"No one wants" usually includes an insufficient wage, sometimes also an issue of insufficient investment in training for skilled folks. eg if you need a doctor in 12 years you have to start more or less today.
A quick google suggests ~18% of their working age people do not have jobs, which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training.
(Edit, because people are confused, I'm not talking about unemployment rate, i'm talking about labor non-participation rate as a measure of people who could be enticed into the workforce with a living wage)
Even tho you added an edit. You’re still wrong. Garbage collection is typically a high paying job because no one wants to do it. But people still consider it “below” them and don’t want to do it even when there’s a high unemployment rate.
This is over 20 years old, and I'm sure doesn't hold true in all areas, but at least at one point there was high demand to be a "san man" ("san" as in "sanitation") in NYC:
> It's a coveted job to be a New York City san man. When they last gave the qualifying test, 30,000 people took it. The General waited five years after passing the exam before a job came open, which is typical. And though the work is grueling, the pay-- if you're actually on a truck-- starts at $40,000 and can go to $60 after just five years. [note: this is in 2003 dollars!] A good winter, meaning one with lots of overtime for clearing snow-- they clear snow, too-- can make for a $90,000 year for a senior guy.
And that's how it should be. Trash men should be making $200K and have high social status whereas the devs helping Bezos to his 5th super yacht or Zuck poison more kids should get minimum wage and treated as pariahs. Unfortunately at the country level it's reversed.
Absolutely 100% agree, and I’m glad people are saying this.
The internet has become a joke since the digital advertisement agencies, Google and Facebook and so on got the web under their control.
While high functioning societies invest in their people’s infrastructure, some societies invest in propaganda and premiere greed over keeping the country clean.
You are both wrong and this is why they win the salary of the coder is not high the taxes on bezos and co are less and the public workers pay less. That what needs to be change not labour be paid less no matter what kind of labour
I don't know if I would call it high pay anywhere ive lived. It is okay pay around me right now in a less prosperous area of the country for not requiring tools or previous skills. But the main thing going for it around here is stability of hours, a decent amount of holidays off, and you don't have to destroy your body.
That is literally double what people around here are paid. And they certainly don't give anyone overtime if they can help it. If you break $60K you gotta worry about them trying to replace you if you aren't one of their top performers.
For manual labor I thought the guys I know who do garbage pickup have a great job - their hours are shifted so they work from 4am to noon so they have plenty of time for hobbies and family outside of that. All the time sitting and driving the truck is hard though they rarely have to handle anything manually with standardized bins and hydraulic lifts.
It seems to be human nature to chase after easy to understand solutions rather than addressing ifficult bottlenecks and friction. Doctors are a great example. In order to be a doctor, you have to study for 12 years. But four of those years involve studying generally unrelated topics like any other college degree despite medicine effectively being a trade. Then on top of that, you have the limited spaces for residents anyway, so more great med students still != more doctors. And then on top of that you have the issue that teaching hospitals are usually split apart from regular hospitals and A med student who ends up at a particular teaching hospital basically ends up locked in until their residency finishes leaving them vulnerable to even more pressure.
Not sure what rate OP is citing, but it's not the one I'd use to draw OP's conclusion. You don't wanna YOLO understanding how employment rates are calculated.
FWIW, this figure looks to be the fraction of 20–69 year olds in the entire population who are unemployed[0]. Referencing the official definitions[1], the standard unemployment figure of 2.6 (as of 2026-02) narrows that denominator to people who are receiving wages or actively looking for work.
> which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training.
From the above, 18% seems like the wrong number to look at. Heck, why not quote 38.1%, since it captures everyone who can legally work (including 15 and 90 year olds)?
IMO, the base population we want to look at is people who actually want a job, which is captured by various Labor Underutilization (LU) metrics. These all hover around 2.5–6.0% according to public records[2], and are also defined in the official docs[1].
yes. this is correct. but that is not how the market works unfortunately or else we would have 0% unemployment. market works in a way that if no one in the country wants to do the job for this wage then you import people from poorer countries that will be able to send money to their family even on a shitty wage.
Robots are the other solution and a much easier one for a society. you don't need to build the structure to welcome mass immigration from poorer countries and all the things you'd need to solve when bringing people from different - often less tolerant / more restrictive - cultures.
1. There is only so much you can pay the people doing the kind of work like cleaning the Shinkansens or manning the 7-11's because it affects customer costs. i.e. There's a point where you increase the salary of 7-11 workers that it causes a $2 fried chicken snack to inflate to $10 that customers will refuse to buy
2. Even if there was magically enough money and time to retrain people, they would still be short of workers.
No one wants to clean s#it, especially in a country with as broad a social welfare net as Japan.
