Why? A big part of the answer, I think, lies in the distinctive Japanese attitude toward work — or more specific, toward meaning in work.

Work is good, but meaningful work is better. I wonder whether our shiny new Western world of work — post-manufacturing, un-unionized, gig-based, insecure — offers as much sense of meaning as work once did, or as it still seems to in Japan. In Derek Walcott’s epic poem “Omeros,” a wide-ranging reimagining and mash-up of Homer’s Aegean and the contemporary Caribbean, he writes admiringly and respectfully of his protagonist, Achille, a St. Lucian fisherman. Achille is a man “who never ascended in an elevator,/who had no passport, since the horizon needs none,/never begged nor borrowed, was nobody’s waiter.” Near the end of Walcott’s long, meditative, elusive poem, that line gave me a jolt. What’s so bad about waiting tables? Is there really something so lessening, something analogous to begging or borrowing, about being a waiter?

The answer to that question for lots of people is yes. This isn’t a general human truth about workers at all times and in all cultures, because there are places where waiting and where service in general are deeply respected jobs. But it’s apparent that the new service work has many people doing things that aren’t congruent with their sense of their identity. A life is the story of a life, and that story, for many, has become one of decline and loss, of reduction in self-esteem. The tension in status between different types of work is one theme of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” — indeed, that is essentially what his struggle is, the gap between the narrator’s sense of what he should be doing, as a writer, and what he actually does all day, as a homemaker: “Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in the play areas, bring them home, undress them, bathe them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry, fold others, and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs and cupboards.”

It’s sometimes said that the value of manufacturing work is exaggerated, and that we should just get used to the idea that most jobs are now in service industries — which is probably true. But unionized manufacturing work gave a sense of community and meaning that more atomized, more modern, more service-based work struggles to do. It doesn’t matter that many of those old jobs were boring, or brutally repetitive, or dangerous, or made workers sick — or, like coal mining, all of those things simultaneously. In the 1937 speech where Franklin D. Roosevelt called for “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work,” he stressed that “the overwhelming majority of our population earns its daily bread either in agriculture or in industry.” Hard manual work created tangible products, and that tangibility was part of what made the work seem meaningful. Miners and autoworkers, laborers in the clothing and electrical and transportation industries, had a social cohesion based on the fact that they worked and sweated and lived and suffered together, creating a tangible product that seemed to them imbued with national, even world-historical, significance. I won’t pretend that I wish I did that kind of work, but I envy the feeling of cohesion and solidarity shared by people who do.

The danger is that a class identity founded on collective labor is replaced by an identity founded on resentment, further destabilizing our politics. As Japan shows us, there are worse things for a society than calmly growing old together.