Japan's baking summer sun is hot enough to melt tar on the roads and inside the Nishijimax factory the thermometer is well above 30 degrees Celsius as Susumu Sugiura welds heavy steel plates, sweat pouring from his wrinkled brow. Next door, his wife Kimiko uses a solder and screwdriver to wire a junction box. The tasks are challenging for most, let alone a couple with a collective age of 145.
In other parts of the world, the Sugiuras might be whiling away days like this watching daytime television in a retirement home. Here in Aichi Prefecture in Japan's engineering heartland they are gainfully employed and an example of how shifting demographics are transforming the global workplace.
A 45-year veteran of this precision tool-making company, Sugiura, 75, never even considered retiring at 60, which was the national pension age at the time.
'It never really came up,' he says, wiping away sweat from under a baseball cap. 'I just carried on working.'
Japan has millions of these fit pensioners. More than 22 per cent of its population is aged 65 or older and the figure set to rise to 40 per cent by mid-century. At the same time, the country is running out of babies: Japanese women now have an average of 1.3 children, well below the level needed to maintain the current population of 127 million.
According to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, the working population peaked at more than 80 million in the late 1990s and will plummet by 40 per cent to about 49 million in 2050. Because Japan has shunned both mass immigration and workplace feminisation, it offers lessons to the West on how to deal with a problem that looms in many other advanced countries - the mass retirement of baby boomers.
