COLUMN ONE : Japan’s ‘Bachelor Husbands’ : Corporate transfers force more families to adjust to life without father. Spending years apart brings some spouses, children closer together. Others succumb to temptations of living alone.

The third time his company asked Shigemichi Fukuda to move here, his family had just bought a home on the edge of Nagoya to ensure fresh air for his 5-year-old son, Shuzo, who had asthma. Fukuda and his wife agreed that he should go to his new assignment in the smoggy capital by himself.

That was 14 years ago. He is still living alone.

The experience of Fukuda--a 57-year-old construction company official--is unusual only in the length of his separation.

As Japanese businesses continue to extend the reach and depth of their endeavors across the nation and the globe, the number of separated Japanese husbands is growing. Government statistics show that about 450,000 husbands live away from their families, compared to 360,000 in 1980.

Formally, these men are called tanshin funin-sha, or “persons on assignment alone”; jokingly, they are known as chonga, or “bachelor husbands.”

These days, even Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa is one. His wife is staying in Kumamoto on the southern island of Kyushu with their second daughter, a high school senior who is preparing for a college entrance examination next year.

To Americans, the Japanese practice of separating families for the corporate good might seem harsh, if not downright cruel. Indeed, it imposes considerable hardship in this nation, which, ironically, prizes the stability of its unique social structure so much that it makes it difficult, if not impossible, for wives and children to accompany husbands on distant assignments.

At the same time, Japan is a nation that has almost made a religion of work. Its people long have not only tolerated but thrived in difficult job and family situations--including long separations.

Among the public at large, 48% believe that tanshin funin is “unavoidable”; almost the same numbers of those surveyed, however, say the practice “should not be done,” a Yomiuri newspaper poll found early this year.

Although younger Japanese employees are said to be insisting on having more time for their families, there has been only the faintest trace of change in the practice of mandatory job transfers in government and business: A handful of companies have agreed to limit the geographical area for job changes.

Most of the workers faced with the hard choice usually submit without complaint. One rare bachelor husband sought damages for being separated from his family for six years. But a judge ruled he had no right to protest his transfer as a deprivation of family life. Only five other protests have gone to court--all of them seeking redress for alleged use of transfers as a union-busting tactic.

“I don’t expect tanshin funin to die out. Japanese don’t see it as unnatural,” says Prof. Ichiro Saga of Kumamoto University of Commerce.

Indeed, it seems so natural there are books offering bachelor husbands advice on such topics as how to cope with living apart, how to claim tax deductions for the extra expenses in maintaining two residences or how to cook simple food. Among the titles: “Self-Management for Smart Drinking.”

Terunori Aiga, personnel director for Toshiba, says the electronics giant regards transfers as a prerequisite to promotions. Eventually, Toshiba might have to adjust to the wishes of employees to remain near their families by offering a special category of employment that would limit transfers to a specific geographic area, he says.

“But a person limited to regional transfers would stop getting promotions at a certain level,” he adds.

Far from limiting the practice, many companies are reported to be broadening it. The Industrial Labor Research Institute found 90% of Japan’s large companies regularly transfer employees not only within a company but also within the conglomerate to which a company may belong.

Some social critics suggest that Japan’s history helps make the idea of bachelor husbands socially tolerable. In the feudal era, the shogun , or military rulers, required the wives and children of daimyo , who ruled regional fiefdoms, to live in Edo (now Tokyo) every other year as a guarantee of the warriors’ loyalty. And through decades of poverty, farmers customarily traveled alone to the cities to supplement their income each winter.

“In a word, I guess you could say tanshin funin persists ‘because it’s Japan,’ ” says Setsuko Tomihara, 58, who lived apart from her husband, an auto parts salesman, for 12 years. “Japanese are earnest people . . . and in Japan, the company is everything.”

Corporations encourage a family to join a husband at his new post, and they pay moving expenses--at least in principle. Yet, typically, employees receive only two weeks’ notice of transfers. Occasionally, an employee learns the day before he must leave.

Facing an average of three to four years away from their families, bachelor husbands receive special allowances averaging 43,000 yen ($410) a month. But extra expenses average 112,000 yen ($1,070), a Labor Ministry study found.

Not surprisingly, bachelor husbands, often in their 40s and 50s, find that relations with their children worsen. Many men complain they smoke and drink more, waste time watching television and even grow disoriented. Some start talking to themselves and suffer sleep disorders, a study by the Sanwa Research Institute found.

However, the study discovered pluses, as well.

Bachelor husbands pay more attention to diet, have more time for hobbies, enjoy better relations with their wives and find their children become more self-reliant, the study found; wives enjoy having less housework, sleep later and are relieved not to have to cook for their husbands every day.

No survey has looked at bachelor husbands and divorce. Japan’s divorce rate is still comparatively low. Toshiba’s Aiga says that 1,000--all men--of the company’s 76,600 employees are tanshin funin , “but I don’t hear of divorces.”

Aiga says Toshiba transferred 1,450 employees early this year, and 400 of them were husbands who went alone.

Japanese society does not merely condone the practice. It seems to conspire to make it hard for wives and children to accompany men on their new assignments.