Instead, in Japan you can get someone from Vietnam, China, or Thailand to do that for a couple dollars a day with Gulf style guestworker rules.
Additionally, Asian societies don't have the same Luddite aversion to automation [0] that seems to have taken over Western mindshare as can be seen on HN.
They don't want Westerners nor are they opposed to Dirigiste style industrial policies that help build a public-private social safety net by commercializing and deploying automation.
Who do you think SoftBank and MUFG's largest LP's are lol.
Edit: can't reply
> I'd highly recommend watching Perfect Day by Wim Wenders. It's a really sweet film
It is! But for every Hirayama there are dozens of ASEAN and Chinese migrant workers doing menial work as part of the JETRO Trainee guest worker program.
> NYC sanitation dept...
Sanitation Engineers aren't janitors.
Janitors, fish cleaners, farmworkers, bricklayers, service staff, and other low and unskilled work is what is being supplemented by foreign workers and depending on the job by automation.
> So your argument might hold for other countries, but not for Japan. Cleaning is a pretty honorable thing to do there
What's with this kind of orientalism?!?
Japan's Labor Ministry literally has a strategy around hiring foreigners for cleaning and janitorial services [1] due to persistent labor shortages.
And if we want to go that route of shallow orientalist sterotypes, Japan is also a society where whether you or not you attended a Teidai/Sokei/Hitotsubashi/TokyoTech/Ivy/Stanford, whether you have a Government or big corporate job, and whether you will be able to afford a house and have kids by 35 matters.
There's a reason Japan's birth rate crisis is overwhelmingly impacting the lower tier of Japanese society [2].
I went to a chain Family Restaurant recently here in Japan. The food is brought by a robot for a while now. Recently you get your seat selected at a touchscreen. You can pay at your table's tablet using PayPay. There is still some waiter staff, but it being reduced to the past. The only part that did not change much yet is the kitchen.
I said to myself to stop going, if there is no human staff left. On the other hand, small shops with good atmosphere are thriving.
Time to share the meme again, sorry to my followers for reusing this joke:
‘I wanted a machine to do the dishes for me so I could concentrate on my art, and what I got was a machine to do the art so now I’m the one doing the dishes’
I’d be much happier with this AI revolution if I got a personal robot chef and house-keeper, while I could keep writing beautiful software. Now I’m looking to pivot into more blue-collar jobs to escape the existential dread, and making software a personal hobby rather than a career.
I think that many signs are indicating that Japan will re-emerge as a major technology powerhouse in the coming decades. And being confronted early to demographic transformation will end-up being an advantage. On the opposite side I think that immigration is a temporary band-aid that doesn’t solve any of the structural issues.
Cobotics (robots doing trivial stuff that helps human and assist them rather than “replacing” them) has been a thing for decades, that’s not the issue here, the issue is corporate greed that are using robots or AI as a scapegoat to blame your low wages and/or fire you. If the job market is more regulated, you will those excuses vanishing quickly.
The article seems to say that it's not jobs nobody wants, but rather a labor shortage from an aging population. Japan just seems to be running out of people for its labor market.
It’s amazing to use technology to save humans from toil. The question is, who owns the robot? Who benefits from the labor it produces?
The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure. But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation.
Labor expenditures and taxes are the only times the wealthy have to share their wealth with the rest of us. If they succeed in disintermediating labor, and governments fail to tax them, the oligarchs will live a life of unlimited luxury while the rest of us die in poverty.
the jobs nobody wants is the beta test, production rollout includes jobs that poor people and teenagers want, next major version upgrade jobs that adults with limited educational opportunities want, and so on and so forth.
The idea that automation, AI, offshoring, and low-paid migrant workers are filling jobs no one wants is pure evil bullshit. The main goal of business is to generate the most income with the least expense, labor being the most cost for the most part. We're downstream from indentured servitude and literal slavery, and probably one bad event away from going back.
241 comments
A quick google suggests ~18% of their working age people do not have jobs, which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training.
(Edit, because people are confused, I'm not talking about unemployment rate, i'm talking about labor non-participation rate as a measure of people who could be enticed into the workforce with a living wage)
> It's a coveted job to be a New York City san man. When they last gave the qualifying test, 30,000 people took it. The General waited five years after passing the exam before a job came open, which is typical. And though the work is grueling, the pay-- if you're actually on a truck-- starts at $40,000 and can go to $60 after just five years. [note: this is in 2003 dollars!] A good winter, meaning one with lots of overtime for clearing snow-- they clear snow, too-- can make for a $90,000 year for a senior guy.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/249/garbage
These guys are/were unionized, which certainly helps.
The internet has become a joke since the digital advertisement agencies, Google and Facebook and so on got the web under their control.
