Japanese freeters find shelter in cyber cafes:
Yamashita is one of Japan’s many “freeters” — a compound of “free” and “Arbeiter”, the German word for “worker”.A by-product of the economic crisis that hit Japan and its lifelong employment guarantees in the 1990s, freeters drift between odd jobs.
Earning around 1,000 yen ($8) per hour, they often struggle to pay the rent in Tokyo, one of the most expensive cities in the world where a modest 30 square meter (320 square foot) flat in a central location can easily cost 150,000 yen ($1,250) a month.
Now the economy is recovering, but many freeters are missing out on the upswing after years of unskilled work. Most expanding companies prefer to recruit fresh university graduates or transfer basic jobs to low-wage countries such as China.
As an Internet cafe owner in Tokyo’s Ueno district, Masami Takahashi has had a close-up view of social change in Japan.
Around the corner from his cafe, homeless people who cannot even afford a reclining seat sleep in cardboard boxes.
Chinese prostitutes in Japanese kimonos prop up drunken office workers, or “salarymen”, who will stumble into Masami’s cafe for a nap later in the night.
The salarymen were the first to discover Internet cafes as a cheap alternative to hotels after companies hurt by the economic crisis stopped funding team drinks — an essential part of Japanese corporate culture — followed by a night in a hotel.
Freeter seemed like an odd word for the Japanese to use:
The word freeter or freeta was first used around 1987 or 1988 and is thought to be an amalgamation of the English word free (or perhaps freelance) and the German word Arbeiter (“worker”). (The German word Arbeit is commonly used as the Japanese loanword arubaito for “part-time job”.) It is said that the use was coined by the Japanese part time job magazine From A (Japanese: Furomu?). Other possible spellings are fur?t?, furiita, freeta, furiitaa, or furitaa in order of frequency
At any rate, I wouldn’t be inclined to mix “arbeit” and “free” without a strong sense of irony. Arbeit macht frei.