The foremost consideration is for children preparing for entrance examinations--to junior high school, high school or college--that can determine their social status for life. There are also worries about the children adjusting to new schools and making new friends, or about caring for an elderly parent, or a job that the wife does not want to give up in a nation where women still have trouble finding good jobs. Sometimes, homeowners worry about renting out a home, since the law protects tenants who often will not move out.

For Tomihara, the auto parts salesman’s wife, it was a rebellion by her second son that forced a separation.

“When we moved back to the Tokyo area when our second son was an eighth-grader (and) after he had been in five different schools, he declared that he wasn’t going to change schools again. We had a fierce argument in the family, but after that, my husband decided to go alone when he was transferred,” she says.

That was in 1980. By then, Tomihara and her husband had moved together 12 times. Assignments of four years apiece in Sapporo, Sendai and Nagoya kept her husband living separately for the next 12 years.

“Many friends have experienced the same thing. In Japanese companies, it is a matter of course,” says Tomihara.

Of the 12 years’ separation, she says: “I don’t think husband and wife have to be together every moment of every day of the year.”

To the contrary, living apart, “husbands and wives find they have an unusually large number of topics to discuss when they do see each other on weekends,” she says. “When a couple lives together for a long time, a period of fatigue eventually comes when they become like air together--taking each other for granted. But separated, we started paying attention to each other. The family became one. With their father away, the boys became sturdy and acted as if they were replacing him.”

Before her husband started going to his assignments alone, says Tomihara, “I made it a point not to regard transfers as a minus, and use the conditions under which we lived to add to our pleasure.” Each time the family was about to move, she says, she got out maps to find historical sites and natural scenery they could visit at their next home.

After the separation began, Tomihara took up hobbies: skiing, singing in a chorus, golf, bowling and diving.

“I also went to driving school and got a license--at 45,” she adds.

But Tomihara says her husband confessed to her “he was very lonely. It was such a long time, he told me. Now, I baby him all the time.”

For Fukuda, his son’s asthma and a job that his wife wanted to keep prompted him to live alone.

“I thought we would be apart for four years at the longest. Although one other man at the company has been separated from his family for 18 years, the average is four,” says Fukuda, director of training for the construction firm.

He joined a social group of bachelor husbands in Tokyo and took up social dancing as a hobby. But he has never danced with his wife.

Fukuda says he and his wife last discussed their separation after the fourth year. They concluded that his job called for so much travel that, even living at home, he probably would not see her more than he has with them living apart--at least twice and as many as four times a month, he says.

“We realized the situation was shoganai (unavoidable) and we haven’t discussed it since--at least not as a serious theme,” he says. In arguments, he and his wife used to mention divorce--”but not for real,” he says.

Fukuda says he is thinking of working as a business consultant or employee-training specialist after he retires in three years. But even then, if he remains in Tokyo, he may continue living apart from his wife, who likes her job in Nagoya, he says.

Ever since their separation began, however, Fukuda has made a point to call home about 9 every night, he says. That practice, he confesses, is to assure his wife that he isn’t having an affair. In the days before bank cards, he used to entrust his paycheck to his wife--and received an allowance from her. Now, his wife receives bank statements showing his withdrawals and “she can tell by the amounts I spend whether I am having an affair,” he says.

Not all wives receive such assurances, of course. The joke label for the husbands on assignment alone, chonga , is the Korean word for “bachelor.” Since it is not a real Japanese word, goes the joke, it doesn’t refer to a real bachelor.

Former Prime Minister Sosuke Uno was a To-chon , a Tokyo chonga . While in the capital attending sessions of Parliament, he kept a mistress. His wife stayed home in Shiga prefecture, running the family sake brewery. Disclosure that he had a mistress helped hasten his retirement as prime minister, but it did not end his marriage.

In the view of novelist Maruya Saiichi, bachelor husbands also have no assurance about what their wives may be doing back home. Indeed, she asserts that Japan has always been lenient about abortion, in part because it wants to allow wives to cover up their infidelity and, thus, maintain the nation’s political and economic structure from the days when wives were sent to Edo right up to the current tanshin funin era.

But for Fukuda, separation brought his family closer together. He recalls that when his son, Shuzo, was only 3, the topic of “What is happiness?” came up at the dinner table one night. Shuzo suddenly offered his definition: “What Mama and Papa and Shuzo like.”

“And ever since then, we’ve always tried to pay attention to each other and do what we like together,” Fukuda says.

One major goal that they came to share was to get Shuzo into the law school of Tokyo University, the pinnacle of academia in Japan and a guaranteed passport to elite society.

“It became a bond that held us together,” Fukuda says.

Last February, Shuzo passed the entrance exam and made the family dream come true. The success, ironically, will split the family into three, with Shuzo living on a freshman-sophomore campus far from downtown Tokyo, his mother in Nagoya and Fukuda closer to his office in Tokyo.

But in a couple of years, when Shuzo becomes a junior and starts attending the university’s downtown campus, Fukuda says he hopes to buy a condominium. Then, he says hopefully, the three of them can live together for the first time in 17 years.

Megumi Shimizu of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.