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The story
On October 6, the Aichi Prefectural Personnel Commission recommended that Governor Hideaki Omura raise prefectural employees’ monthly salaries by an average of 3.09% (¥12,481). This marks the second straight year of a recommendation topping 3%, a notably high level, and if implemented, the average annual salary for general administrative employees would come to roughly ¥6.986 million. On 5ch, reactions split between people calling it “surprisingly cheap” and others pointing out that once management positions are factored in, raises in places like Tokyo’s 23 wards are even steeper — fueling a wider debate over civil servants’ pay levels and job security.
On October 6, the Aichi Prefectural Personnel Commission recommended that Governor Hideaki Omura raise Aichi prefectural employees’ pay by more than 3%. This is the second consecutive year the recommendation has topped the 3% mark.
On October 6, the Aichi Prefectural Personnel Commission recommended to Governor Omura that prefectural employees’ monthly pay be raised by ¥12,481, an average of 3.09%. The move aims to close the gap with private-sector wages, which have been trending upward; if realized, the average annual salary for general administrative employees would reach approximately ¥6.986 million.
Full text at the source. Last updated: Wed, 10/7, 6:02 AM
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Funny how there's always magically a budget for this.
If the justification is "matching the private sector," that can't apply to salary alone.
Social insurance should be fully merged with the private-sector system too.
They're leaving out management to make it look cheap.
Here's the real picture ↓
Starting pay for civil servants in Tokyo's 23 wards is up 25% from five years ago, with annual pay rising over ¥1 million — four straight years of increases.
A 36-year-old section chief's annual pay went from about ¥9.17 million to about ¥10.22 million; a 42-year-old department head went from about ¥11.83 million to about ¥13.00 million.
https://www.fnn.jp/articles/-/945789
At this rate nobody's going to want to be a civil servant anymore.
Disposable income is way higher than in "Tonkin" (derisive 5ch nickname for Tokyo).
Well, if a civil servant ever gets laid off, that's basically game over for them.
Going forward we'll see more municipalities like Yubari (the city that famously went bankrupt), and civil servants will keep getting cut too.
No matter how much you raise the pay, nobody's going to want the job under those conditions.
This is probably a civil servant posting on the taxpayer's dime.
Don't they get how hard things are for people crushed by high taxes?
Civil servants are so greedy.
Consumption tax hiked from 8% to 10% ← No problem for civil servants, since they just use a quarter of the expanded general-account budget to raise their own pay
High-cost medical care burden increased ← Doesn't touch civil servants, thanks to their mutual aid association (half of its funding is effectively tax money anyway)
Student loans have to be repaid ← Public school teachers don't have to repay theirs
And yet the government waves the inequality flag around.
But when you point this stuff out to them, they fire back:
"It's a different position, so it can't be helped!"
"If it bugs you that much, why don't you become a civil servant too?"
Hey, hold on, isn't that contradictory lol
Weren't you the ones who said inequality (favoring whoever pays less) is unforgivable?
Way too much of a double standard lmao
Then just become a civil servant lmaooo
It's the "employment ice age" generation, right (Japan's famous lost-generation job seekers)? The competition ratio is still insane.
Civil servants are supposed to be a drag on/check on society, but if that's the only job everyone wants, it just drags the whole society down.
And it's already bloated so much that in elections, "public opinion" is basically turning into "civil servant opinion" — it's spiraling out of control.
So civil servants his age are basically an elite bunch, since high pay is just the norm for them, huh?
Who knows.
I think it's because people keep voting for politicians who just look stable on the surface — that's how we ended up here.
Just look at the Hyogo Prefecture document scandal and you'll get it.
It's messed up: in Japan, private-sector workers earn less, actually contribute to society, and pay high taxes — yet still have to fund useless, dead-weight civil servants with that tax money.
Civil servants basically work a three-day weekend.
They've got so much time off and so little to do that most of the posts online end up being from civil servants.
Everyone else just has to keep posting things civil servants would hate, every day, as self-defense.
They already get weekends and public holidays off, plus something like 60 days of paid annual leave.
A year is 52 weeks, so that works out to roughly 3-4 days off a week.
They're off for half the year.
Converted to an hourly wage, that's gotta be something else.
The weird part is that it's the only job that's this popular. You see that tendency in developing countries, like in parts of Africa.
