Half of Japan's Retirees Still Working

choi

Jonathan Soble, Back in the Cockpit at 65; As Japan's population shrinks, a commercial pilot is among the retirees returing to work. New York Times, July 29, 2017.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/ ... -retired-pilot.html

Quote:

(a) "Last month, the Japanese government said the number of births last year fell below one million for the first time since it began tracking the figure in 1899.  

"All of that makes older workers more crucial to the economy. More than half of Japanese men over the age of 65 do some kind of paid work, according to government surveys, compared with a third of American men and as little as 10 percent in parts of Europe.

(b) "its [Japan's] lack of workers could limit growth. Unemployment is a rock-bottom 2.8 percent

(c) "Older workers may also partly explain the puzzle of Japan's stagnant wages, which have barely budged despite low unemployment. Older workers generally earn much less than at the peak of their careers, offsetting increases among the young and middle-aged.

(d) "As a captain at All Nippon, where he flew Boeing 767s, primarily to Southeast Asia, he earned the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars a year plus a generous pension. Oriental Air Bridge pays him only about a third of his peak salary, but he says he does not mind.

" 'The jets I used to fly were highly automated,' he said. 'But now, with the propeller planes, I can enjoy a freer, more visual kind of flying. It means getting back to the basics as a pilot.'

"In the cockpit of Mr Miyazaki's Bombardier Dash 8, flying still looks plenty complicated.

(e) "He [Miyazaki] acknowledged having been 'a little uneasy' about studying for the new license that he needed to fly the Dash 8s, a process that took eight months.

(f) "Some jobs in Japan are becoming distinctly gray. More than half of Japanese taxi drivers are over the age of 60, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, while less than 10 percent are under 40.

Note:
(a) "Shigekazu Miyazaki * * * a pilot with nearly four decades’ experience at All Nippon Airways * * * left the carrier last year at its mandatory retirement age of 65. * * * since April has been piloting 39-seat propeller planes for Oriental Air Bridge [Ltd, whose company name in Japan is written in katakana], a tiny airline that connects the southwestern city of Nagasaki to a group of remote islands. * * * a recent flight back to Nagasaki from Tsushima, a rugged island of 30,000 residents."

Tsushima Island  対馬
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsushima_Island
(an island of the Japanese archipelago situated in the Korea Strait)
(i) Click "Korea Strait" and you will see en.wikipedia.org divides it into two halves, whose japanese half is Tsushima Strait.
(ii) The ja.wikipedia.org has a page for 対馬海峡, which separates Korean and Japan -- not half of the waters. Taiwan of course follows this tradition.

(b) Japanese-English dictionary:
* kichō 機長 【きちょう】 (n): "captain (of an aircraft)"
* fuku-sōjūshi 副操縦士 【ふくそうじゅうし】 (n): "copilot"

(c) "Atsushi Seike, an expert on labor economics at Keio University in Tokyo"

慶應義塾大学商学部教授  清家 篤