![]() It must exist, somewhere - perhaps on another planet certainly not the one Spa!’s interlocutors live on. In difficult times we seek the consoling warmth of friendship. It’s as if the work I’ve done up to now has no value at all.” “I’m 31 years old I want a regular job, but employers don’t consider the part-time work you’ve done as real work. “I do the same work as a full-time employee, and yet I’m liable to be laid off any time,” complains a part-timer in the financial sector. It’s not just blue-collar workers who are in that situation. Never mind the long-term future I can’t even plan six months ahead! It’s terrifying.” “Often enough, I don’t get my six-month contract renewed, or else the factory suddenly shuts down. “I do temp work at factories, usually for six months at a time,” says a 31-year-old man. How can that not rub salt in the wounds of a freeter - one of a rapidly growing number of short-term part-time workers - condemned to scrape by on 2 million yen? Here, for example, is a would-be lover’s voice: “It’s infuriating to think of all those ‘Arasa’ girls out there.” Arasa is a popular women’s magazine whose readers’ boyfriends are said to earn on average 10 million yen a year. Whatever aspect of life you consider - friendship, love, family - despair, if Spa! is to be believed, is rampant. ![]() Its symptoms have spread beyond the workplace. What he symbolizes, Spa! (Oct 14) seems to be saying, is no longer the plight of an oppressed but numerically small underclass, but a “citizens’ disease” that can be summed up in two words: mass misery. The speaker is a 33-year-old temporary worker whose only consolation is that he is not - for now - unemployed. ![]() I learn no skill I perform the same operation thousands, tens of thousands of times, until I begin to think of myself as a machine.” I attach one part to another - day after day, over and over. ![]()
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