While high functioning societies invest in their people’s infrastructure, some societies invest in propaganda and premiere greed over keeping the country clean.
So many people are locked in on on temporary contracts constantly in fear of termination.
Now they have the trucks that dump the bins without getting out of the truck. The driver's make $18/hr.
This includes early retirees, full time students, home makers and people unable to work for health related reasons.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS?location...
This is basically the best in the world.
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/insights/statistical-releases/2...
Not sure what rate OP is citing, but it's not the one I'd use to draw OP's conclusion. You don't wanna YOLO understanding how employment rates are calculated.
> A quick google suggests ~18%
FWIW, this figure looks to be the fraction of 20–69 year olds in the entire population who are unemployed[0]. Referencing the official definitions[1], the standard unemployment figure of 2.6 (as of 2026-02) narrows that denominator to people who are receiving wages or actively looking for work.
> which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training.
From the above, 18% seems like the wrong number to look at. Heck, why not quote 38.1%, since it captures everyone who can legally work (including 15 and 90 year olds)?
IMO, the base population we want to look at is people who actually want a job, which is captured by various Labor Underutilization (LU) metrics. These all hover around 2.5–6.0% according to public records[2], and are also defined in the official docs[1].
[0]:https://www.stat.go.jp/data/roudou/sokuhou/tsuki/pdf/gaiyou....
[1]:https://www.stat.go.jp/data/roudou/pdf/hndbk5_2.pdf
[2]:file:///var/folders/96/k0p95wxn7sg5_xjnv5n233bc0000gn/T/gaiyou-1.pdf
Robots are the other solution and a much easier one for a society. you don't need to build the structure to welcome mass immigration from poorer countries and all the things you'd need to solve when bringing people from different - often less tolerant / more restrictive - cultures.
2. Even if there was magically enough money and time to retrain people, they would still be short of workers.
Instead, in Japan you can get someone from Vietnam, China, or Thailand to do that for a couple dollars a day with Gulf style guestworker rules.
Additionally, Asian societies don't have the same Luddite aversion to automation [0] that seems to have taken over Western mindshare as can be seen on HN.
They don't want Westerners nor are they opposed to Dirigiste style industrial policies that help build a public-private social safety net by commercializing and deploying automation.
Who do you think SoftBank and MUFG's largest LP's are lol.
Edit: can't reply
> I'd highly recommend watching Perfect Day by Wim Wenders. It's a really sweet film
It is! But for every Hirayama there are dozens of ASEAN and Chinese migrant workers doing menial work as part of the JETRO Trainee guest worker program.
> NYC sanitation dept...
Sanitation Engineers aren't janitors.
Janitors, fish cleaners, farmworkers, bricklayers, service staff, and other low and unskilled work is what is being supplemented by foreign workers and depending on the job by automation.
> So your argument might hold for other countries, but not for Japan. Cleaning is a pretty honorable thing to do there
What's with this kind of orientalism?!?
Japan's Labor Ministry literally has a strategy around hiring foreigners for cleaning and janitorial services [1] due to persistent labor shortages.
And if we want to go that route of shallow orientalist sterotypes, Japan is also a society where whether you or not you attended a Teidai/Sokei/Hitotsubashi/TokyoTech/Ivy/Stanford, whether you have a Government or big corporate job, and whether you will be able to afford a house and have kids by 35 matters.
There's a reason Japan's birth rate crisis is overwhelmingly impacting the lower tier of Japanese society [2].
[0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-aro...
[1] - https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/11130500/001567071.pdf
[2] - https://news.yahoo.co.jp/expert/articles/11d033af448e404c3f5...
I said to myself to stop going, if there is no human staff left. On the other hand, small shops with good atmosphere are thriving.
> filling the one [job] nobody wants.
Time to share the meme again, sorry to my followers for reusing this joke:
‘I wanted a machine to do the dishes for me so I could concentrate on my art, and what I got was a machine to do the art so now I’m the one doing the dishes’
I’d be much happier with this AI revolution if I got a personal robot chef and house-keeper, while I could keep writing beautiful software. Now I’m looking to pivot into more blue-collar jobs to escape the existential dread, and making software a personal hobby rather than a career.
Grunting out 2.6 babies before you’re 35.
Who’s paying for your nursing home? Tax the robot’s income? Will your demographic replacements vote for that?
The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure. But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation.
Labor expenditures and taxes are the only times the wealthy have to share their wealth with the rest of us. If they succeed in disintermediating labor, and governments fail to tax them, the oligarchs will live a life of unlimited luxury while the rest of us die in poverty.
I must've missed the last terminology update patch…
(I can see what it's trying to say, but… my brain just refuses this one. AI is a concept, which… just, no.)