TOKYO -- When Masako Torii got married 28 years ago, she was eager to tackle what she believed was the most important job for a woman: full-time housewife and mother. In the decades that followed, she devoted herself to caring for her husband and, later, their two children.

That freed up her spouse, Hiroshi Torii, to spend long hours running his small printing company, which provided the family with an upper-middle-class income. At home, Mr. Torii, like many Japanese men of his generation, was anything but self-sufficient. His wife says he would often call out to her to bring him his ashtray, even when it was sitting right in front of him.

Then, three years ago, Mr. Torii's company failed. His family lost its home and temporarily split up to save on expenses. To help make ends meet, Ms. Torii enrolled in a job-training program and landed a full-time post as a hotel clerk. Now, at age 50, clad in a navy-blue uniform suit and striped bow tie, she spends five days a week behind a hotel desk, juggling telephone calls and taking reservations. Meanwhile, Mr. Torii, 51, who has since launched a new venture, has had to take on such unaccustomed household chores as making coffee and helping with the laundry.

The transition hasn't been an easy one. But, these days, it is being repeated all across Japan. The country's decade-long economic slump has roiled the domestic lives of many couples like the Toriis, whose traditional sex roles once made them the real-life Japanese equivalents of Ward and June Cleaver. The downturn has thrust Japan's businessmen into a tough new world of bankruptcies, pay cuts and layoffs, eroding household incomes. That, in turn, has prodded a growing number of the country's estimated 16.5 million homemakers into the work force as fledgling breadwinners.

The trend has fueled a heated controversy known as "the housewife debate," which pits traditionalists who insist that a woman's place is in the home against those who argue that women should have their own incomes. The debate began in 1998 with the publication of "Give Me A Break, Full-Time Housewife," by Risa Ishihara, who wrote that stay-at-home wives were "parasites" feeding on their husbands.

The 34-year-old housewife-turned-author says she decided to write her book after tradition-minded homemakers chided her for seeking work soon after the birth of her daughter. For the next few years, she received barrages of e-mail from angry critics, many of them women who defended housewifery as a noble calling. The book, along with its two sequels, has made Ms. Ishihara a fixture in Japan's women's magazines and on its talk-show circuit.

Practical Motives

But many homemakers who have sought out paid employment in recent years have been motivated by economics, rather than rhetoric. And, unlike many unemployed Japanese men, they have proved willing to take on such low-status, often part-time jobs as waiting tables, selling door to door or cashiering in supermarkets.

"I feel I need to help out my husband," says 47-year-old Mitsuko Suzuki. For the past three years, she has worked as a part-time clerk at a health-food company. Her husband, who quit a faltering apparel firm five years ago, has started his own house-cleaning service. On her days off as a clerk, Ms. Suzuki cleans houses for the business. The couple needs the total of about 100,000 yen ($810) a month she makes from the two jobs to help pay their two children's school tuition.

To many Japanese, the one-income household looks increasingly precarious. A poll released last year by the Japan Institute of Life Insurance, an industry trade group, found that 31.5% of the households in Japan's three largest cities felt there was a possibility the husband would lose his job as a result of downsizing or business failure. "It's become much more risky to remain a full-time housewife," says Machiko Osawa, an economics professor at Japan Woman's University.

Ms. Torii agrees. "I was just so unprepared. I thought my lifestyle would continue forever," she says. But though she says she misses the free time she used to have to visit art galleries and to cook elaborate dinners, she adds, "I can't go back to the way I was before, cooking three meals and waiting on my family."

For decades, sengyo shufu, or stay-at-home wives, held an esteemed place in Japanese society. They were extolled as one of the crucial components of the country's postwar economic engine, allowing their husbands to give their all to jobs as small-business owners or salarymen at big corporations, to keep growth humming. For many women whose mothers worked on the farm or at family-owned stores, staying at home represented a step up the economic ladder. The government encouraged the rise of a housewife class, showering full-time wives with tax breaks and, later, free pensions.

Past downturns reinforced the system. The relatively few married women who worked, typically in lower-paid and less secure part-time positions, tended to be the first to go as companies focused on preserving the jobs of their male employees. But as the current slump has eroded the country's tradition of lifetime employment, leaving many higher-paid middle-aged men jobless, labor data indicate that housewives are picking up some of the slack.

Between 1989 and 2000, the number of Japanese nonfarming households with a working wife and a nonworking husband rose 91% to 820,000, while the number with both spouses employed rose 20% to 9.4 million. During the 10 years from 1989 to 1999, the proportion of married women who worked outside the home rose to 55% from 46% among those age 40 to 44 and to 56% from 47% among those age 45 to 49.

A Glamorous Gig

Before she married, Ms. Torii, a high-school graduate, worked for Japan Airlines Co. as a flight attendant, considered one of the most glamorous jobs then available to a Japanese woman. But she knew her career would be short, especially after meeting her future husband, the son of a printing-company owner, at a neighborhood coffee shop. Like many companies, Japan Airlines had a rule back then that women flight attendants had to be single.

Ms. Torii wore a kimono at her wedding in 1973. Having married into a traditional family, her duties as a new bride included taking care of her mother-in-law and her mother-in-law's own mother-in-law. Before long she also had a daughter, Chinatsu, and a son, Yamato, to care for. Only a handful of other mothers she knew worked back then, she recalls, and they tended to keep quiet about it, because it was usually a sign of family hardship.

