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319 tokyo Living Arrangements and Use of Long-Term Care 19. Growing Old withTokyo John Creighton Campbell and Ruth Campbell We first came to Tokyo from NewYork in the summer of 1965. John had just graduated from college and was about to embark on a year of Japanese-language training before graduate school; Ruth was the mother of a two-month-old boy and for a year or so had been working with older people in East Harlem. As we drove in the dark from HanedaAirport to our new home in Western Tokyo, we were struck by the endless busy sidewalks and the rows of small shops still doing business in midevening. Ruth had grown up in a small grocery store, and she immediately felt at home—a feeling that we both still have in Tokyo, almost forty years later. Small Stores and Social Networks Small stores in fact play a big role in the lives of older Japanese. They are the core of a neighborhood, giving residents daily contact with a small number of people known for years. Such a social network gives many urban neighborhoods the quality of a small village. Japanese women have typically visited the same vegetable, fish, and meat shops almost every day, and gone every week or so to the local hardware, flower, liquor, notions, confections, drug, stationery, electrical, and other small stores that make up the set of shops found nearby almost everywhere. And that is just shopping. While around the neighborhood, people often stop at the local three-table coffee shop, which always seem to be run by two or three ladies of a certain age. The housewife who didn’t have a chance to get out that day might well call out to the local noodle or sushi shop for a quick delivery. When we did that in our first Tokyo neighborhood, the scooter-riding delivery boy always stuck his foot into one of John’s shoes and marveled at this gigantic new addition to the neighborhood social network. Small stores provide much of the texture of daily life for many customers, mostly women but also older men, who might add a tobacco stand and the local “snack” (actually a bar) to their list of stops. They also keep a lot of older people employed. Forty years ago, and even more so today, the proprietor and anyone helping in a small neighborhood shop is over sixty-five (or at least looks it). If the owner is 320 Growing Older inWorld Cities PartV:Tokyo lucky, one of his children might be willing to carry on the business, in which case the wife would probably be helping in the store while her husband holds down an outside job for additional income (either could be the proprietor’s child). One does not so often see a man between high-school age (except a part-timer or maybe a grandson) and retirement age in these small shops. This pattern is reflected in the macropicture of employment. On the one hand, a very high percentage of the Japanese labor force works in small and medium enterprises, especially very small enterprises, of which the majority are tiny retail shops. On the other, many more older people work in Japan than in any other industrialized country, and more older people work in Tokyo than in the other world cities examined in this book (Chapter 2). These two observations are not unrelated. That is, what foreigners and Japanese alike usually see as “typical” Japanese workers, the “salarymen” and industrial workers who are “permanent employees” of big corporations, are actually a minority of the labor force. They are predominantly male, and they are young—for much of the postwar period, the normal “retirement” age (teinen) in big organizations was fifty-five. Many men and most women are not guaranteed a permanent job, but yet they need not “retire.” They work on and on, as small proprietors or employees in small enterprises (in manufacturing as well as retail and other services). They are joined in the gray labor force by those who “retired” from their primary job and then found a second job. In looking at income statistics, according to a recent OECD comparative study, the standard of living of elderly Japanese is among the highest in the world, partly because of substantial employment income.1 Pensions are not very high for people who had been self-employed, and so the continuing modest revenue from a small shop keeps the household...

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