While Western CEOs crack down, demanding super-AI productivity to keep your job. Japanese firms are paying older workers to do nothing

As corporate America and Europe drag workers back to five days in the office and squeeze for ever more efficiency, Japan is quietly paying thousands of older employees to show up, sit down and do almost nothing at all.

Meet the “madogiwazoku” cohort—older, underperforming, or redundant employees who are assigned desks near the window with little to no work to do. 

These “window workers” are mostly Gen X and boomer men in their late 50s and 60s, who were hired on the promise...