MyVision
No.9

2015.5Oﬀering the Elderly theOpportunity to Work
The population of healthy and able elderly citizens is increasing in Japan. As thenation’s declining birthrate and aging population result in an ongoing decline in
the working population who pay social security premiums to support future
pension payments, the need to establish an environment in which elderly citizens
who wish to work are able to continue their working lives and become independent is increasing. How can we organize society, establish modes of work, andcreate employment systems to enable a greater number of Japan’s elderly tocontinue working?

C O NT E NT S
Expert Opinions

How can We Enable the Healthy Elderly
Population to Lead Fulﬁlling Working Lives?
Towards a society in which oneʼs
working life can last oneʼs entire
life
Kenji Ueda

How can we harmonize elderly employment
with corporate proﬁtability?

Atsushi Yashiro

Professor, Faculty of Business and Commerce, Keio University

Senior Advisor, KOUREISHA Co.

Providing support to the able elderly
through the “Senior Cloud”

Michitaka Hirose

Professor, Graduate School of Information Science andTechnology, The University of Tokyo

Promote the formulation of employment
policies that consider the social future of
employment
Shinya Ouchi

Professor, Graduate School of Law, Kobe University

Create meaningful jobs forthe elderly
Caitrin Lynch

Associate Professor of Anthropology,
Olin College of Engineering

About this Issue

Noriyuki Yanagawa

Expert Opinions

How can We Enable the Healthy Elderly
Population to Lead Fulﬁlling Working Lives?
What approach should we take to employment for the elderly? In this issue of, we ask academics
in the ﬁelds of labor management and labor law, a researcher seeking to support the employment ofelderly workers through the use of ICT, the founder of a temp company for elderly workers, and an American cultural anthropologist who has conducted extensive ﬁeld work at a company that employs elderly
workers.

Interviewer: Maiko Sakaki, Mari Kawamoto
Editor: Kazuyoshi Harada
Period of interviews: January 2015

Towards a society in which oneʼs
working life can last oneʼs entire life
Kenji Ueda
Senior Advisor, KOUREISHA Co.
I believe that a society in which people who wish to work following
their retirement are able to extend their working lives indefinitely isdesirable. After retirement, people throw themselves into enjoying
travel and golf, but they ultimately become tired of a life in which
every day is like Sunday. KOUREISHA, the company that I founded,
is a temp company for just this type of over-60 year-old, and its goal isto provide them with the opportunity to work and find purpose in life.
Retirees who wish to work around three days a week preponderate
overwhelmingly among the people who register with my company.
What the elderly want is a place to belong, a purpose in life, andconnection with other people. Often they have tried using thegovernment’s Employment Service Center, but have had their
expectations disappointed, and so they welcome our services. The
mode of work that we employ is to use two people for the work of
one, and to have these two people supplement each other in theirperformance of the work duties.
The types of work we deal with are diverse, and include inspection
work, sales rounds, the provision of customer service when regularstaff members are not at their desks, convenience store work, anddriver assistance, and it is extremely difficult to match our clients withthe right job. We operate on the basis of an hourly wage system withno bonuses or premium payments. We are able to function as acompany because these conditions are acceptable to the pension
recipients who we find employment for.
The way my company works is to provide a mechanism that offers
positive benefits for the elderly workers, their spouses, the companies
they work for, KOUREISHA, and everyone concerned. For example,
let’s assume that a company wants to offer its customers services on
weekdays, but that its customers would prefer to use it on weekends.
Employees with small children are reluctant to work on weekends andholidays. That’s where we come in. The company doesn’t have to pay
weekend premiums, and the other employees are happy because they
can have their weekends off.
In the future, it is predicted that throughout Japan there will be apolarization of the elderly into those who receive company pensions
and those who do not, for example as a result of having worked for
micro-enterprises during their working lives. We need to takemeasures in response to this situation. It will be important for theelderly to learn new job skills following their retirement, and we needto create a system of education and training in which the burden of
cost is shared between the government, companies, and theindividuals receiving training. It will be essential for all of us, young
and old, male and female, to think together about how to respond toan aging society. ■Mr. Ueda is the founder of KOUREISHA, a temp company for individuals in
the 60-75 age bracket. Operating based on a system in which workers are
remunerated in combination with their pension payments, the company
oﬀers the elderly the opportunity to work and ﬁnd purpose in life.

