TOKYO – Japan is world famous for its long working hours and long working lives. But Fukutaro Fukui still makes most of his countrymen look like shirkers. At the age of 70, when most of his compatriots have already enjoyed several years of retirement, the former securities house executive began a new career as a clerk at a lottery sales broker, Tokyo Takara Shokai.
The job lasted 31 years, with Fukui making a one-hour commute daily into central Tokyo until he retired at the age of 101, becoming one of Japan’s oldest known “salarymen,” as office workers are sometimes called here.
Now three years into retirement at the age of 104, Fukui said he was motivated mainly by a belief that the desire to work is a deep-seated human instinct and money should not be a primary motive. “It does not matter what we achieved or if we were promoted. I have worked just because it is my instinct.” His three-decade last job was not a particularly exciting one, at least by the standards of his previous roles in finance and mergers and acquisitions: it involved mainly counting money and lottery tickets.
But he enjoyed it: “I sometimes climbed the stairs by myself to the office, carrying a suitcase with tens of thousands of lottery tickets and even walked faster than younger colleagues,” he recalled at the retirement home where he lives in the city of Chigasaki, on the outskirts of Tokyo.
In Fukui’s case, loyalty to a former university classmate, his best friend Tamazo Mochizuki, was a key factor. The two met while studying economics at Tokyo’s Keio University and both originally dreamt of becoming economic researchers. However, World War II prevented Fukui’s dreams from coming true. He was conscripted and sent to Manchuria for military service.
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AFP
