The way people sleep — with others, alone, in beds, on floors —
varies widely from culture to culture. Now, a professor of territorial
studies has published a book saying that Japanese married couples are
unusual because high numbers of them sleep in separate places.
The article below, which was the most read article on Yahoo! Japan’s
magazines section, discusses the phenomenon, pointing out that sleeping
separately in Japan doesn’t necessarily mean that a marital relationship
has gone sour…
From Yahoo! Japan:
Is It Only Japan Where Married Couples Sleep Separately? Japanese Couples Rare In The World
“Many Japanese married couples
sleep in separate rooms, and this is seen as an unusual phenomenon even
when compared with the rest of the world”.
Or so says a book entitled “A Place
Where You Can Be Yourself: A Deeper Look Into Houses and Families As
Seen In Territorial Studies”, which looks into Japanese married couples.
When the author researched the way that couples slept in a Tokyo
apartment building, it appears that a total of 26% slept separately.
Furthermore, when limited to those couples over 60, the figure rises to
40%. For those still living with their children, “sleeping separately”
levels at around 28%; however, when it comes to households where a child
is now independent and lives separately to their parents, the the
number of married couples who sleep separately is more than half, at
53%.
According to a survey carried out by Seniorcom
that was aimed at people over 50, the percentage of couples in Japan
who sleep separately was 40%. In neighbouring Korea, the figure is 19%,
and in America it was 14% (2004). In the West, couples sleeping
separately is considered the beginning of a divorce, and it is thought
proper for couples to “sleep together” in the same room. The high number
of elderly couples who sleep separately, and whose children are now
living separately, in particular, is a rare phenomenon in the world.
And so why are there so many couples sleeping separately in Japan?
The author of the book, Kobayashi
Hideki, a professor at Chiba University Graduate School and Faculty of
Engineering, analyses that one reason there are a lot of couples who
sleep separately is because there is a tradition of the mother sleeping
alongside the infant, and that this is linked to why there is no sense
of reluctance to going back to sleeping separately in old age.
Another
reason, is that the divorce rate is not as high as it is in the US,
where “one in two couples divorce”. In Japan, what is remarkable is that
there are cases where even though, for example, a couple may be
“finished”, the continue to retain their marital relationship without
divorcing. That is to say that in Japan, there are a lot of “familial
divorces” where although they are a couple in form, they are emotionally
distant from each other.
In Japan, the divorce rate has been
more or less 35% in recent years, but the middle-aged generation, where
“familial divorces” are common, the number of couples opting for
divorce are on the rise. In the past ten years, the number of
middle-aged couples who have lived together for more than 25 years who
then go on to divorce has doubled. When you look only at couples who
have been living together for over 30 years, this number almost triples.
Couples have their own individual
circumstances. But still, one strategy to make their marital lives
better might be for couples to sleep in the same place.
