A life in Japan
The longest lives of the eight, and the longest hours. Old age here is something you are very likely to reach.
In One Life, a Japanese life is born in Sendai, Okayama, Niigata, Kumamoto, Shizuoka or Hakodate. Small children walk to school in a walking group from their street, in a line behind the older children carrying a yellow flag. The money is in yen.
What the game gives you
School in Japan builds towards the entrance exams, and the game treats them as the turning point they are. Japanese working life is known for long hours, and in the game, as in the world, time given to work comes out of sleep, friendships and family.
Health care is close to fully paid for, as in the UK and Germany. The state pension starts at 65 in the game.
The great fact of a Japanese life is its length. Old age is something a Japanese life is very likely to reach, which means more of the game is played in the late chapters: retirement, the care of ageing parents, the death of friends, grandchildren. The question of how to live a long old age matters more here than anywhere else in the game.
Money in the game
The game sets each country’s money against the United States, then shows it in local currency, here in yen at a fixed rate of ¥150 to the dollar. In a life here, an ordinary job pays about 60% of what the same job pays in the US, and everyday prices are about 70% of American prices. A university education costs about 62% of the American price, and medical bills about 13% of what an American pays out of pocket for the same illness.
Those ratios are the shape of a life here. Pay is lower than in the US and prices lower too. Illness is cheap; time is what a Japanese life spends most of.
The odds
The UN estimates life expectancy at birth in Japan at about 85 years, the longest of the eight countries and among the longest in the world: 82 for men and 88 for women. In the game, a Japanese life is the one most likely to reach ninety. Whether those years are good ones is decided, as everywhere, by the choices made in the decades before.