Help Wanted in Japan
Chef Takahashi serves a superb four-cheese pizza. Thin crust, gooey center, and a total umami flavor experience. We were staying with Mayumi’s parents at their home in the foothills of Nagano Prefecture. They asked where I’d like to celebrate my birthday. There is only one answer to that question.
This is not a restaurant review. Chef Takahashi does not want publicity. He’s doing just fine, thank you. He has a beautiful pizza oven and trained for years in Italy. He tells us that first-time customers come back the next day and order another batch of pizzas to confirm that they weren’t dreaming the night before.
What’s unusual is that he works alone in the restaurant. There is no wait staff, no dishwashers, no front of house, no one to answer the phone, and no website. He brings the menu on a chalk board and props it on a chair for each group of customers. Then he runs back to the open kitchen to prepare the meal. Cash only, please.
We first thought he was alone because he couldn’t find help. Absolutely not. Solo is the way he wants it.
What an exception in today’s Japan. Help Wanted signs are everywhere. They plead with customers and passersby to enter and become staff. Here’s a help wanted sign from a 7-11 convenience store a block from the restaurant. There are signs outside, on the windows, and plastered on all of the walls. Please, please come and work here.
A few steps away there is a help wanted sign on a bakery window desperate for morning help, any help.
Back in Tokyo, we recently had dinner at a fancy trattoria in the Aoyama district. There was a “help wanted” sign for both permanent or non-permanent full or part-time staff. No surprise there. But the sign was in the patron’s restroom. We’re still wondering about a campaign desperate enough to aim at the diners of an upscale restaurant.
Japan has literally become a Help Wanted Society. It’s no wonder given the speed and urgency of its demographic transition. Last year Japan had 800,000 more deaths than births. That means that Japan is losing almost one million people per year and over 30% of the population is over the age of 65.
The Japanese word for help wanted (boshu) tells a story. The first ideograph (募) on its own can be read tsunoru, originally meaning to gather in one’s arms the rays f the setting sun on the fields. Listening to our Japanese friends and colleagues, it’s hard to miss a sense of Japan as the Land of the Setting Sun.
Our longterm stay apartment building here in Tokyo has reduced its cleaning service to bare bones. The housekeeping “crew” on our floor consists of one elderly woman frantically trying to keep up. The building manager is always looking to find help for her. He posts help wanted ads, spreading his arms to the rays of the setting sun on the fields. No one responds.
In December, Mayumi led a series of “Door Knock” sessions with Japanese parliamentarians to brief them on the Tourism and Hospitality Viewpoint (translated into Japanese by Mayumi, of course) from the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ) to brief them of the ACCJ’s Viewpoint on travel and hospitality. Each Diet member lamented the crush of incoming foreign visitors and the dire shortage of hospitality workers in their district. They asked, “Who will do the work as Japan depopulates?”
While we wait for immigration and the AIs to answer that question, our new friend pictured here will clear the table.
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