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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