That's men for you: In a recent Tokyo Letter, David McNeill wrote about a wave of divorces hitting Japanese businessmen when they retire. Almost seven million male baby boomers are due for retirement shortly and the prospect is not always welcomed by their wives.
Indeed, many of the wives in question are planning to divorce their husbands.
A Japanese tradition of men spending their time, not with their families, but with work colleagues and customers, means that many of these men are virtual strangers to their wives by the time they are pensioned off. Their wives have developed lives of their own and do not welcome this new intrusion into their world.
A change in the law which will mean that workers' pensions can be divided between spouses is expected to accelerate the boom in divorces which had been postponed by wives, some commentators suggest.
This may all seem very Japanese but it has echoes in Ireland where husbands and wives struggle with similar problems.
Retirement tends to be one of the more common crisis points in marriage (the others are the arrival of the first baby and the departure of the last "child" from the family home).
Admittedly, it would be an outrageous overstatement to suggest that a man's retirement results in the arrival of a stranger into the family home. And yet we need to be very aware of the implication our work culture holds for our marriages. In many places of employment there is an expectation that people should work very long hours because that is what is needed to get the job done.
Working from early morning to late at night is seen as the requirement for anybody who wants to be regarded as a team player. And this nonsense is very easy to fall in with. You may desperately want to spend time with your family - or just with yourself - but the culture of long hours is hard to shake off. You want to be seen to be part of the solution and not of the problem so you put in the hours and your family does not get to see you.
Is that an extreme example? If you think so, then be grateful you do not work in a company or department of a company in which this is the norm.
And this kind of approach is not just found in financial services, sales or the media. You could be working in the hotel industry for the minimum wage or behind the counter in a convenience store and have little energy left for your family at the end of the long, long day.
People make choices, of course. I once observed somebody who was ambitious but who placed family first and turned down promotional opportunities because he was not willing to work the unsocial hours expected.
That was then. How easy would it be to make that choice now? Today, a person in a similar situation would have a mortgage of a size unimaginable at that time. Taking the promotion and the hours that go with it might well be the only way to keep the ship afloat.
Many parents, both men and women, are now in this situation. We hear of parents delivering their children in pyjamas to the childminder and collecting them in their pyjamas in the evening. A nightmare scenario without a doubt - and one we have managed to create.
As time goes on it is usually the woman who stays at home with the children and the man who stays in full-time employment. And often that makes sense because the man is in a position to earn more than the woman. But it's worth remembering that we may be creating a society in which some people are forced almost to become absentee parents. We need to combat the assumption that this is desirable. We need to see time for ourselves and our families as being just as valuable as time for the boss. Otherwise, Irish families could end up paying the price which is being paid by Japanese families.
- Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.