Yen for Living

Where am I? Lottery booths in Tokyo

According to the Mainichi Shimbun, as of May 13, the holders of seven winning ¥100 million lottery tickets that were sold last year for the Dream Jumbo Takarakuji have yet to claim their prizes, and if they don’t claim them by June 17 the tickets will become void. The media is cooperating by actually printing the names of the locations where the seven tickets were purchased in an effort to jog the memories of people who may have bought them but for reasons unknown have forgotten all about it. Being a responsible social medium, we here reprint these locations in the unlikely event that one or more of our readers happens to belong to this select group: The Koriyama branch of Mizuho Bank in Fukushima Prefecture; the TFC Kita Asaka TK Shop in Saitama City; the Nishi Ginza Chance Center and the Yotsuya Dream Center in Tokyo; the Hiratsuka branch of Mizuho Bank and the Yokohama Porta Chance Center in Kanagawa Prefecture; and the Tenmonkan Chance Center in Kagoshima Prefecture. To check the details and the winning numbers (in Japanese only), go here. The site also includes information about unclaimed prizes from more recent lotteries.

This is not, apparently, an unusual development. Since 2009, ¥20.1 billion worth of winning lottery tickets have become void because their holders did not redeem them by the deadline, which is one calendar year after the winning numbers are selected by computer. Included in this loot are 25 tickets that were worth at least ¥100 million. Since Takarakuji lotteries do not carry over, the money becomes the property of whichever local government presides over the place where the winning ticket was sold, so it’s not as if the money becames a complete waste. The free media publicity may have another purpose. Sales of Takarakuji have been dropping steadily for the last few years and the operators want to keep awareness of the lottery alive. In fact, the failure of some lottery buyers to check their tickets for winning numbers could be considered a symptom of the game’s loss of cultural topicality. As with the squirrel that works hard to hoard nuts for the winter and then forgets where it hid them, all the excitement is in the acquisition.

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Just doo it: Cleaning up after Fido

About a year ago we reported on a proposed dog tax in the city of Izumisano in Osaka Prefecture. The purpose of the levy was to pay for patrols to enforce a local law mandating that dog owners clean up after their pets. The city’s mayor, Hiroyasu Chiyomatsu, says that because Izumisano is close to Kansai International Airport, the city is a “gateway to Japan” and thus it is embarrassing if the first thing visitors see is dog doo all over the streets.

As it happens, the tax was never passed, since dog owners complained that it was only a minority who broke the law and thus was unfair to punish all of them for the sins of a few. In addition, once it was announced that the patrols were going into effect, the problem actually got worse, since some dog owners misinterpreted the measure to mean that they could leave the droppings behind because the city would be cleaning it up.

So in February the city announced a new strategy. Pairs of inu no fun G-men (dog feces government men) would patrol the city in public vehicles three days a week and whenever they saw droppings on the ground they would place a yellow card on them and leave it there.

If the droppings weren’t picked up for a month, then the G-men would clean it up. The idea is that dog owners tend to walk their pets along the same routes and so will likely see the yellow card and feel guilty enough to clean it up themselves. Only ¥4.6 million has been budgeted for the program, so in order to save money the patrols will be made up of individuals from the local Retired Persons Human Resource Center, whose average age is 75.

So far, the plan seems to be working. In the month before it went into effect, patrols counted 1,736 spots where droppings were left behind, and in the month after it went into effect the number of spots numbered 1,030. Fines will likely go into effect in July.

The ¥1,000 penalty, however, can only be issued when a dog owner is caught in the act — or non-act, in this case. Such issuances may be even be rarer since the patrols only go out in the early morning and late evening. As it stands, many local governments throughout Japan have similar fines for negligent dog owners but few actually collect any money.

There are also other pet problems that the town wants to address, including non-registration of dogs — estimated to be about half — and people who walk their dogs without leashes. About 4,400 people are bitten by dogs every year in Japan.

