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Tokyo: When 34-year-old Sayuri Shimizu broke the news to her parents that she planned to wed a man six years younger than herself, they weren't upset.

An increasing number of Japanese women are delaying or skipping marriage altogether. But for those who still want romance, younger men are an increasingly trendy option.

Tales of women pairing off with toshishita (younger) men are being told in a rash of recent books, articles in women's magazines and even a TV drama called Suppli - named after popular health supplement tablets.

The growing financial independence of Japanese women makes relationships with younger men a more feasible option these days in a land where wives traditionally relied on husbands for economic sustenance.

"Marriage used to be for a livelihood," said Kaori Haishi, 40, who has written two books on the topic and whose own husband, Yasushi, is 34. "Now it's for having a partner with whom you can walk through life together."

Marriages in which the bride is older than the groom accounted for almost one-third of all weddings in 2002, up from just under 18% in 1987, according to a survey by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

Women are waiting longer to marry - the average age for first marriages jumped to 29.8 in 2005 from 25.9 in 1992 - while the percentage of unmarried women in their early 30s rose to 32% last year from around 14% in 1990.

The factors are complex, but in part the feminine aversion to marriage reflects a gap between women's rising status at work and the deep-rooted notion that they should be subservient in relationships with men, said social commentator Rika Kayama.

Daisuke Inoue of Good Will Planning Ltd, a dating agency that organises parties for meeting potential partners, said about half the agency's female clients in their 30s sign up to meet younger men and the number looks set to rise.

Dating a younger man might once have been cause for embarrassment, but Mika Tsukuda, 35, whose husband is 29, says her friends see dating a younger guy as "a kind of status symbol".

"They didn't lend us the money because the norm from their perspective is that the man is older, the woman is younger, and the woman belongs in the home," she said.

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