Supporting the able elderly through the“Senior Cloud”

Michitaka Hirose
Professor, Graduate School of Information Science andTechnology, The University of Tokyo
It has been indicated that Japan’s declining birthrate and aging
population will result in every 1.3 workers being forced to support
one elderly person in 2055. To the extent that we see the elderly as
people in need of support, it is clear that we will find no solution tothis problem. However, many of the elderly population have thedesire to work and are healthy enough to do so, and it is likely that wewould see the light at the end of the tunnel in relation to this problem
if these people were to actively participate in society as a labor force.
Knowledge and the ability to respond are among the strengths

My Vision No.9
possessed by the elderly in comparison to young people. At the sametime, there are many factors that prevent the elderly from finding
employment, among them the decline in their physical capacity andthe fact that the other side of their specialized knowledge andexperience is an inability to perform other tasks. The characteristics ofelderly people are quite diverse in comparison to young people, andcompanies therefore hesitate to employ them. We are at present
engaged in a research and development project called “Senior
Cloud,” which is attempting to use ICT to create mechanisms that will
enable us to utilize this labor force which is so rich in diversity. If thisresearch bears fruit, it may be possible for us to stabilize a new social
structure.
In the “Senior Cloud,” we will disaggregate the time, potential
working spaces and skills of different individuals, and recombine
them to create “virtual workers” who will each perform the work of
one person. This new system of work, which we call a “mosaic-typework model,” is able to reconcile flexible working patterns with theefficient supply of stable labor power. Precise matching of factors
including the experience, knowledge and skills of potential elderly
workers and their desired type of work with job data will ensure, forexample, that someone with experience as a department head in an
overseas company will not be offered work pulling weeds in a garden.
The number of companies providing job-seeking assistance that areinterested in this type of electronic temp system using ICT isincreasing. In the future we will commence tests using data, but atpresent a process of trial and error is ongoing. ■Professor Hirose leads research and development eﬀorts in the “Senior
Cloud” project, which seeks to create a system that enables the experience, knowledge and skills of senior citizens to be put to use as a new
driving force for a super-aging society.

Create meaningful jobs for the elderly
Caitrin Lynch
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Olin College of Engineering
For the elderly, the meaning of “working” is more than merely
earning money; it is also about the ability to lead a fulfilling life.
Rather than forcing the elderly to work, governments should
encourage people looking forward to retirement to realize thatworking in their old age will offer them satisfaction. One of thelessons of my study of Vita Needle, a small, family-owned factory
outside of Boston, is that work can provide the elderly with a sense of
meaning and belonging. About half of the workers at Vita Needle are
74 or older, and in the workplace they feel that they matter. In Japan,
at the “Silver Jinzai Centers,” older workers are doing jobs likesweeping, and planting flowers, and picking up garbage. But theimportant thing is whether or not the work gives them a sense of
meaning in life, a sense of belonging and connection to others.
We need to get employers to think differently about the value thatolder workers bring to the workplace, and to create working
environments and working conditions that make work easier for theelderly. The automobile manufacturer BMW did a study in Germany
in which they made adjustments to one production line to suit it toolder workers, for example by making the flooring softer andimproving the lighting, and they found that this became a very
productive line. Older workers have many years of experience, andthey have different motivations to be at work and, possibly, a different
work ethic to younger people, and so might actually be more reliable
workers. It might cost a company a little to make adjustments forolder workers, but in the end it pays off.
It is also important for us to think about government policies that
notice all the kinds of work that people are doing, not just office workand manufacturing work, and to offer remuneration, for example, forcare-giving and other types of informal work that women have done
up to the present. Another way of keeping older people working is byallowing them a flexible schedule. Unless we have systems in asociety to enable people to feel like they still belong, and they stillmatter, then we’re just going to have a lot of problems, and also losea lot of rich opportunities for intergenerational connections. ■Dr. Lynch studies the dynamics of the relationship between work and culture, with afocus on areas including aging, gender, and oﬀshore industries. She is well known forher ﬁeld study of Vita Needle, a U.S. company that maintains high productivity while
actively employing seniors, which has been featured on U.S. media.

How can we harmonize elderly employment
with corporate proﬁtability?

Atsushi Yashiro
Professor, Faculty of Business and Commerce, Keio University
Currently, the legal age of mandatory retirement in Japan is 60, as
specified by the Act for Stabilization of Employment of Older
Persons. As means of providing employment for the staff over 60
years old, companies have to either extend the mandatory retirement
age to 65, to abolish mandatory retirement, or to offer theiremployees continued employment until the age of 65. According to
the questionnaire survey for companies in Japan, more than 80% of
the surveyed would select the option of setting 60-64 as the
mandatory retirement age, offering their staff continued
employment. The reason why most companies select this option liesin that even though it would extend the duration of employment, thecompany could flexibly adjust working conditions. It is because
their working hours are shorter than regular workers. It meansoffering continued employment would effectively function as ‘work
sharing’ because the wage of a single employee reaching the
mandatory retirement age could be distributed to several workers.
So far, the continued employment beyond the mandatory retirement
age can be seen to represent ‘Best Practice’ as a mean of elderly
employment after 60 years old.
In the long run, however, the extension of elderly employment
may affect corporate profitability because companies would not beable to execute the right to dismiss employees by the establishedlegal precedents. Ideally, each company should decide the durationof employment from the viewpoint of development and utilizationof human resources in competition with other companies. For somecompanies with difficulties in attracting new graduates andcompanies with high employee turnover rates, it is rational to extend
the mandatory retirement age in order to retain the incumbent staff.
In some cases, leading companies may use the extension of themandatory retirement age as their’ branding strategy’.
As aging and the declining birthrate proceeding in Japan, we must
give serious consideration to elderly employment, for which privatecompanies currently taking sole responsibility. Promoting elderly
employment is, of course, very important. However, it should notsqueeze corporate profitability. We will need to consider how toboost the demand for elderly workers beyond making theiremployment an obligation for the private sector. ■Professor Yashiro conducts research on human resources management inmodern Japanese companies, based on the theory of internal labor markets. He
is now engaged in conducting international comparisons of human resourcesmanagement as well as human resources management after the Second World
War based on the method of Oral History.