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The rise of non-regular employment has received a lot of coverage because of its effect on job security in the general work force. A seldom discussed side effect is the acute anxiety experienced by non-regulars as their contracts approach their expiration dates. Will mine be picked up for another year? Will I have to go out and look for a new job next month?

Hello Work website

For public non-regular employees this emotional roller coaster starts right after Jan. 1, since most contracts end with the fiscal year in March. And for those who have been working in the same position for an extended length of time, there is no solace in the new law that goes into effect this year and which says an employer must hire a contract worker as a regular full-time employee, complete with benefits, if the worker has been in the same position for five years.

Though it’s assumed that many employers will work the loophole by not renewing a contract just before the five-year period is reached and then hiring the person back after a six month “cooling off” period with an open-ended contract, non-regulars who work in the public sector aren’t covered by the new law in the first place. They can be retained as non-regulars indefinitely.

This exception was highlighted when the labor ministry announced that 2,200 non-regular members of its unemployment advisory staff had not had their contracts renewed for fiscal 2013. That represents 10 percent of all the non-regulars employed at Hello Work counseling centers nationwide, and presents an interesting scenario: Former employment counselors who themselves must seek employment advice.

In fact, a Tokyo Shimbun article described one woman in her 50s who received her notice in early March while she still had several weeks on her contract. Though she knew there was always the possibility her yearly contract would not be renewed the lateness of the notice (the media reported the announcement as being “sudden”) caught her off-guard.

In the last weeks of March she was looking for a new job at Hello Work on Saturdays while still working Monday through Friday at the same facility counseling people who themselves were looking for jobs.

One part of the new law that was already in effect before April 1 is to make the practice called yatoidome illegal. “Yatoidome” means nonrenewal of an employment contract for “no good reason,” but, of course, “good reason” constitutes a gray area that the Japanese legal system isn’t equipped to address. It is this part of the law that doesn’t apply to public workers, supposedly because non-regular government employees are only hired as stopgap workers, meaning people employed to fill certain positions on a temporary basis. They do not have to pass a test the way full-time regular civil servants do. However, in many cases, these workers become as indispensable as regular employees. In 2012, 63 percent of all Hello Work employees were non-regulars.

As for why the labor ministry decided to effectively lay off so many employment center staff at one time, a representative told the media that the ministry hired extra contract workers when the recession worsened in 2008 and again after the disaster of 2011, but now the job situation “is stabilizing” so the ministry doesn’t need as many counselors. Some laid-off employees counter this explanation by claiming that their workloads have been heavier in recent months, not lighter, especially in areas most affected by the disaster. What may have sparked the layoffs was the finance ministry, which has been auditing budgets across all government agencies and ministries and demanding cuts.

The yatoidome exception doesn’t just apply to national public workers. One-third of all local government employees, or about 700,000 people, are also non-regulars. That’s an increase of about 100,000 since 2008, according to a labor ministry survey. Of these, 60 percent work more hours than regular employees. More than half of these non-regulars make less than ¥160,000 a month or ¥2 million a year. And because they are technically part-timers, they are not up for promotions or salary increases. The most prevalent jobs in this category of public worker is day care attendant and librarian, but it also includes policemen, firemen and school teachers.

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A goal of the resurgent Liberal Democratic Party is to reduce public welfare expenditures over the next three years by cutting handouts to the tune of ¥67 billion, or about 10 percent. The targets of these cuts are households who receive more money in welfare than do “lower income” households who don’t, the purpose being to bring the monthly payments made to non-working poor families down to or below the monthly earnings of working poor families. Thus the public assistance payment for a family of four would drop from an average of ¥220,000 to ¥200,000.

They call it gambling: Pachinko enthusiasts waiting for their loot

As to what this family would have to give up, one category ripe for reduction is “recreation” (goraku), which includes everything from TV sets and PCs to books and magazines. However, according to a 2010 government survey, welfare recipients only spent 6.4 percent of their money on recreation, and due to the LDP’s prime bugbear, deflation, they are spending less in this area all the time, so the keepers of the treasury will have to find other places to cut.

