The Purse and the Account

Women in this country have held the household purse for generations. It is one of the few forms of authority that was never in dispute: she runs the budget, she decides what is spent, his salary arrives and she allocates it. Foreign accounts of Japan mention it constantly and usually mention it as evidence of power.

It is worth separating two things that the phrase runs together, because everything on this page follows from the separation. Managing money is a job. Having money is an asset. A woman can allocate every yen a household spends for thirty years and hold almost nothing in her own name at the end of it, and there is no contradiction in that at all — the first was work she did for the household, and the second is a question about whose name is on the account.

This page is arithmetic and dates rather than encouragement, and it is written now for a specific reason: one of the numbers a great many women have arranged their working year around is being removed next month, and the removal has had almost no explanation aimed at the people it affects most.

The phrase 年収の壁 is used as though it named one thing. It names at least three, written under different bodies of law, with different consequences, and a great deal of the anxiety around this subject comes from their being discussed as one number. Here they are separately, each with its date, because this is the fastest-moving corner of Japanese household law and a confident stale figure is worse than no figure.

The income-tax wall. This was ¥1.03 million and had not moved since 1995. The FY2025 tax reform raised the basic deduction to ¥580,000 and added a further ¥370,000 for incomes at or below ¥2 million, which produces an effective line around ¥1.6 million; it applied to wages paid through 2025 and first showed up in the December 2025 year-end adjustment. A further rise to ¥1.78 million was agreed at the end of 2025 for the following fiscal year. Where exactly that has landed by the time you read this is a question for a current source rather than for this page.

The social insurance wall at ¥1.06 million, which is a different law entirely. This one is not about tax at all: it is the point at which a short-hours worker is pulled into employees’ pension and health insurance in her own right, paying premiums and accruing entitlement. It is the wall that bites hardest, because crossing it reduces take-home pay immediately while the benefit appears decades later — which is precisely the shape of decision human beings are worst at.

And the ¥1.3 million wall, which is different again: the threshold above which she stops being a dependent on her husband’s insurance and must be insured in her own right. The reforms described below do not remove this one. Three walls, three bodies of law, one phrase. If this has been confusing, the confusion was not yours.

The pension reform act enacted in June 2025 abolishes the ¥1.06 million wall — strictly, the requirement that a short-hours worker earn at least ¥88,000 a month before employees’ insurance applies — with effect from October 2026. For anybody reading this in the weeks around that date: it is next month.

What replaces it is a different test. The question stops being how much she earns and becomes whether she works twenty hours a week or more. For a woman who has been managing her monthly wage to stay just underneath a number, that is not a small adjustment — the variable she has been controlling is no longer the variable that decides.

Two qualifications that matter. The company-size requirement — currently employers with more than fifty employees — survives in October 2026, so whether this reaches a particular woman depends on where she works; it then steps down from October 2027 and is scheduled to cover all employers by October 2035. And a transitional measure is planned to soften the premium burden on newly covered short-hours workers for three years, with the employer carrying additional cost. Both of those are the kind of detail that decides an individual case, and both are questions for her own employer and her own pension office rather than for an essay.

The framing that is worth resisting, because it will be everywhere: this is not a tax on women who work. Being inside employees’ insurance means a pension accruing in her own name, and sickness and injury allowance if she cannot work — which, as another page here sets out, pays around two thirds of standard remuneration for up to a year and a half and is not available under the municipal scheme. What it costs is money now. What it buys is an entitlement that belongs to her rather than to a household.

The dependent spouse category — 第3号被保険者 — is genuinely a benefit and this page will not sneer at it. A woman inside it pays no pension premium of her own and still accrues the basic national pension. That is not nothing and it was not designed maliciously.

The problem is the amount rather than the arrangement. The basic pension alone is not a sum anybody lives on independently in this country, and it was never meant to be — it was designed as one half of a household that also contained an employees’ pension. Which is fine for as long as the household contains both. The arithmetic only becomes visible when it does not: at widowhood, at divorce, or at the point where one person’s care needs consume what was supposed to support two.

This is also the reason the pension-splitting provision exists and matters, and why this library has mentioned it more than once. Contributions made during a marriage can be divided on divorce — it is not a favour and not a settlement term to be negotiated away, and a woman who does not know it exists cannot ask for it. But splitting divides what was accrued. It cannot create the thirty years of employees’ pension that were never accrued because the hours were capped.

None of which is an argument that she should have worked more. It is an argument that the cost of the decision was on a different page of the ledger from the decision itself, thirty years away, denominated in something she could not see when she made it — and that a system which produces that gap reliably is producing an outcome rather than offering a choice.

Back to the separation the page opened on, because it has a physical form. The household purse is a responsibility: she is accountable for it, she is criticised when it runs short, and the work of running it is real and unpaid. An account in her own name is something else entirely — it is not a duty, nobody audits it, and its distinguishing feature is that spending from it requires no explanation.

