“Starting this year, I’m not giving them any more.” A 72-year-old woman living on a monthly pension of ¥160,000 cut off financial support to her grandchild’s family — and the family’s once-annual invitation to a summer vacation together abruptly stopped coming. The episode, reported by GENTOSHA GOLD ONLINE, became a hot topic on 5ch. Some readers reacted coldly to a family that only visits when money is involved, asking “Weren’t they just mooching off her?” Meanwhile, opinions split over whether ¥160,000 a month is a lot or a little — some said “that’s normal for a civil servant,” others “reasonable once you add in a survivor’s pension” — sparking a flood of comments about the nuclear family trend and the distance in modern parent-child relationships.
“Starting this year, I’m not giving them any more” — why she stopped helping her grandchild
“Should we all go somewhere together again this summer?”
When her eldest daughter Mayu (pseudonym, 45) asked her that, her mother Etsuko (pseudonym, 72) hesitated for a moment before answering.
Source: gentosha-go.com / Original article here
Yeah, that's about right.
A downside of the nuclear family trend.
Family love (lol)
Grandma and grandpa are supposed to cover the bullet-train fare when the family comes to visit, y'know.
Embarrassing daughter.
If anything, she should be the one paying and bringing her parents along.
You could call it a parenting failure, but this kind of thing is becoming more common.
My older brother and his wife mooched off our parents for everything from travel costs to the photographer fees for Shichi-Go-San (a traditional milestone celebration for young kids). They even built their house on our parents' land — a whole family of moochers.
There are plenty of cases where the son's side is worse than the daughter's.
My mom apparently gets over ¥200,000. Though she was an absolute powerhouse who worked her way up from insurance sales.
Combined with a survivor's pension, that's pretty normal though.
They put out these made-up sob stories a lot, huh.
Aren't they embarrassed doing this kind of work?
Tokyo just draws in more people than it needs, and there are tons of people doing jobs that don't need to exist. Japan would be better off if they went and farmed in the countryside instead.
They get AI to crank out articles for basically free and rake in the page views, so of course they'll keep doing it. It's the evolved form of the "kotatsu article" (a piece written from the comfort of a kotatsu with zero actual reporting).
They all live in high-rise condos.
A genuine "winners" organization.
Just give up.
Isn't that more of a family-environment problem, if "Grandpa" is all he can recognize him as?
Expecting a kid to go look it up himself is a pretty unwinnable ask.
A truly modern, dry kind of relationship.
These are the types who'll definitely start fighting the moment nursing care becomes necessary due to illness.
That's just how it is, eh.
This isn't about the grandkid — it's about the grandkid's whole family.
"A daughter is [worth] eight burglars."
It's a famous proverb. (A twist on the real saying "one daughter draws eight suitors" — swapping suitors for burglars.)
Hey, I actually asked Google if that proverb is real, and here's what it said:
If this is an active emergency (an ongoing burglary), please call 110 [Japan's police emergency line] immediately.
If you're looking for information about a specific incident — like "my daughter got caught up in an 8-person burglary ring" or "my daughter was arrested/reported as one of 8 suspects in a robbery causing injury or death" — please check and provide the following details.
Taxes get taken out of that though.
Even if it's a hassle, I think it's worth visiting once or twice a year.
Wait, why does it never occur to anyone that the parents could go visit them instead lol
My parents call me asking "so when are you coming this year?" They don't have a car, so visiting us isn't really an option for them.
They don't give my daughter New Year's money (otoshidama), but I'm happy they send us a ton of vegetables in spring and summer instead.
It does read like a cold daughter, but this grandma probably had some coldness in her own relationships all along too.
How you raise your kids comes back around to you.
Probably.
Children are a mirror of their parents.
Even if this article is made up, similar things happen all the time in real life. Guess you wouldn't get that though.
They coin terms like "kodo-oji" (mocking adult men who still live at home with their parents) to push people out, and then turn around and demand support — that's rich.
Though the parents probably also got some satisfaction out of being the ones who could afford to give money.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
This kind of first-person “¥X a month, Y-year-old woman” human-interest story is regularly published by financial outlets like GENTOSHA GOLD ONLINE to draw out readers’ empathy or anxiety, and commenters on the thread noted it might be a “made-up composition.” A pension of ¥160,000 a month is a figure that a single person’s National Pension alone (topping out around ¥60,000-something a month even at the full rate) can’t reach on its own — it’s typically only achieved by combining it with Employees’ Pension Insurance or a survivor’s pension, so readers unfamiliar with Japan’s public pension system tend to split on whether the number sounds like “a lot” or “a little.” While the thread leaned critical of a family whose visits seemed to hinge on financial support, opinions were divided over who was really at fault — the ones asking for help or the one giving it — leaving the emotional distance between parents and children as a point with no easy right or wrong answer.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News Plus) thread “👵”Nobody Came This Summer Either” 〈Pension ¥160,000/month, 72-Year-Old Woman〉 Family Visits Stopped After She Ended Support for Her Grandchild.”