One public figure, however, feels that the goraku category hasn’t been scrutinized enough. The city assembly of Ono, Hyogo Prefecture, passed a law that went into effect April 1 prohibiting people who receive public assistance from the city to use that money for gambling. The law also compels city residents to report any instance of gambling by welfare recipients to the police. Given the timing of the implementation and the nature of the law, some people may wonder if it’s a joke, but Mayor Tsutomu Horai, who wrote it, is quite passionate about the matter, which is why the media have covered it so closely.

Ono currently pays out ¥290 million in welfare annually to 120 households. The population of the city is 50,000. The new law states that anyone who observes a welfare recipient spending “too much money” on gambling has a responsibility to report it to the authorities. The model seems to be local versions of child abuse prevention laws, which state that anyone who believes a child is the victim of violence or neglect must report the abuse to police.

The bill first became publicly known in February, before it was approved, and the city received some 7,000 “opinions” from all over Japan, 70 percent of which were positive. As Horai told the weekly magazine Aera at the time, “Let’s say your friend asks to borrow money because of some trouble, and then later you see him playing pachinko. Naturally, you’re going to be annoyed.”

The problem, as he saw it, was that most people don’t care about public money, and so he wants to change that perception. There is no penalty if a person sees a welfare recipient gambling and does not report it, probably because that would be impossible to prove. Horai certainly understands this, but claims that 90 percent of the city’s residents, including welfare recipients themselves, support the law and so most of his job is already done.

The Hyogo Prefecture Bar Association has come out against the law, saying that its purpose of involving average citizens in the monitoring of welfare recipients’ behavior will result in greater “discrimination of and bias toward” the latter. In fact, Ono’s finances are healthier than most local government’s. Its treasury actually reports a surplus balance of ¥8.5 billion, and the mayor himself has said that the aim of the law is not to reduce the welfare budget. If anything, he hopes the law will also alert people who may qualify for assistance to apply for it.

As it stands, the central government provides three-fourths of a typical handout with the remainder handled by municipalities. About 1.7 percent of the national population receives welfare, while the portion in Ono is only 0.3 percent. However, both statistics are on the rise — the number of recipients in Ono increased by 64 percent over the last five years — and is certainly a reflection of the economic situation in general, but Horai thinks that it has to do with a more relaxed attitude toward government handouts. He told Aera that he first thought of devising the bill when he was at city hall and overheard several people who were waiting on line for their welfare packets. One asked another, “Where are you going to play pachinko later?”

Horai focuses on pachinko, which, legally speaking, isn’t gambling. Players can only earn money by trading the excess balls they win for premiums in the pachinko parlors and then “selling” those premiums at specially established booths outside the premises. Though no one is fooled that this isn’t betting in practice, it’s gambling by legal loophole. What’s more, the off-site payment booths are regulated by the National Police Agency, so why doesn’t pachinko qualify as legal recreation, which is considered acceptable for welfare recipients? And why doesn’t Horai induce citizens to narc on welfare recipients who, say, buy lottery tickets?

Actually, he has an answer to those questions. “People say pachinko is merely entertainment,” he told Aera. “But they don’t understand reality. People who spend too much on pachinko are addicts.” In truth, he wants welfare recipients who play “too much” pachinko to seek medical help, which they can do easily since, as welfare recipients, their medical insurance is free. Horai’s system may not make much sense, but he wants you to know his heart is in the right place.

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No raises here: Recently shuttered convenience store

If Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s plan to boost inflation and the economy along with it is to succeed, companies will have to raise employee salaries and wages, otherwise there will be no increase in consumer spending. Earlier this week, a number of automotive companies and electronics makers said they would go along with this plan and announced bigger bonuses, seemingly as a gesture of support for Abe’s scheme. However, one company got the jump on all of them, the #2 convenience store chain Lawson. The company’s president, Takeshi Ninami, who happens to also serve on the government’s Advisory Panel on Industrial Competitiveness, said earlier this month that employees “in their 20s to their 40s” would be eligible for a pay hike of 3 percent, or one percentage point higher than Abe’s inflation target.