へそくり — money set aside quietly from the household budget — is the workaround women in this country have used for generations, and it should be understood as what it is: an intelligent response to a structural problem, invented independently by millions of people, and a very poor substitute for the thing it substitutes for. It is small by necessity, it cannot be discussed, it earns nothing, and its existence depends on not being found. A solution that requires secrecy to survive is reporting something about the arrangement it exists inside.

What an account in her own name does that the purse cannot is quieter than it sounds and is not really about the balance. It is that a sum which requires no explanation changes what is thinkable. A consultation she would rather not itemise. A night somewhere else. A lawyer’s first appointment. A ticket. None of those has to be used, and most of them never are — the function is not the spending, it is that the option exists and can be considered without a conversation first.

The case this page would be incomplete without is the woman in her late forties who left work fifteen years ago and is now considering going back. She is usually told this is a matter of confidence, and it is overwhelmingly a matter of structure.

The structural fact, and it is the one that decides most outcomes here: in this country leaving the regular employment track is very much easier than returning to it. Re-entry after a long gap is overwhelmingly into non-regular work — shorter hours, lower hourly pay, no internal promotion ladder, and frequently no route back across regardless of what she did before the gap. That is not a judgement about her and it is not about the quality of her application. It is a feature of how the two tracks were built, and it has been documented for decades.

Knowing it in advance changes two things and neither of them is her ambition. It reframes a rejection as information about a system rather than a verdict on her, which matters because most women in this position stop after three. And it changes what is worth spending on: if the gap is what the track is reading, then the things that shorten or explain the gap — a qualification with a name on it, anything current, anything that produces a recent date — buy more than a better-written 履歴書 does. The public employment offices run subsidised training schemes aimed precisely at this and a large share of the women eligible for them have never been told they exist.

Because of a pattern that runs through almost everything else here, and is easier to see once all the pages are side by side. The woman who cannot rest when she is ill. The woman who carries her husband’s parents because she cannot see what else she would do. The woman who stays in a room she wants to leave. The woman who says yes because a no would have needed a reason. In every one of those the explanation offered — by her, usually — is about her character.

It is very often not character. It is that the alternative required money that was not hers, and a choice that requires somebody’s agreement is not a choice she holds. Money in her own name is the thing that converts a preference into an option, and this library has spent forty essays on what a woman can do about her situation without once saying plainly that for a large share of readers the binding constraint is financial and everything else is downstream of it.

Which is also the reason this house has to be careful about what it sells. We are a paid service. Everything we offer costs money, and a woman for whom the binding constraint is money should spend it on the constraint rather than on an hour here. That is not modesty. An hour of attention bought with money she could not spare produces a debt-shaped feeling afterwards that undoes most of what the hour did, and we would rather say so than take it.

Read your own pension record. The annual notice that arrives around your birthday shows what has actually been accrued in your name, and the online service shows more. A great many women have never opened it, and a surprising number find an error or a gap in it — unrecorded periods, a category recorded wrongly, a job that never made it in. Those are correctable, and they are correctable only by somebody who looked.

Find out which of the three walls actually applies to you, and specifically whether your employer is inside or outside the size requirement that survives into October 2026. That is one question to a payroll or personnel desk and it is a completely ordinary question that they answer all day.

Have an account in your own name with something in it. Not an investment decision and not a plan — an account. The tax-advantaged schemes that exist in this country are real and are not recommended here, because this page does not give financial advice and because the structural fact worth knowing about the retirement one is simply that money placed in it is locked until age sixty, which is either the point or a problem depending entirely on a situation this page cannot see.

And if the household finances are genuinely opaque to you — if you do not know what is held, where, or in whose name — that is its own item and it is not solved by asking harder at home. A municipal 消費生活センター and the free legal consultation routes will both talk to somebody who is simply trying to understand her own position, and neither requires that anything be wrong.

It is not saying work more. Choosing fewer hours in order to be at home is a legitimate decision that a great many women have made deliberately and would make again, and a page that treated it as a failure of ambition would be doing precisely what this house has argued against everywhere else: replacing one set of demands with another and calling it freedom.

The objection is narrower and is about information rather than about hours. A choice made because it suits a family is a choice. A choice made because a threshold was never explained, whose cost appears in a different decade and in a unit nobody showed her, is an outcome. The difference between those two is not what she decided. It is what she knew when she decided it, and that is the only thing this page is trying to change.

So: three walls and not one, and the middle one is removed next month for people at employers above the size threshold, with the test becoming twenty hours a week rather than a wage figure. Thirty years under a wall accrues a basic pension that was designed as half of a household. Pension splitting divides what exists and cannot create what was never accrued. And the purse and the account are different objects, whatever the phrase 家計を握る suggests.

And the sentence the rest of the library needed and did not have: a great deal of what looks like a woman’s temperament is her budget. Not all of it, and this page is not claiming otherwise. But enough of it that a reader who has spent years asking why she cannot bring herself to do something might usefully check, once, whether the honest answer is that she could not afford to.