JAPAN: A STORY OF LOVE AND HATE

Naoki used to have it all: a wife, a six-bedroom house, his own business and a flashy BMW. Then Japan’s economic crisis in the 1990s left him destitute and divorced. Now the only job he can get is as a part-time postal worker – it pays just €4,000 a year. He lives in a one-room apartment with his girlfriend, Yoshie, who, at 29 years old, is almost half his age, and works 15 hours a day in 3 jobs to keep the two of them afloat. She relies on alcohol, cigarettes and sleeping pills to block out her problems. Naoki has little but his dented pride. Every night she gets paid to drink and flirt with lonely men in sleazy bars while he does the housework. It is a strange symbiotic relationship - "She hates me, I need her" Naoki laments - but somehow it keeps them going. People in Japan are notoriously reticent when it comes to talking about their feelings. For years the British director Sean McAllister struggled to find a story he could tell about Japan’s culture and its strict work ethic. That is until he met Naoki and Yoshie and got an insight into the world’s second largest economy’s hidden working poor.