Word: wife
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...laws went off the books, and the emancipation of Japanese women made giant strides. Just how wide the break with the past has become was demonstrated when Novelist Shusaku Endo published, in the popular weekly Shukan Asahi, an interview with no less a personage than Mrs. Hiroko Sato, wife of Premier Eisaku Sato...
...world. Husbands ruled as absolute masters of the home, and wives were expected to be obedient, unobtrusive and completely devoted to family and household. Divorce for a man meant little more than writing a brief decree and sending his spouse back to her family; for a wife, it was nearly unobtainable. Adultery was a criminal offense -for women...
...interview was entitled "My Tearful Early Days of Marriage," and in it Mrs. Sato described the Premier as about as fierce an old-style Japanese husband as can be imagined-a rake, a wife-beater and a man so taciturn that he never consulted his wife on anything. It was not only an uncommonly candid flashback of the Satos' early wedded life but a commentary on the old code and how it has been broken. And the source was the woman whose husband heads one of the most industrialized and progressive nations in the world...
...printed only brief notes on the reaction elsewhere. Young Japanese, with little knowledge of prewar Japan, dismissed it as incomprehensible. To older people it was hardly news, although it aroused a bit of nostalgia for the good old days among some of the men. The Premier, true to his wife's characterization, remained silent; an aide reported that he had only laughed when he read the interview...
...there nothing good to be said about the Premier, asked Interviewer Endo in some astonishment. Indeed, there was. Over the years, Mrs. Sato conceded, affection had grown between husband and wife-and they had had two children. "Our Mr. Eisaku, I think, is not without a certain masculine charm," she said. "Now we are like brother and sister. We've been together for a long time, you know. We are just like the air to each other...