Ninami told Nihon Keizai Shimbun that Lawson employees in this age group account for 70 percent of the company’s workforce. It should be noted that the vast majority of Lawson employees who interface with the public, meaning clerks at Lawson’s stores, are not eligible, since they are either hired by the franchise owners or, if the store is company-owned, employed as part-time help (arubaito). Ninami admitted this to Nikkei, but said that Lawson would try to “secure higher incomes” for these workers by implementing “activities to increase profits for our franchisees, starting in March.”

In response, Seven and i Holdings, which runs the No. 1 convenience store chain 7-11, and Family Mart, which operates the No. 3 chain, will also boost pay to stay competitive, since there’s a danger some of their regular employees might bolt to Lawson if they don’t. Ostensibly, however, or at least according to Tokyo Shimbun, the convenience store industry believes it needs to support the Abe plan because retail “is very close to the consumer” and thus must provide an example that could help open tightly closed wallets. Because convenience stores have continued to do well even during the recession, and retail workers tend to be paid less per hour than workers in other industries, CS companies need to take the lead in the hope that other distribution-related firms will also increase wages and, as a result, boost consumption in general.

Domestic consumption accounts for 60 percent of Japan’s GDP. That’s why Abe stood in front of the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren) and two other business associations in February and bowed deeply, asking them to increase salaries. They reacted “cautiously,” saying that the business situation is “still difficult,” but Abe probably expected that. He made sure cameras were there to record it so that the public would know that he was trying and other business leaders might be shamed into going along. Then Ninami, who is basically part of the Abe team, announced Lawson’s wage plan. In addition, Family Mart announced its wage hike right after economic reconstruction minister, Akira Amari, told reporters that he hoped the company would do exactly that.

Specifically, Lawson will increase bonuses for 3,300 of its 3,500 regular employees for an overall 3 percent boost in employee income. The 54 group companies of Seven & i Holdings comprise 53,500 regular employees, who will receive a “base up“ — meaning all affected receive a uniform raise — in addition to regularly scheduled individual salary increases (teikishoku) based on position, age and number of years at the company. Family Mart will give 2,700 of its 3,100 regular employees a 1.5 percent raise in teikishoku and a 0.7 percent bonus increase.

As Tokyo Shimbun points out these measures are mostly cosmetic. Since more and more workers are non-regular employees of the people they work for, there is no chance for a boost in inflation unless they get wage increases as well, and except for Ninami’s vague promise to “increase profits for franchises,” no one has said anything about non-regular and part-time workers, including major media. To give some idea of the scale involved, there are more than 13,000 7-11 franchises and 400 company-owned stores; the respective breakdown for Lawson is about 9,300 to 1,000; and for Family Mart its 7,500 to 450. Franchise employees are paid by the franchise owner, not the company whose name is on the store.

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Stock til you drop: Uniqlo branch in northern Chiba

The highest ranking Japanese person on Forbes’ most recent Billionaires List is Tadashi Yanai, the president of Fast Retailing Co., which operates the huge discount clothing chain Uniqlo. Yanai placed 66th on the list with $13.3 billion. His inclusion in the world’s most prestigious business magazine’s prestigious list is appropriate in that Fast Retailing has promoted an image of being more internationally oriented than other major Japanese companies, with its insistence that management be fluent or at least conversant in English and employment policies that have resulted in one of the highest percentages of female management of any company in Japan. When recruiting new talent, Fast Retailing pushes its global outlook and hints that ambitious new employees could see themselves transferred to Paris after only 18 months on the job. Consequently, the company has became a top draw for university graduates, who see it as a forward-looking company that rejects the insularity Japanese firms are known for.

