Reforms of Retirement Policies: Three Common Paths in Aging in Japan and Korea.

Faced with an unparalleled rate of population aging, Japan and Korea have been reforming their retirement policies. To date, however, while the age of mandatory retirement has increased, employees continue to face significant decreases in compensation and other working conditions, typically at age 60 in Japan and age 55 in Korea. Three factors have contributed to shaping the path of the policy reforms in both the countries, including (1) the productivist welfare regimes, (2) the structure of the labor market for young workers, and (3) seniority-based wage and compensation systems.

Government as Institutional Entrepreneur: Extending Working Life in the UK and Japan.

Through the lens of Institutional Entrepreneurship, this paper discusses how governments use the levers of power afforded through business and welfare systems to affect change in the organisational management of older workers. It does so using national stakeholder interviews in two contrasting economies: the United Kingdom and Japan. Both governments have taken a 'light-touch' approach to work and retirement. However, the highly institutionalised Japanese system affords the government greater leverage than that of the liberal UK system in changing employer practices at the workplace level.

Surviving death-anxieties in liquid modern times: examining Zygmunt Bauman's cultural theory of death and dying.

Despite his prominence as a leading contemporary social theorist, Zygmunt Bauman's long-term writing on the cultural theory of death and dying has largely been overlooked in the sociological literature of death and dying, particularly in the United States. Bauman uniquely theorizes how we survive death-anxieties today: Contemporary, liquid modern culture has engaged us in ceaseless pursuit of the unattainable consumer sensation of bodily fitness as a way to suppress and thus survive our death-anxieties. Bauman also argues that the prevalence of this cultural formula to survive death-anxieties has simultaneously increased, more than ever before in social history, the volume of individual responsibility for restlessly coping with existential anxieties in the societies of consumers. While unique and insightful, his theoretical argument has a limitation; largely succeeding Freud's classic view of mortality, Bauman's contemporary theory may lead us to neglect potentially important social, cultural, and historical variations in how mortality has been understood.

Why Japanese workers remain in the labor force so long: lessons for the United States?

As part of the search for ways to increase labor force participation rates among older workers in the United States, it makes sense to take a close look at evidence from Japan, one of the few industrial countries with a substantially higher labor force participation rate among older workers, particularly men, than the United States. Based mainly on prior studies and original interview data, we first discuss five potential factors which help explain why Japanese workers remain in the labor force as long as they do: (1) perceived economic necessity; (2) the large fraction of workers who are self-employed; (3) a culture that puts a high value on remaining in the labor force throughout the life course; (4) the long healthy life expectancy; and (5) the government's role in facilitating the labor force participation of older workers. We suggest that the Japanese national cultural value on remaining economically productive well into old age clearly underlies the development of the government's legislative initiatives aiming to extend the working lives of older workers. We then outline three policy suggestions for those seeking to increase labor force participation rates among older U.S. workers: (1) increase the financial incentive to workers who remain in the labor force; (2) improve public programs designed to foster efforts by older workers to become self-employed; and (3) increase the extent of government efforts to link older workers to prospective employers.