’m a little sad that I have reached the age of 69 and have no secrets to keep.”
Some of the people who took part in the survey admitted that they had “several million yen” secretly deposited that their partners had no idea about. The phenomenon of keeping savings secret from a spouse has become so widespread in Japanese society that it has been given a name – “hesokuri”.
A separate study, carried out by the women’s magazine Halmek, showed that women aged 50 and over have an average of 5.63 million yen (US$53,416) secreted away for the proverbial rainy day, up a significant 1.27 million yen from the last time the magazine conducted the survey, in 2018.
The figures were even larger when broken down between women who described themselves as being in happy or unhappy marriages. A woman who was happy in her relationship had an average of 4.37 million yen tucked away, but the dissatisfied wives admitted to secret savings of 10.23 million yen.
Takako, a 41-year-old housewife from Yokohama who would only give her first name, said in an interview that she had a whole slew of secrets she kept from her husband of seven years – and that she knows her husband keeps secrets from her too.
“I still smoke secretly,” was her first confession. “And I have been putting away some money as well, just in case.”
After a recent move, she said she kept the deposit from her and her husband’s previous rental property as “pocket money”, while she also made sure that the money the Japanese government gave to support families – including hers – during the coronavirus pandemic was also squirrelled away into her account.
But she did not feel any hint of remorse.
“I know my husband has secrets,” she said. “I sometimes go through his wallet and I once found a receipt from a men’s beauty salon where he had been for a Botox treatment. It cost 100,000 yen, and Botox wears off so he has to go back again every year.”
Further digging also revealed membership in a golf course – although she said she was not sure when he had the time to play – and that he belongs to a chain of high-end hotels across the country.
But her husband’s small perfidies were nothing compared with what her friend had to put up with, she insisted. With more grandiose dreams, perhaps, her friend’s husband had bought a large and flashy power yacht, and managed to keep it on the down low from his wife for more than a year.