Promote the formulation of employment
policies that consider the social future of
employment
Shinya Ouchi
Professor, Graduate School of Law, Kobe University
The Revised Act for Stabilization of Employment of Older Persons
etc., which obliges companies to employ workers until the age of 65
if the worker wishes it, will be useful in increasing work
opportunities for the elderly and reducing the financial burden of
public pensions, but can also be assumed to have certain follow-on
effects. The first of these is that it may restrict employment
opportunities for young people. The second is that companies which
are obliged to continue employing elderly workers whose
productivity is declining may apply severe working conditions in an
attempt to utilize these workers as a high-productivity labor force.
In addition, there is a balance between the termination of
employment after having worked until retirement age and theguarantee of employment until retirement age. The fact that the
Revised Act effectively does away with the former by obliging
companies to continue to employ workers after retirement age,destroying this balance, is an important point. Because of this, it ispredicted that the Japanese-style system, organized around the axis ofguaranteed employment until retirement, will be transformed. Thismeans a transition to a merit-based system.
At the same time, the significance of the retirement age system in
itself is changing. This is related to changes in the nature of theregular employee. In return for the guarantee of employment until
retirement age, the traditional regular employee accepted thecompany’s wide discretion concerning working conditions, anddeveloped particular skills in order to contribute to the company overthe course of their working life. However, with intensifying
competition as a result of globalization and the rapid development ofIT, the need for this type of regular employee is diminishing, and theneed for professional workers to function as work-ready resources isincreasing. It is assumed that these professional workers will not be
employed over the long term, and retirement age does not enter into
the picture.
In an era of declining labor power, the elderly, with their abundant
experience, are a precious resource. The development of IT is able tosupplement the decline in physical powers among elderly workers
and create the conditions for them to make use of their accumulated
skills, but at the same time it brings with it the danger that those skills
will rapidly become obsolete. It will be essential for the government
to accurately predict changes in the social nature of employment andwork to realize employment policies that enable workers to maintainhigh productivity throughout their working lives. ■Professor Ouchi emphasizes that in an aging society, not only will companies necessarily have to make use of the labor power of the elderly, but amerit-based system will also be demanded. He indicates that the government must strengthen policy measures designed to raise the weak to theposition of the strong.

This is a translation of a paper originally published in Japanese.
NIRA bears full responsibility for the translation presented here.

About this Issue

Oﬀering the Elderly the Opportunity to WorkThe negative economic impact of a low birthrate andan aging society has been sufficiently pointed out.
However, it is also the case that many seniors possesslong years of experience and abundant knowledge.
Many seniors are also energetic and motivated. It
would be a great waste for our society not to makeadequate use of these elderly people, treating their
existence rather as a burden. Surely it could bepossible to consider the elderly in a positive light? This
was the point of origin of the latest issue of My Vision.
The naïve assertion that we should simply provide
more employment for the elderly, however, does nottake the full picture into consideration. If someone
with an inherent ability becomes unable to display thatability, then we should suspect that systemic factors or
a problem of the overall system lies behind it. No
doubt it is difficult to put systemic factors right
immediately. But doing nothing simply because theproblem is difficult has meant that no progress has
been made. What we need is for many people to pool
their knowledge in order to overcome the difficulty
and realize multifaceted change in the situation.
Based on this perspective, the interviewees in thisissue of My Vision come at the issues from multifaceted perspectives, indicating fascinating aspects of the
problem and proposing directions for the future. We

can broadly divide the points highlighted by these
proposals into two.
The first of these is that modern seniors differ significantly from the vision of the elderly that we have
harbored up to the present. Lifespans have increased,
and the state of health among seniors has improved
considerably. The elderly are also physically moreable than was formerly the case. A particularly
noteworthy aspect of contemporary changes is the factthat the development of IT has dramatically increased
the possibilities for the elderly to be involved in avariety of ways. We must make active use of thischange.
The other point is that Japan’s social systems remainunchanged, and we do not possess mechanisms
sufficiently able to provide the healthy elderly with
opportunities to involve themselves and places inwhich they can do so. With a focus on the employment
system, it is an urgent matter for us to establish suchmechanisms and enable the elderly to be more actively
involved in society.

Noriyuki Yanagawa, NIRA Executive Vice
President (Professor, Graduate School of
Economics, The University of Tokyo)

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