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TOKYO -- For 40 years, Daizen Hirose wanted to tell his wife, Kumiei, how much he loved her. But the gruff 69-year-old says he just couldn't overcome his embarrassment.

"In our day, we were told that men don't pander to women," says Mr. Hirose, who is retired from a desk job in Japan's military. Stubbornly traditional, he never told his wife that he loved the way she laughed, that he longed to sing karaoke with her, or that he appreciated all she did to make ends meet when they were young and poor.

Then, one fall day a year ago, an unlikely liberator unleashed Mr. Hirose's passions: the Sumitomo Trust & Banking Co. In an effort to win more older clients, the stodgy bank started a sweepstakes campaign called "Love Letter by a 60-Year-Old." It ran newspaper ads urging Japanese men and women in their 50s and 60s to send in postcards revealing their "honest feelings" toward their spouses. First prize: one million yen ($7,500) in travel coupons.

"You know, we've come all this way, and I never even proposed to you," wrote Mr. Hirose, cramming the postcard he wrote on his computer with type so small it was barely legible. "You may laugh, but I'll regret it if I don't say it, so here I go, in a loud voice: Thank you for marrying me."

Older married men in Japan have long been known for an inability to display affection for their wives. When couples married during the economic boom of the 1960s and 1970s, Japan was still an uptight place. Arranged marriages were much more common than they are now. Ostentatious shows of love were considered distasteful. In fact, etiquette called on a man to jocularly put down his wife to his friends. Later, men got stuck in their roles as corporate warriors who saw it as a weakness to display emotions in public.

But many secretly longed to be more expressive, a bit like the actors in Hollywood movies they had seen. Society changed, to the point where the hipper parks of Tokyo now are dotted with young lovers making out like Parisians. So, many older couples find they are willing to make the leap -- if they're presented with an occasion.

Curiously, a mass audience seems to help. More people are writing love letters and poems that are getting compiled in books with titles like "The Best Love Letter in My Life." Gushing in groups helps, too. Some couples are going on packaged second honeymoons, a niche travel agents call "full moon" tours. A couple of years back, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines Ltd., whose cruise tours are popular with seniors, held photo sessions on the front deck of vessels, with couples taking turns embracing.

Sumitomo Trust's love-letter campaign, which started in November 2000, struck a chord. In two months, the bank was inundated with 15,688 letters -- five times what it expected. The response startled the midsize bank, which planned the low-budget campaign in an effort to stand out at a time when banks were paying depositors next to nothing in interest.

"You may not expect it, but this generation is pretty passionate," says Masami Tsuzuki, a Sumitomo Trust official who ran the campaign. Even more surprising, about 40% of the entrants were men, including the first-prize winner, Mitsuo Enomoto, who admits that he had his wife's help in writing his letter. Japanese women tend to be considerably less inhibited about expressing their emotions.

Mr. Tsuzuki -- who confesses that he lacks the nerve to write his own wife a love letter -- is busy expanding Sumitomo Trust's budding romance business. The bank recently compiled 165 of the contestants' letters into its love-letter book, which has sailed onto the bestseller list, with 180,000 copies in print. (Proceeds go to charity.) It recently held a second love-letter contest and now is entertaining offers to turn the letters into a television drama series.

Some of the writers' zeal may have as much to do with competitiveness as uxoriousness. Older men, especially retirees, "are scrambling to find a place for themselves," at home and in society, says Yamato Kawai, secretary general of the Foundation for Senior Renaissance, a nonprofit group. Winning I-love-you competitions would satisfy the itch for recognition, he says.
Most of the letters are pretty restrained by Western standards. Only a handful of their writers dare to use the word "love." More typical are elliptical whispers from the heart, like this one from 60-year-old Tadanobu Fujita to his wife: "I can't regret enough why I couldn't be more thankful and sympathetic to you."

As tame as the letters are, some men squirm at the thought of their wives' actually reading them. The campaign inspired Kazuhide Kameyama, a 61-year-old former steel-company worker in central Japan, to dash off a mushy letter to Nobuko, his wife of 34 years. "Thank you for supporting me with all your heart, when I'm the kind who recklessly rushes ahead," wrote Mr. Kameyama, adding that he was looking forward to their "life as newlyweds" in a new house they had built.

But Mr. Kameyama, who now runs a machinery-sales business from his home office, hid the letter in his desk, hoping to surprise Mrs. Kameyama if his entry made it to the finals and got published. When it didn't, he didn't have the nerve to hand it to her, he says.

Instead, he quietly posted it on his company's Web site, which is otherwise packed with sales data on industrial machinery, and waited for someone to notice. A few days later, Mrs. Kameyama's sister saw it and called to break the news.

"I couldn't believe what he did!" exclaims the 54-year-old Mrs. Kameyama, blushing as she sits in her spacious living room. She says she was secretly pleased when her sister said it was obvious how deep Mr. Kameyama's love was. While the Kameyamas had an arranged marriage, "If I were to pick someone in my next life, I'd pick him again, I suppose," she says softly.

Hayato Kameyama, their 32-year-old son, says he was so startled to see his father's letter on the Web that he couldn't immediately bring himself to click it open. "I never imagined that a phrase like 'love letter' would ever pass my father's lips," says the publishing-company manager, who remembers his father being strict and aloof.

The younger Mr. Kameyama says he wonders how people in his parents' generation were able to hold their marriages together while expressing so little affection. Japanese his age are far more expressive. And yet, "so many couples are splitting up so soon," says Mr. Kameyama, who himself is divorced.

Men and women in Japan both initiate divorces, citing incompatibility, infidelity and other grounds familiar in the West. The divorce rate in 2000 was 2.1 per thousand Japanese, compared with 4.1 per thousand in the U.S.

Yumiko Sato, a 53-year-old housewife who lives south of Tokyo, confided in a letter that she wished her husband were a little more romantic. "I long to walk arm in arm with you, just like old couples do in foreign movies," Mrs. Sato wrote to her husband, Tsunehiko. "I know you're really shy, but do you think you could give it a try if we went abroad somewhere?"
Mr. Sato, a tall, proud 57-year-old policeman, says the very thought of doing such a thing puts him on edge. "That's just the way the Japanese are," he mumbles when asked about his wife's request.

Still, he ventured a step forward last summer, when he took his wife on one of those full-moon tours to Hawaii. As the couple posed for a photograph in a beachside park, Mr. Sato, relaxed in yellow shorts, timidly put his arm around his beaming wife.
Actually, the gesture wasn't all that spontaneous, Mr. Sato admits sheepishly. The park guard who took the picture suggested it.

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