OSAKA, Japan: With job signs stuck to their vans' windshields and sliding side doors left open in expectation, the recruiters were sizing up the potential hires at Japan's largest day labor market here recently.
By 4:30 a.m., thousands of aging day laborers had spilled out of the neighborhood's flophouses and homeless shelters, or risen from its parks and streets, to form a potential work force of mostly graying men.
A sign on one blue van, barely legible in the twilight, offered a 15-day construction job paying $95 a day, minus $33 in room and board. Although the terms were comparatively decent, the recruiter sitting in a folding chair in front of the blue van had found only one suitably young laborer by 5 a.m. Most were above the unwritten cutoff age of 55.
"It's really hard to use the men here because they've gotten old," said the recruiter, Takuya Nakamae, 55, turning his head toward his prize catch, a recruit in his 30s. "If you're this young, everybody wants you and you get plenty of offers. Just look at how young you are!"
And yet it was the older men who really knew how to work, he said, adding: "They're the ones who worked during Japan's decades of economic boom, so they know the ins and outs of every job. It's just that they don't have the strength anymore."
Nowadays, few young men gravitate here, the Airin district of Osaka. Little is being built in Japan's stagnant economy, and young day laborers or part-time workers find jobs by registering their cellphone numbers with temporary employment agencies.
Many of the older men who remain arrived here to work on the 1970 Expo in Osaka, which, like the Tokyo Olympics six years earlier, became a symbol of postwar Japan's rebirth. Over the decades, they left to work on bridges, buildings and highways all over the country, performing the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs in helping build Japan. Some made it out of here and moved on to steadier jobs and lives.
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