There was little reason for Ms. Torii to work. The affluent Mr. Torii built her a new house with a huge kitchen and a refined, Japanese-style tea room. In between her household duties, Ms. Torii had the leisure to collect Wedgwood china, take gourmet cooking classes and attend art exhibits. And she was active at her children's school. The family spent the New Year holidays in Hawaii.

Then came the 1990s. As Japan's economy swooned, the debts at Mr. Torii's printing company mounted. A big real-estate development deal he had invested in fell through. On a hot summer morning in 1998, he startled Ms. Torii with the news that his bank had cut off his credit and that his business was being shut down. Even their house had to be put on the block to pay down debt. He warned her that creditors might soon swoop down on their home to cart away hard assets. So, Ms. Torii took refuge at her sister's house nearby.

After a couple of weeks there, Ms. Torii decided that the least she could do was try earning enough to support herself. But when she wrote her resume, she was shocked at how skimpy it was. In listing her work experience for the past two decades, "the only thing I could write was either 'housewife' or 'unemployed," ' she says. "I thought, 'what does a housewife have? Absolutely nothing.' "

Ms. Torii's first stop was an employment center. To avoid bumping into anyone she knew, she choose one that was a few miles away from a similar center in her own neighborhood. It had no openings for her. Japan allows employers to select employees based on their age. Then 48, she was over the 45-year age limit most companies impose.

Ms. Torii then set her sights on a government-sponsored program that trains older Japanese to work in the hotel industry. There were three applicants for each of the 30 slots available, and she faced a long written exam. She bought a stack of children's textbooks, spent weeks cramming on Japanese and math -- and made the cut. She found the six-month course grueling. She spent 7½ hours a day on drills designed to teach her everything from how to set a Western-style dinner table to using a computer. Upon graduation, she got a job at Sun Hotel Asakusa, a 120-room business hotel.

Her on-the-job learning curve was steep. She was overwhelmed by the fast pace of the hotel's cramped lobby and daunted by its busy telephone system. She says she kept taking down phone numbers incorrectly and entering the wrong characters for guests' names in the computerized reservation system. She was scolded by her boss, who was no older than her own daughter. She says one senior manager called her "a burden" right to her face.

"If I were a housewife, I would never have had to put up with this," she recalls thinking. But she kept going, knowing she needed the monthly salary of 150,000 yen ($1,190).

Tiny Apartments

Meanwhile, to save on rent, the family decided to split up for a year into two, tiny apartments, the kind typically inhabited by students or young marrieds. Ms. Torii and her daughter lived in one, and Mr. Torii and their son in another. The children were already grown-up and working, but they lived at home, as many young Japanese do until they marry.

Chinatsu Torii, now 27, split the $1,000-a-month rent with her mother for their two, 100-square-foot rooms, each divided by a thin sliding door. Chinatsu, a graphic designer who dyes her hair chestnut-brown, says she was struck by the strong figure her mother had become. Even as she struggled to adjust to her job, Chinatsu says, "She was always so stable."

Last year, with the help of a partner, Mr. Torii began to get back on his feet, starting a business that distributes ads and catalogs. The Toriis rented a bigger apartment and moved back together. But Mr. Torii noticed changes. His wife often worked weekends, leaving him at home alone to do chores he had never done before -- like taking the laundry off the clothesline and making coffee when his wife was tired.

"I know, I know, it was my fault for making her go through this change, so I have to do as she says," he says. "But when I'm also pressed for time, and she says things like, 'Make me some coffee,' we get into a fight."

Mr. Torii stresses that he admires his wife's pluck in getting a job after so many years at home. Still, he says it's hard to accept. "To tell you the truth, I'd much rather have her at home, taking care of me," he confides. When his new business gets on track, the first thing he's going to do is tell her "it's O.K. to quit" her job, he says.

Chinatsu Torii has drawn a lesson from her mother's experience. Women must be independent of men, she thinks -- an outlook that is increasingly common among young Japanese women. To survive, she says matter-of-factly, what you need above all is "financial security," adding that she is determined to keep working after marriage so she can always support herself. Nowadays, she is helping her father rebuild by working in his new business.

"I don't want to have to rely on my husband," says Chinatsu, who is single and has no immediate plans to marry. "I don't want to have kids before I'm financially stable."

New Skills

As women become more independent, the world is also changing for Chinatsu's brother, 25-year-old Yamato. Ms. Torii says her son, who lives at home and works for another printing company, currently doesn't do much housework, because he wasn't brought up that way. But she says he would probably have to learn to help with the chores if he were to marry, because more women want to keep working after marriage.

As for herself, Ms. Torii says she appreciates her husband's desire that she return to full-time homemaking should his fortunes improve. But she has other plans: She would like to work for 10 more years. "It's so strange, because there are times when I wish nothing more than quitting this job," says the gregarious Ms. Torii, sipping coffee in her simple living room. But she adds that as stressful as her new life is, she also enjoys the "buzz" of work.

One reason: Despite early clashes at the hotel, Ms. Torii has won the respect of her colleagues. None of them speak English, and most were terrified of foreign guests. Ms. Torii, who remembered some English from her flight-attendant days, quickly proved her value by making herself the unofficial foreigner handler.

She has improved her English, memorizing new phrases during her subway commute. Younger female colleagues now consult her on their love lives. And just recently, Ms. Torii beams, her colleagues honored her with a new nickname that she cherishes: "Mama."