When Ayumi’s two daughters left home, the 62-year-old resident of Kawasaki began to see her marriage differently. After more than two decades together, she and her husband had little left in common, and the relationship that had once revolved around raising a family had gradually lost its purpose. Her husband moved out nearly a year ago as they prepared to finalise their divorce. Ayumi now lives alone in the spacious suburban house they bought to raise their children, accompanied by two cats.
The separation was not how she had imagined her later years. Her husband had worked long hours, including weekends, while she managed the household and raised their daughters. Their arrangement had functioned well initially, she said, but years of competing responsibilities had eroded their communication. “I think we worked well as a team at the beginning, but somewhere along the way, we just stopped talking like we had before,” she said.
Financial pressures during their daughters’ university years and the deaths of their respective parents had tested the marriage, but the decisive change came when the children moved out. “It felt like we were almost strangers with nothing in common,” Ayumi said. “Before, we had always put our children first. But suddenly they had their own lives, and we both realised there was not much holding us together any more.”
Her experience reflects a broader shift in Japan, where divorces among couples married for 20 years or longer, commonly known as “silver divorce”, are becoming an increasingly prominent feature of later life. Although the country’s total number of divorces has steadily declined since reaching a peak in the early 2000s, the proportion involving long-married couples has continued to increase.
Data released in September by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare showed that silver divorces accounted for a record 24.2 per cent of divorces in 2025, an increase of 0.4 percentage points from the previous year. The overall number of divorces fell to 179,073, down 6,831 from 185,904 in 2024. The figures indicate that, even as divorce becomes less common overall, the breakdown of marriages lasting two decades or more represents a growing share of separations.
Changing family circumstances, greater opportunities for women to earn their own income and reforms to the pension system have contributed to older women reconsidering marriages that no longer meet their expectations. Sumie Kawakami, a lecturer at Yamanashi Gakuin University and author of a book on gender issues, said the departure of children often exposed emotional distances that had accumulated over many years.
“Many find that they had grown a long way apart during the years of raising their children,” Kawakami said. With parents focused on their respective responsibilities, differences and the loss of shared interests may remain less apparent while children require their attention. Once the children establish independent lives, couples may find that the family duties that organised their relationship no longer provide a common focus.
Women’s growing participation in employment has also altered the financial circumstances in which such decisions are made. Earning their own wages can give women a degree of independence that previous generations often lacked, making it more feasible to consider separation after years of marriage. Financial security remains particularly important for women who have spent much of their adult lives caring for children and managing the household rather than building substantial personal earnings.
A significant policy change came in 2007, when Japan reformed its pension system to allow divorced spouses to claim up to 50 per cent of the Employees’ Pension Insurance contributions accumulated by their partner during the marriage. The reform provided an additional source of retirement income for people whose financial position had been shaped by their spouse’s employment.
“For women earning less than 1.3 million yen [US$8,217] a year, this was significant,” Kawakami said. The change offered a financial safety net that had not previously existed in the same form, helping address concerns about how women with limited earnings could support themselves after a divorce.
However, the distance between spouses can begin long before retirement or the decision to separate. Japan’s corporate culture includes tanshin funin, a practice under which companies transfer married male employees to distant domestic or overseas offices for extended periods. Wives frequently remain in the family home so that children can continue attending the same schools, leaving couples to maintain their marriage across separate households.
Kawakami said such arrangements could continue for decades, allowing spouses to develop largely independent lives. “One of my friends never actually lived in the house he bought for his family; his wife and children live there and he visits when he can,” she said. “So it is not at all surprising that when the husband reaches retirement age he has nothing in common any more with his wife.”
For couples whose lives have been organised around work, child-rearing and long periods apart, retirement can expose how little remains of their shared routines. In Ayumi’s case, the departure of her daughters brought that distance into focus. After years of functioning as a team, she and her husband reached the point at which they no longer saw enough common ground to continue their marriage.
