The old man security guard. If it were not for him, the world would have been over run by loiterers and whippersnappers.

Old people can be quite cranky or even mean sometimes, but even they have problems here. Even though they’re eventually going to take over Japan in less than 50 years (2 workers for every retired person by that time), they get shat on. Japan has a big problem with ageism.

You can see it in many places. At the minimum, anywhere you can find a taxi. Taxi drivers in many other countries might be comprised mostly of one ethnic group, but in Japan it’s pretty much men older than 60. Why 60? For a lot of companies, it’s the age of mandatory retirement. Want/have to work more? Go find somewhere else to work.

Be nice. What did the yakuza guy that killed your family ever do to you?

And many of them do have to continue working for one reason or another. Maybe their wife is a horrible shrew that makes him want to let everyone see the contents of his stomach quite directly (腹切). It could be that he loves working (in that way). It’s also possible that he doesn’t have enough money to retire. Thanks to the nonexistent interest rate, even though Japanese people save much more than Americans on average, they still end up with about the same amount.

So we have all these 60+ year old men that want/have to work. What do we do with them? Well there’s the taxis. After that, a lot of them might go work at some food establishment (usually not restaurants) like a たこ焼き stand (octopus ) or a noodle stand. Sometimes they’ll get a waste of space job like security job or greeter (yes, they are like the Wal-Mart greeters, but they are more likely to be at banks). There’s a bunch of other things they might do and I’m not going to go through all of them, that’d be crazy and boring.

“I wouldn’t call you a bitch if you didn’t spend all my money at the host clubs.”

This isn’t the only place where the oldies are discriminated against. It also happens to people much younger than 60. On the job wanted form that the companies give to the unemployment office, there’s a box that shows the age they are looking for. Many times, this box only has a maximum. Sometimes the max is 60, sometimes it’s 40, sometimes there is no maximum. I understand there being an age limit for certain jobs (construction), but why exclude old people if it’s just a desk job? What does it matter as long as they can do the job?

Being Japan, they’re trying to fix it, but very sloooooooowly.