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The story
A Nippon TV News report on seniors who can’t get by on their pensions alone and end up doing jobs like traffic control under the blazing sun drew a wave of reactions on 5ch’s Newsplus board. Posters discussed the going rate for traffic guard work — about ¥10,000 a day — and how the job is often set up to keep elderly workers from collapsing on the job.
The average monthly payout for the employee pension (kosei nenkin) — around ¥210,000 — was also brought up, sparking a split debate over the gap with households relying on the basic national pension alone, and over fairness between generations in shouldering the burden.
[Life on a Pension] “I Have No Choice But to Work” — Seniors Toil in the Blazing Heat, Earning “¥10,000 a Day”; the Harsh Extra Costs of Obon Season… Saving on Electricity Bills by Beating the Heat (“every. Ki ni Naru!”)
Sun, Aug 23, 11:27 AM JST
Nippon TV News NNN
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
My family gets the money (after I'm gone), so I'm fine with that too.
I don't want to end up like you either — found a month after I've died.
Right…
Well, traffic control is a job somebody's got to do, though.
It's fine —
when it comes to traffic guiding, the old guys get put in the spots least likely to make them collapse, like standing in the shade or an easy post.
Just coast through the day like that and it's ¥10,000.
Once a guy gets a taste of that, he never quits the job.
Meanwhile the younger crew backing them up on-site (though "young" here means 40s-50s) push themselves too hard and end up collapsing, getting sick, or dying off.
That's why wherever you look, it's the old guys who stand out as traffic guards.
That's basically it.
There's still the dual-income benefit though.
If a real depression hits, you're going to regret writing that.
It's been cut back a lot because of all the people who made noise about pensions being 'too generous.'
With stuff like the invoice system hitting the self-employed, it feels like the government's pitting salaried workers against everyone else and steering things wherever's convenient for them.
Do that and all those financial products you guys love so much would crash, and you'd get a real depression.
Meanwhile their grandkids will pay more than double in taxes over their lifetime and get almost nothing back before they die.
That's basically always been true.
In Japan, aside from civil servants, pensions have basically been the private sector's responsibility all along, and that hasn't changed.
For the self-employed, sure, that's how it is.
I wouldn't be surprised if they cut pensions for people who never had kids.
That's pretty much it.
What gets me is that my own parents, who are the same generation, did it right.
These people probably blew their money on cars they couldn't really afford during the bubble era.
What shocks foreign tourists when they come to Japan is seeing old people working everywhere.
They look at it with pity, you know.
Though the foreigners too poor to even travel to Japan are living on the streets back home.
Makes you wonder what other countries, especially developed ones, are doing about this.
They've got the same low birthrate/aging population problem, and it's not like they're all sitting on piles of assets.
People getting the employee pension have ¥210,000 a month, so they're totally fine.
It says the employee pension figure already includes the basic pension, so isn't it ¥151,000?
Background and Key Points
Japan runs two public pension tiers. The kokumin nenkin (national/basic pension) is mandatory for everyone, including the self-employed and homemakers, and pays a flat rate regardless of income — averaging roughly ¥59,000/month, well below what’s needed to live alone. On top of that, company employees and civil servants pay into kosei nenkin (employee pension), an earnings-linked add-on that brings their average combined payout to around ¥151,000–¥210,000/month, depending on how it’s tallied. This two-tier gap is precisely why the “traffic guard” jobs in the report exist: many older people doing this work spent their careers self-employed or in non-regular jobs and draw only the basic pension. Local governments and staffing agencies also lean on elderly workers for these posts through shirogane jinzai centers (senior work-placement bureaus), which deliberately assign lighter duty — shade, low-traffic corners — to keep them from collapsing, which is what several posters described.
The thread’s real fault line wasn’t “pension vs. poverty” in the abstract, but whether ¥210,000/month (employee pension) counts as “fine” while only the ¥59,000 national-pension-only households are the actual crisis — a distinction that also maps onto a generational-fairness argument: today’s retirees paid into a system now seen as underfunded, while younger workers expect to pay far more and receive less.
One thing the thread muddles rather than clarifies: post 234 catches that the ¥151,000 employee-pension figure already includes the basic pension portion, meaning the ¥210,000 number floated earlier likely double-counts — a common error even in Japanese reporting on this topic.
*This article was compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Newsplus) thread “[Life on a Pension] ‘I Have No Choice But to Work’ — Seniors Toil in the Blazing Heat.”
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