Coincidentally, the weekly economics magazine Toyo Keizai recently ran a cover feature critical of Fast Retailing titled “Hihei suru shokuba” (“The worn-out workplace”). The article describes the company as a different sort of employer than its image would have you believe, dwelling on labor practices that follow all the worst stereotypes of Japanese corporations. Apparently, this isn’t news. Fast Retailing is suing Bungei Shunju for publishing an unflattering book about the “Uniqlo Empire,” asking for ¥200 million in damages and halting sales of all remaining copies. Toyo Keizai seems to have gotten Uniqlo’s cooperation up to a point. In addition to talking to a number of former and current employees (anonymously, of course), they interviewed executives who gave them some startling statistics, such as the turnover rate. In 2007, 37.9 percent of all new regular employees quit the company within three years. This portion rose to 53 percent by 2009. Moreover, 43 percent of employees who take sick leave cite mental stress as the reason. It’s common for new grads to become disillusioned with company life, but that’s pretty high for a company with Uniqlo’s appeal.

The problem is the workload. Company policy prohibits (more…)

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Just add rice.

The newly elected Liberal Democratic Party government and the Bank of Japan have set an inflation target of 2 percent as a means of reviving the economy. It’s a plan that has been met with as much skepticism as approval, but what sort of impact will it have on the average person? According to an analysis in the Asahi Shimbun, inflation has only exceeded 2 percent several times in the last 25 years. In 1989, when the consumption tax went into effect, and 1997, when the tax was raised, consumer prices spiked for obvious reasons. In the early 90s, after the bubble burst, it went up due to an increase in the global price of oil, but during that period wages also went up by 4.8 percent, so the increase wasn’t that noticeable. In the summer of 2008, just before the subprime crisis, consumer prices went up by 2.4 percent, also due to a rise in energy costs, but wages actually decreased by 0.3 percent. It’s this dynamic between consumer prices and wages that determines how the public “feels” inflation. According to Japan’s Tax Bureau, the average income of salaried workers in 1997 was ¥4.67 million, and in 2011 it was ¥4.09 million. In terms of total money, Japanese salaried employees earn ¥25 trillion less than they did at the peak of the bubble era. Some of this loss in buying power has been offset by the attendant decrease in retail prices. Anyone who lived in Japan during the bubble will tell you that consumer prices were very high, especially when compared to those in other countries, so the subsequent drop doesn’t seem unnatural.

All of which is to say that we plan to post occasional observations about price changes over time as a means of putting Abenomics — whose core strategy is to boost inflation — in perspective. First up: retort curry, meaning prepared curry topping in a pouch that is heated in a pan of boiling water. Except for noodles, it’s the most common instant meal in Japan and there are dozens of retort curry product lines. The volume of a single serving package is usually 200-210 grams, with higher end products topping out at ¥300 retail per piece. However, above the ¥100 price line, there really isn’t that much difference from one brand to another except maybe in terms of meat volume.

Below ¥100 is where the competition lies, and in that price range the most representative brand is House’s Kariya. Though the recommended retail price is ¥120, after the turn of the millennium Kariya usually retailed for about ¥98 in line with the “one coin” marketing strategy that said people tended to resist a product once its price floated above ¥100. Following deflationary patterns over the course of the decade, Kariya’s price actually dropped, first to ¥88 and then to ¥78, in discount and drug stores that specialized in bulk sales. The spread of such stores put pressure on regular supermarket chains to also reduce the price of Kariya, since it was so popular. Last weekend, we found it on sale at our local discount drug store for ¥68. That’s even cheaper than generic brands, which usually go for ¥296 for a set of four pouches. More significantly, the price of other brands of retort curry has also come down, and while none are as low as ¥68, more have drifted below the ¥100 line. This means a curry meal can actually cost less than two convenience store onigiri (¥200), the standard model for a cheap lunch, since a microwave package of prepared white rice is ¥80-¥90. Of course, non-instant curry, made from packaged roux, costs less per serving, but retort curry will likely become even more in demand with the projected increase in single-person households, and so we predict it will resist any inflationary pressure.

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