BUSINESS ABROAD: Love v. Stocks

“Love is all very well,” said an unmarried Japanese office girl, “but it makes you too dependent on a man. That’s why I buy stock.”

She was not a spinster munching sour grapes. In the land of the rising woman, where a husband used to control his yen, millions of wives are buying stock by cutting corners and snipping off a larger hunk of the family pay envelope. As a result, Japan is having its biggest investment boom in history. This year 9,000,000 shareholders will invest $5.5 billion v. $4 billion last year; investment trusts have increased 50%, and savings accounts have risen 20% to $17 billion.

Last week Japanese security dealers opened a major campaign to attract more women investors. Some 6,000 salesmen began a door-to-door drive urging housewives to invest their husbands’ winter salary bonuses—usually one to three months’ pay—in stocks. Traditionally given in December, the bonuses used to go for rice wine, New Year’s gifts and new clothes. Now a flood of mail urges Japanese wives to “multiply your huband’s bonus wisely -in stocks. To become a millionairess is no longer an impossible dream.”

Appealing to the new power of women unleashed since the war, brokers have spread the gospel of manibiru (money building)*all over Japan, display elaborate charts and brochures in remote hamlets to show how buying one $28 bond every month will build to $2,800 in 78 months. Every investment company has its “Golden Tree” or “Millionaire” club, whose members avidly read financial news bulletins, flock to jargon-heavy lectures by female stock-market experts. Companies operate scores of advisory offices in department stores and train stations, where shoppers and commuters can dash in to buy shares in investment trusts promising yields as high as 23%. Female investors all keep a sharp eye on how their money is spent, go off together on monthly plant inspections to see that no man ruins what women have helped to build.

The dream of most wives of white-collar workers is to save 1,000,000 yen ($2,778). “Even while she’s brewing green tea or boiling rice,” says an awed banker, “today’s Japanese housewife is calculating risks and interest rates.” Her children are not far behind. Saving against the day when they too will buy stocks as mamma does, schoolchildren savers have an average $4.93 put away in 27,000 school banks, with total deposits of $43.8 million.

*An offshoot of bodibiru (body building), a word heroically coined by Japanese tongues when U.S. and British physical culturists spread their gospel in Japan years ago.