• 234 354
• Sun. Sep, 12 2010

This week again, an interesting article. It is in French but it doesn't really matter as I put the most important information in the title: 234,354. But, 234,354 what? Well, 234,354 missing people over 100 years in Japan...
For those who are not in Japan or didn't fall on the few articles about it in the international newspapers, Japan is realising that:
1- most of its 100 and more years old people is missing
2- their system is not bulletproof
3- Japanese are not as honest as they thought they were.
4- they don't live as long as expected
5- their population is even more shrinking that they thought it was

As a matter of fact, everything started with their eldest citizen. A 113 years old man that, actually, had been unseen for 31 years... Besides the cost (by my calculation, the pension system gave 31x12x50,000 = 18,600,000 JPY to his children, 235,000x12x50,000 = 141M JPY for one year), the story is actually showing one sad part of the society here: nobody really care of the elder people. Not the family (sad to say but I guess this is getting more and more true everywhere in the World), not the State (well, they have other sunject to worry about) and not even the pension system. My question is though: How can you give allocations for more than 30 years without any check?
Well, these are the same guys who simply 'lost' employment records of thousands of people a few years ago and contacted everyone to update them again...

Now they have started to investigate, we have more than 235,000 people missing (some since... World War II). On a population of 127 million, we find that ~0,2% of the population is missing... But when you talk to locals, they don't seem to be shocked by this. More by the fact that Japanese people (Koreans or Chinese can not be blamed for this, in reference to last week article) could actually cheat... Well, as a matter of fact, October 1st is the census day. Let's see how many inhabitants Japan has. Let's also if my pension tax will be reduced, now they know they don't have to pay 141M a year anymore. 141M, until they find out that more are missing...