Women in Japan Still Want a Rich Husband

The reason I put “still” in the title of this post is because lately there’s been a sort of politically correct type of trend here. People don’t like people to talk about people being elite. They say that people should not talk about education and things like that… but the reality is this –

Reuters and President Online, publisher of several magazines in Japan, recently did a poll of male and female graduates of four year universities between the ages of 25 and 55.

80% of the women polled responded that they want to marry someone that makes over 7,000,000 yen (currently about $76,000) a year. All but 20% also said that they wanted to marry graduates of a well-known university.

The original article on can be found here on reuters. It’s in Japanese.

Here is the circle graph they present on the article with a breakdown of women’t answers.

The chart on the left shows how much women want their future husbands to make. The character following the number means 10,000 and the next one is the character for yen so where you see 700 written, it refers to 7,000,000 yen.

The chart on the right refers to how much they will settle for if they have to. Even for the chart on the right 80% of the women say they are willing to settle for a mere 5,000,000 yen (US$55,000) a year.

Now here’s the sad part of the story for people who really sincerely expect this kind of lifestyle… …

The average salary for a man in his 30s in Japan is 5,080,000, and the average salary for a man in his 40s is 6,430,000 yen. This does not bode well for the dreams and expectations of women in Japan, but sort of indicates that settling must be the de facto status quo. (And that’s enough Latin for today.)

I think everyone would be a lot happier if love were enough to satisfy them. I say this in all sincerity, it always seems like people here are looking for something more.