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The story
An article about a 72-year-old man living alone on a monthly pension of ¥140,000 while leading a life of “constant frugality” became a hot topic on 5ch’s News Speed+ board. The man reportedly worked at a manufacturing company until mandatory retirement, then kept working under re-employment until age 70, when he quit due to knee pain. The thread saw a head-on clash between those who felt “¥140,000 a month should be plenty” and those who countered that “pensions haven’t kept up with soaring prices.” Since the meaning of the figure changes depending on whether it’s an employees’ pension or the basic national pension, and whether benefits were deferred, many commenters also questioned the article’s underlying assumptions.
(Omitted)
“After working all these years…” — the frustration of a 72-year-old man living on a ¥140,000 monthly pension
Makoto Yamada (72, pseudonym) lives alone in a rented apartment on a pension of ¥140,000 a month. After graduating high school, he joined a manufacturing company and worked there until mandatory retirement. He kept working afterward under a re-employment program, but around the time he turned 70, his knee pain worsened. Unable to keep up work that required standing for long hours, he retired.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
The remaining 70% work at small and mid-sized companies
↑ So that's a 2x gap, huh?
What are you even trying to say?
That's basically royalty
For a small/mid-sized company, that's actually a pretty decent amount, I'd say — though that doesn't mean rising prices will wait around for you
Well, he deferred his pension payout until 70,
which is why he gets this much.
If you can get this much,
moving out of Tokyo makes life pretty manageable
— can't live large, but still
If an ordinary person ends up falling short, that's a failure of politics
Getting ¥140,000 and still calling it not enough is a bit much……
That's for the self-employed —
they're supposed to pay into a pension fund separately on their own.
It's his own fault for not paying the premiums
He probably only worked enough to end up with this little
If you work a normal job you'd get double that
Less than 0.2% of people get a ¥280,000/month pension
You really think that's what someone with zero work history gets from a normal job? lol
they take a ton of tax out of your pension too!
Everyone only realizes it once they actually start receiving it
The tax taken from pensions isn't that much. The deduction amount is large to begin with.
After the deduction, income tax only takes around 5%
Another one of those made-up stories again
There's no way a single 72-year-old man with no family is still alive
His life up to now and from here on has been nothing but pain with zero joy
There's no way he could still be living
I think the average lifespan for unmarried men is around 67?
If you never marry at all, it's 59
This guy's practically a miracle of longevity
No thanks to a dirt-poor old age
Same here, also from the Lost Generation, but you've done well
Figured if I can work until 65, saving up ¥20-30 million should be enough to last until I die, lol
It wasn't really a life, more like just… existing
Maybe around ¥3 million a year at some small/mid-sized company?
You clearly haven't been paying your pension premiums properly
You'd need to earn around ¥5-6 million in gross salary
and pay premiums for many years
to not end up this low
Deferring to age 70 also has a big effect though
If he were a civil servant it'd be 20-30% more
But our condo rent is ¥250,000, so the moment I retire and we sell off the company, our finances will fall apart instantly
especially if one of us dies
If you die,
your wife gets the survivor's/widow's pension,
and on top of that the mortgage gets wiped out by the group credit life insurance,
so a happy retirement is waiting for her
Yeah
It says right at the start it's 'pension plus savings' — why'd it turn into just pension?
it's just a living subsidy meant to supplement your savings
The only people who can live on pension alone without touching savings are civil servants
Big companies used to run three-tier pension systems that were pretty generous. Civil servants' career track is a separate story too. Basically, the system right now is built for people like that — there's a strong case for restructuring it to be more generous toward people without assets
True
People scraping by on bare-minimum pensions must be having a really hard time
Pensions haven't kept pace with rising prices at all
Even though they set up automatic indexing for payouts, lol
It's weird
The payout is ¥140,000, though
That's exactly why people still renting past 40 get called idiots
UR housing or a danchi (public housing complex) should work fine though
Pension price indexing?
That thing doesn't even function, you idiots
Background and key points of this discussion
Pension amounts vary widely depending on the type of pension someone was enrolled in, how long they paid premiums, and the age at which they start receiving benefits. The average payout for the employees’ pension (kosei nenkin) is roughly ¥140,000, while the basic national pension (kokumin nenkin) alone tops out at only around ¥65,000 a month even at the full rate. Deferring payout until age 70 also boosts the amount by roughly 40%, so a figure like ¥140,000 a month alone doesn’t tell you whether someone is comfortable or struggling. The thread’s split opinions also reflect differing assumptions about living costs depending on whether someone is single or married, and whether they own their home or rent. On top of that, since the source article followed the kind of “relatable scenario” format common to certain economic media outlets, some commenters questioned whether it was a true story or something closer to fiction. Articles like this tend to read very differently depending on the reader’s own situation unless you look beyond the raw pension figure to the underlying assumptions — premium payment history, housing costs, and so on.
※This article is an excerpt and summary based on the 5ch (News Speed+) thread ““This is making a fool of the public!” Despite working over 40 years, a 72-year-old man on a ¥140,000 monthly pension still faces “constant frugality” in retirement.”
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