Word: salaryman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Besides his glowing complexion, Shigeo Tokuda looks like any other 74-year-old man in Japan. Despite suffering a heart attack three years ago, the lifelong salaryman now feels healthier, and lives happily with his wife and a daughter in downtown Tokyo. He is, of course, more physically active than most retirees, but that's because he's kept his part-time job - as a porn star...
...Weakening loyalty between employer and employee, the growing clout of Tokyo at the expense of outlying areas-these are trends most Japanese are experiencing. But just as the salaryman is far from an endangered species, the gangs aren't likely to disappear. Yukio Yamanouchi, an Osaka-based lawyer who represents Yamaguchi-gumi, says the yakuza "provide the services that Japanese society requires." As long as there's a market, the yakuza will exist. It's just good business...
...salaryman has followed the Seibu Lions since he was 8, back when his family lived near the team's stadium in Tokorozawa, a sleepy suburb 40 minutes west of Tokyo by train. Clad in a powder blue Lions jacket, with a Lions towel wrapped around his neck, Koike spends the entire game bobbing like a prizefighter in Seibu's official cheering section, where well-drilled fans in blue and white drum and sing personalized anthems every time a Lion comes to bat. One player is missing though--superstar pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, who left for the Boston Red Sox this...
...joke may be on full-timers and part-timers alike. Although the salaryman's lifetime employment is still considered the Japanese ideal, today nearly one-third of workers in Japan are part-timers like Haruko, up from 20% in 1994. The change is the result of a painful transformation that saw Japanese corporations drastically cut back on hiring while shedding tens of thousands of workers during the economically disastrous years of the 1990s and early 2000s...
...Sony or Canon or Toyota, just like Dad did. And why not? If you work hard enough - which is to say, put in 16-hour days for 30 years or so - you too could earn a place among the elite, eating fugu on the company dime. Being a salaryman is good, but being a salarymaster is better. And if you can't be one, the next best thing is to be on their guest list...