For much of this year, Japan has been revealing situations that revealed the extreme situation derived from aging of its population. In fact, the need of many elderly people to continue working after retirement had become the “rent” of grandmothers in a new symbol of the times. The same thing happened with many jobs. that they are going to lose due to lack of young hand.
But there is also another side: that of reaching 100 years celebrating it with work.
Longevity as a vocation. I was telling it on the weekend the new york times. Japan, country with a centenary population largest in the worldlives a demographic paradox: while its birth rate sinks and the proportion of young people is reduced, an extraordinarily long-lived generation of elderly defies retirement.
More than 100,000 people exceed one hundred yearsand among them there is a common thread that goes beyond genetics or diet: work as a reason for being. In a country where a sense of duty and discipline permeate daily life, these centenarians do not conceive of old age as a retirement, but as the natural extension of a useful existence. Their longevity, they say, is born from the balance between an active body, a busy mind and a purpose that does not extinguish.
The mechanic that doesn’t close. One of the most palpable cases is 103 years old. Seiichi Ishii He continues fixing bicycles in the same Tokyo neighborhood where he started as an apprentice as a child. His hunched figure under a too-long blue jumpsuit sums up an ethic: that of the artisan who is not measured by age, but by the need to continue doing.
The man repairs screws with trembling hands, makes his own miso, sings karaoke and rides a tricycle to his favorite bar, but above all he refuses to leave the job that gives meaning to your days. Your workshop is your world and, as he says calmly, “if I die here, I will die happy.” In a technical JapanIshii represents the persistence of the intimate relationship between manual labor and personal dignity.
The cook The Times also remembered the story by Fuku Amakawa102 years old, who it’s been six decades in charge of the family restaurant where he mixes noodles, broth and chives with the naturalness of someone who has not lost the rhythm of work life. The heat of the steam has kept his skin smooth and his spirit strong. She continues to work five or six days a week, convinced that her body remains strong thanks to the routine of effort.
Her restaurant, opened with her husband and supported today by her children, has become a domestic temple of perseverance. When the muscle pain scared her, she thought it was her heart. The doctor explained that it was just a consequence of lifting heavy pots. For her, continuing in the kitchen is not resistance: it is gratitude for being able to do it.
Cultivating memory. Masafumi Matsuo101 years old, grows rice, eggplants and cucumbers in the mountains of Oita. He works in the sun with measured breaks, sitting on a plastic stool, and brings offerings of rice to the small chapel where he honors his deceased wife.
Cancer and covid survivor, clings to the earth like a form of continuity: To till the field is to maintain the link with his past, with his family and with the natural cycle that taught him to resist. He plays with his great-grandson, watches the grasshoppers jump from his heating table and finds in everyday life the serenity of someone who has learned that working is, literally, continuing to breathe.
Selling beauty. At 102 years old, Tomoko Horino continue selling cosmeticsas she has been doing since she was 39, when she decided to challenge social conventions that prohibited married women from working. With three children and a reluctant husband, Horino turned her aesthetic intuition into sustenance and pride.
Today, widowed and alone, she makes her sales by telephone, sews, feeds the neighborhood cat and continues to feel the same emotion when listening to a client regain her self-esteem. In his story The change of the Japanese woman and the validity of work as a personal affirmation are intertwined: each conversation, each shade of lipstick sold is an act of vital continuity.
The narrator. Tomeyo Ono101 years old, sits on a cushion and recites traditional stories (minwa) with an energy that belies his age. She began telling stories in her seventies, in a society where girls of her time did not dream of having a public voice.
Since the 2011 tsunami devastated his house in Fukushima, he has mixed old legends with memories of the disasterconvinced that narrating is preserving the memory of those who left. He eats natto between bread, writes his diary, laughs, cries and says he only dreams of the dead. His mission, he says, is to keep talking until he can meet with them.
Work is life. If you will, the example of these five portraits condenses a vision of Japan that survives beyond its demographic crisis: that of a society where work is not only a means of subsistence, but moral affirmation and emotional continuity. In all of them, activity maintains health, protects from loneliness and gives purpose. No one idealizes fatigue, but everyone assumes it as a companion.
Contrary to the stereotype of the golden retirement, these centenarians embody a form different from fullness: that of the repeated gesture that sustains identity. In a country where the elderly already surpass in spades To young people, his example is not a curiosity, but rather a response: to continue working, in Japan, is to continue being.
Image | RawPixel
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