Chapter 555 Cherish

The women dressed up before going out. Sakai Misuzu got into the passenger side of Masayoshi Kishimoto’s car, and accompanied Rie Sakai, Kazuya Takahashi, and Yuki Mizuhara, each of whom drove their own cars, to the port’s Pier 1.

“I’m the one who doesn’t have a car, the most outdated.” Sakai Mirei said with a sudden imbalance in her heart.

Masayoshi Kishimoto gripped the steering wheel with both hands and looked at the road ahead with both eyes, “You’ve never really suffered, and both eyes are only focused on the lifestyle of the upper class.

Feeling that you are comparing yourself to this with them, then leading a bad life. In reality, your current standard of living is considered to be middle to high in Japan.

You have no contact at all with people who are really living a hard and miserable life. Poor people have no parents to rely on, and they are struggling to make it in the world on their own with nothing.

You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. A poor man works overtime until late at night every day, with no or nominal overtime pay, and earns an average hourly wage of only 350 yen, which is equivalent to the labor value of four dry cell batteries.

And that’s not even the worst part of his life. There was no time at all to find a girlfriend. It was hard to find a girlfriend, but she wasn’t good-looking.

Even so, he recognized it. He was already an ordinary-looking man, and he had no money, no education, no skill, so it was completely unrealistic to find a beautiful woman.

This one girlfriend he found not only often asked him to buy things for her, but also often let him act as free labor to move things. In the end, her girlfriend even cheated on him and ran off with another man.”

Sakai Mirei turned sideways and stayed quiet as she finished listening to his narration and said, “You’re the one who made up the story to fool me, aren’t you! Is that poor man you’re talking about a fool?

With such a low hourly wage, how can he still do it? Why don’t you just quit your job and find a restaurant or izakaya that pays more than this?”

“The world of the poor is not like the hero of a teenage idol drama. His hourly wage is low, but it’s very stable.

If you work at a Chinese restaurant or izakaya, the hourly wage is high, but there are a lot of tricks in it. The owner hires the part-timers at the time when the store has the most customers.

In one way or another, you don’t have time to rest at all, and the amount of labor you have to put in is double that of a regular worker. If there are fewer customers, do you think the boss will spend more money to hire more people?

The answer is no. If the business of the store is not good, the boss will not hire more people, but will also fire them.

If you are unfortunate enough to meet a dishonest boss, you will be subjected to all sorts of tricks to deduct your salary, and what you are promised and what you can actually get are two different things.

Their usual tactic is to offer an hourly rate that is higher than the market rate to attract people. When it’s time to settle the bill, they intentionally undercut the advertised hourly rate. In the end, it’s possible that you’ll get an hourly rate that’s a little lower than the market rate.”

Masayoshi Kishimoto wasn’t laughing at her naivety regarding her involvement in the world, but rather, he wanted her to understand the path of cherishing what she had at the moment.

“Even if everything you say is true, I’m not a man, but a woman.” Sakai Meiling said bluntly.

“In Japan, women are even worse off than men. The poverty rate for women is way higher than the poverty rate for men. One in three single women in the working age group, 20 to 64, are trapped in poverty. One out of two single mothers is in poverty.

For women, the years between 15 and 26 are the brightest years of their lives. They are outwardly bright and beautiful, and most of them will be married and settled in a few years, and people have this feeling.

From this feeling, it is generally assumed that young women are the people least associated with poverty, but in the modern world, it has been pointed out that behind young women is invisible poverty.”

Masayoshi Kishimoto isn’t full of it, but cites a book he once read called “Female Poverty”. This book is a work of documentary literature published by NHK.

“After all you’ve said, what does it have to do with me? The reason why they are poor lies in the fact that they don’t have higher education and don’t master a skill properly.

Who is to blame for this bad life? One can only blame oneself for not working hard enough. Can you call it hard work when you fish for three days and sun-dry the nets for two days?” Sakai Misuzu spoke in the manner of a college student.

If it wasn’t for the fact that Masayoshi Kishimoto had read the author of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, The Nature of Poverty, in his previous life, he might have thought that she had a little bit of truth in what she said.

After all, within traditional propaganda and education, the poor were attributed to laziness and stupidity. In fact, it was not that way at all.

Plus, in his previous life, he had also read the book “Poor Hustle” written by the Pulitzer Prize winner in the United States, which could completely disprove that the poor were in poverty because of laziness and stupidity.

The book “Poor Hustle” contains a great deal of detailed information and evidence to show that the poor are not in poverty because of laziness and stupidity.

Even the United States, the world’s only superpower and rich in resources of all kinds, has more than 40 million people, that is, more than 15% of the total population of the country, in relative poverty, not to mention Japan, a country that can be said to be lacking in resources of all kinds.

“You and Rie are really close sisters, why do both like to carry on so much?” Justice Kishimoto blurted out.

“I’m not being a jerk, I’m telling it like it is. How many graduates of prestigious universities have you seen who are not doing well and have fallen into a state of living in poverty?

Even if there are, it’s a small probability. Otherwise, why would people still squeeze their heads to study hard just to get into a good university?” Sakai Mirei said with conviction.

Masayoshi Kishimoto retorted, “In Japan, how many of the students who are able to enroll in prestigious universities come from poor families? All of them are at least children from ordinary middle-class families.

It can be said that you are the ones who won above the starting line from this very beginning. If you don’t do well in a certain subject, you are still able to go to a tutorial class for remedial work.

Even if you work during vacations or weekends or whatever, it’s still to earn pocket money. As for children from poor families, unless they are smart, they can’t be saved if their grades are not good, after all, they can’t afford to go to tutorial classes.

They don’t work part-time to earn pocket money, they work to earn living expenses. You grow up with a separate room, and your surroundings are not noisy in the middle of the night, so you are perfectly suited for quiet study.

On the other hand, where the children of poor families live, not only are the houses poorly soundproofed, but they are also mixed with all kinds of people. Besides, human energy and physical strength are limited.

After a tiring day of work, who still has the heart to study properly, only thinking of lying down and resting. The unfortunate situation where one wrong step leads to a wrong step happens to them, and for eternity they can’t jump out of such a circle of poverty that cycles from week to week.”