Japan: Paradise Of The Aged

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32303, 22 May 1970, Page 9

Japan: Paradise Of The Aged

(Newsweek Feature Service) r At 74, Naka Funada, Speaker of Japan’s\ Lower- Louse of Parliament, likes to pretend ! he’s slowing down. “I only go to geisha parties two or three times a week,” he says, If he wants. Funada can go to the parties at Kuni Shirai’s famed Shinhashi geisha house. Miss Shirai is? 94 and beginning to be a bit? touchy on the subject of age.; “Work?” she snaps, “of course I work. Every day I! still climb up and down the staircase to meet my cus-l tomers. Do you think I want?

Ito sit around all day, boring ! myself to death?” Clearly, Japan is still the paradise of the aged. In a world that increasingly glorifies youth and shunts aside the old, it is a land virtually owned and run by the elderly. The current life span of the average Japanese man is 69 (for women it is 74). but: death at such an age is considered most untimely. About that time, a man’s career is often just getting off the I ground. I Nearly 200 men in their middle 70s and 80s hold crucial positions in industry, politics, education and the arts. And they are on top largely because the people ■ want them there. |

That seems to be especially true in politics. Though 70 per eent of the population was born after 1926, only 15 per eent of the elected members of Parliament are from that age group. On the other band, almost 50 per cent of the lawmakers were born in the first decade of the century or earlier.

Experience Valued The . general—and apparently radical—ideas behind this preference for the aged are that experience is a valuable commodity and that retirement is a waste of human resources.

“Perhaps the secret is that the Japanese people work , until death," says the Prime • Minister, Mr Eisaku Sato. ; “Foreigners seem to do nothing but enjoy life in old age. They make trips around the world or enjoy themselves in other ways. But in Japan old people work. Consider Yasuzaemon Matsunaga.” Matsunaga is president of the Central Electricity Research Institute. Perhaps the Prime Minister thought him unusual enough to single out because, at 94, he is old even by Japanese standards

to be head of a large industry. But there are many similar cases. Men of 81 head the Toyota Automobile Company and the Bridgestone Tire Company. A 79-year-old is chairman of Toyo Rayon, an 82-year-old is one of the country’s largest publishers. The top man at Toyo Pulp is 83. at Mitsubishi • Petrochemical Company. 85. i At 82, Japan’s leading hotelier, Tetsuzo Inumaru recently presided at the opening of his new Imperia' Hotel, the largest in the country. It replaced Frank Lloyd Wright’s classic old Imperial, which Inumaru had tom down. Though the new hotel lacks the taste and individuality of the Wright masterpiece, it is bigger more luxurious and. by the new standards, most certainly • more “modern.”

The old hotel, explains the octogenarian proprietor, “was too old.”

Stripling of 74

Of course, senility is always possible and bad luck or just • plain incompetence is no respector of age. So now and ' then an elderly person does lose his job “for cause.” Last year, for instance, the 80-year-

old Speaker of the Lower House was forced to resign and Prime Minister Sato went searching for a likely replacement.

He found him in his own Cabinet Takechiyo Matsuda who is Bs. Only after Matsuda had set the current crisis to rights and had gone on to more convivial work, did Sato take a chance and appoint the 74-year-old stripling, Funada. to the speakership. It’s not that the Japanese oldsters necessarily get a stranglehold on the top jobs. Sometimes they go down and then bounce right back. The most notable example of this resilience is Okinori Kaya, the pre-war Finance Minister who spent 10 years in gaol for war crimes. In recent years, he has surfaced again. At 81, in fact, he became the Justice Minister —and one of the strongest pro - American figures in Japanese politics. The Age of the Aged shows no signs of disappearing. In business, promotions of young men into positions of responsibility are so rare they make headlines in the business pages of newspapers. The Japanese business community was stunned when two Hitachi employees in their 30s were named division chiefs. Even the rebellious students gear their demonstrations at the system, not the individuals. Most radicals defer to age in the same manner conservatives do. The chairman of the Japanese Communist Party is 78. Indeed,' retirement is a dirty word to most influential Japanese. "Such talk is nothing but the result of individualism and selfish dreams,” says Sazo Idemitsu, aged 84, who heads the country's largest individually owned motor-fuel company (5246 petrol stations). Idemitsu is very clear about just why the elderly remain on top in Japan. “Aged people," he says, "are greater human beings than younger people.”