In developed countries, public-sector pay tends to track private companies, small and midsize firms included — but in exchange they hire a bit more broadly, using the jobs as an employment buffer, say for single mothers.
In Japan, though, the bottom rungs are non-regular staff and fieldwork gets outsourced, so full-time civil servant jobs are basically a privileged class now. They squeeze headcount at the bottom to balance things out, while the "bubble generation" who got in back when competition was low just rides the seniority system and lives it up.
It's less that the job "became" popular and more that the whole civil servant system was built to engineer that popularity as a tool of control.
Historically, Japan's rule has run in an unbroken line from aristocracy to the samurai class, and today's government and bureaucracy were established out of that same lineage.
Just as politicians inherit their seats across 2nd and 3rd generations as a leftover of samurai-era society, civil servants were built into the other half of that same structure of control.
So why did it end up this way? Because Japanese culture runs on the assumption that people are fundamentally good.
There's been constant complacency that even handing out enormous authority, people will keep themselves in check.
In reality, that's not what happens — they run wild and do whatever they want.
Civil servants actually have a really high birth rate.
That's probably the key to fixing the falling birth rate.
Meanwhile, the birth rate among fixed-term contract government workers is 0.3.
I hate to say it, but this isn't so different from Rome living large on the backs of slaves.
And the rest of the public is the one footing the bill.
first time in my life I've actually felt a boom.
The only parts of the economy doing well are a small slice of semiconductor and AI-related firms.
Most of the Nikkei average's moves just come down to Uniqlo and SoftBank anyway — that doesn't describe the economy as a whole.
Everything's getting more expensive and bankruptcies are everywhere, and you call that a boom?
That's just how it feels if you're a civil servant.
I've experienced both, and honestly the ease of the job doesn't change much — in the end it all comes down to which department you're in.
Isn't that way too narrow a view?
How is it narrow? You make it sound like you've got some wide-angle view across all civil servants or something?
It's not even about having some broader view — you can just observe this normally through everyday dealings, paperwork, and daily life.
There are a lot of posts from civil servants here, and all they ever think about is… civil servants.
Of course nobody's going to get that.
You'd have to be out of your mind to just intuit it with zero explanation given.
Maybe just read whichever you like better, Keynes or Schumpeter, or at least check out a summary of their ideas.
So basically your position is: once you state your opinion, the other person is supposed to go look it up themselves and automatically come around to agree?
That's total civil-servant-brain thinking.
If you want to take it easy, I already gave you the keywords — just go ask an AI about it.
Civil servants can only think in terms of leaning on tax money.
Clueless about the real world, total dead weight on society…
That's just a rural thing.
By the way, Kanagawa and Tokyo are the only places where civil servant pay is actually below the private-sector average.
Those two have some justification for a raise, but the rest of the top 10 haven't needed one in the last decade.
What exactly do you mean by "private-sector average"?
Can you actually show specific numbers for that average?
For Tokyo, here's how it looks ↓
Starting pay for civil servants in Tokyo's 23 wards is up 25% from five years ago, with annual pay rising over ¥1 million — four straight years of increases.
A 36-year-old section chief's annual pay went from about ¥9.17 million to about ¥10.22 million; a 42-year-old department head went from about ¥11.83 million to about ¥13.00 million.
https://www.fnn.jp/articles/-/945789
Background and Key Points of This Topic
Personnel commission recommendations are issued under the Local Public Service Act, based on comparisons with private-sector wage surveys conducted in each prefecture. Whether one is actually implemented is up to the governor and the assembly — a recommendation doesn’t automatically take effect. This time’s 3.09% increase, about ¥12,481, is an average figure for general administrative positions, and it’s worth noting that the real picture differs once management roles and other job categories are included. The thread split between those who read the roughly ¥6.99 million average as “surprisingly low” and those who pushed back with examples from Tokyo’s 23 wards, arguing that actual figures including management are much higher — much of the disagreement came down to people talking past each other about different things (the overall average versus individual job ranks). Criticism of civil servants expanded into broader points about job security and differences in social insurance, but the discussion never got into a detailed comparison of the actual systems.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “Aichi Prefecture Employee Pay: Second Straight Year of a Recommendation Topping 3% — Average Pay Would Reach Roughly ¥6.98 Million If Realized.”
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