Harumi Okubo fills round dumplings with vegetables with her small hands and lines them up next to a smoking fireplace. “Our generation has always worked hard,” says the Japanese proudly. Okubo is 79 years old. For six years, she has been baking oyaki, a pastry filled with vegetables or sweet bean paste, in a restaurant in her home village of Ogawa in Japan’s mountainous Nagano Prefecture. “Here I can chat. At home I wouldn’t have anything to talk about with my husband,” laughs the great-grandmother of two. “Work to stay active for life” is his company’s philosophy, says Okubo’s employer Koryu Gonda. Of his 70 employees, 25 are older than 60 years old.
No other industrial nation in the world is aging as rapidly as Japan. According to the Ministry of the Interior in Tokyo, the proportion of people over 65 in the total population of the world’s third-largest economy is now 29.1 percent. Japan also enjoys the highest life expectancy in the world, averaging 87.6 years for women and 81.5 for men in 2021.
So it is not surprising that the proportion of people who are still working in old age is higher in Japan than in other developed countries. Around nine million of them are now older than 65. That is 13.5 percent of the working population. In many companies in Japan, it is common for employees to officially retire at the age of 60 or earlier. More than 80 percent are then employed, but often at drastically lower wages. Since pensions are often only paid from the age of 65, many older people are simply dependent on continuing to work.
Many of them have to earn their living in poorly paid, strenuous and often unstable jobs, for example as security guards on construction sites or building cleaners. On the other hand, statistics show that older Japanese are generally more willing to work than in some western countries, Miho Fujinami of Chiba Keizai University told the Japan Times newspaper. People like Harumi Okubo and her colleagues. Her home prefecture, Nagano, is the prefecture in Japan with the highest proportion of employees over the age of 65: 31.6 percent.
As an example for the whole island kingdom, special attention is paid to the health care of the population. The mountainous prefecture boasts that its residents eat far more vegetables than the national average every day. Shusuke Natsukawa, honorary director of the Saku Central Hospital in Nagano, says that according to the motto “prevention is better than treatment”, doctors and nurses began to be sent to the villages for regular examinations shortly after the Second World War. Today, such group surveys are common in corporations and communities across Japan.
On a nearby wooded hilltop, Satoko Fujioka runs an innovative medical facility that, in cooperation with Natsukawa’s hospital, organizes home visits and at the same time offers young and old a creative community space. Surrounded by books, musical instruments and toys, professionals look after disabled children in the cozy wooden house, while senior citizens voluntarily cook for everyone next to them. “A place with a clinic and a large kitchen,” Fujioka describes her “hotch lodge” with a smile.
The “Hotch-Lodge” wants to offer old people a community and at the same time overcome barriers. More and more seniors in Japan are living alone. While it used to be common for several generations to live under one roof and for the younger ones to take care of the older ones, today the trend is increasingly towards the nuclear family – also in Nagano. In the “Hotch-Lodge” old people can meet up again. “We don’t just see people as patients or the consequences of aging here,” Fujioka explains the concept. Everyone has a personality, skills and experience that they could bring to the community here.
Initiatives like these help people stay healthy into old age – and work longer. And at the same time relieve the health system. Because that is coming under increasing pressure in view of a decline in births and the aging population. Added to this is the fact that the G7 country Japan does not pursue an active immigration policy. And so, according to experts, the nation is dependent on its fit senior citizens. But Japan’s population is shrinking – and with it the number of employees.
The elderly alone are by no means enough to resist the increasing shortage of workers. That is why the government has declared boosting the birth rate to be the state’s most important task. “The next six or seven years will be our last chance,” says Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Among other things, he wants to create financial incentives and ensure that more men take part in raising children.
“We will work to change the national mentality to face the challenges,” promises Kishida. However, Shusuke Natsukawa of Saku Central Hospital in Nagano is skeptical. The state has often announced great things, he says. For many young people today, it’s simply “unrealistic to get married and have children,” he complains. “The future is very uncertain”.
