Salute — The Story of Mr. Masaka

I first began working with him fourteen years ago.
The company was in turmoil, rushing into restructuring, when—quietly—a new project was launched.

I was responsible for the technical side.
Mr. Masaka was in charge of the field.

The project was extraordinarily demanding, with an investment running into several hundred million yen. I had been assigned as a substitute after my predecessor took early retirement. The handover was incomplete, and my knowledge of the product was shallow. Day after day, I was forced to confront the gap between what I thought I understood and what actually functioned on the ground.

Shortly before that, I had completed another project—one that held the company’s fate in its balance—over the course of two years, and it had been well received. It was obvious that this achievement had led to my current assignment. Perhaps because of that, Mr. Masaka was cooperative from the very beginning. He never intruded too far, yet always extended a hand at critical moments. He understood perfectly the distance required of someone entrusted with the field.

He, too, was taking a gamble. A promotion from a responsible role to a supervisory one depended directly on the success of this project. We both understood what was at stake.

The work was harsh, but after two years, the project launched successfully. The business that emerged went on to support the company’s revenue as its largest pillar for more than a decade.

The results were recognized, and I was promoted into management.

Mr. Masaka, however, did not advance beyond his position. The reason was never spoken aloud. Before long, he was transferred to another department without promotion. I heard rumors that his health had suffered. Gradually, his name stopped coming up in the field.

In that workplace, it was almost unheard of for seniority-based promotion to be disrupted. What happened then was exceptional. Perhaps that alone weighed on him—not that his work had gone unrecognized, but that the order itself had been broken.

Two years later, he returned to his former post. But the vitality he once had was gone. His gaze no longer rested on the work in front of him; it seemed fixed on somewhere else entirely. His work remained meticulous, yet the sense that he carried everything with his whole being had disappeared. When people break, they do not make a sound. They simply change how they engage with the world.

Eventually, he reached mandatory retirement at sixty. In the two years leading up to it, he was demoted from a responsible role and reassigned repeatedly to unrelated departments. It must have been painful. After retirement, he was placed as a line worker. Not by command or by choice—just by the flow of events.

And yet, from there, he stood up again.

As a contract employee over sixty, there were no titles. No expectations of evaluation or promotion. Still, he decided to work until sixty-five, when his pension would begin. With every position stripped away, the suffering bound to the need for recognition seemed to loosen. What remained were the tasks in front of him, and his own hands.

The line he stood on was brutal. Summers reached forty degrees Celsius; winters hovered near freezing. He guarded processes that could never be stopped. Carrying three-kilogram components, walking thirty thousand steps—twenty-one kilometers—a day, he spoke of it with a laugh.

Delivering the required number of parts to the next process within the allotted time—never missing by even a fraction. His skill was overwhelming. Beyond product knowledge, he understood the surrounding processes, the quirks of the equipment, and the movement of people. Trust gathered around him naturally.

His body was neither thin nor heavy. Trained, balanced, without waste—built for endurance rather than display. It was a form shaped by time, so well-proportioned it could only be called beautiful.

His hardship did not end at work. At home, he lived with six people: his wife, his parents, and two university-aged children. His father carried a serious illness; his mother was bedridden, and later developed dementia. Caregiving that stretched from his fifties onward—he once summed it up briefly, with a laugh: “It’s hell.”

When I told him, “In a few more years, things will surely turn for the better,” he murmured in a low voice, “If this continues for even another six months… I’ll go mad.”
He wasn’t rejecting hope. He simply no longer had the strength to think beyond the present.

But no darkness lasts forever. Five years ago, his mother passed away. Last year, his father followed—on the same calendar day. There are no words for the weight of that coincidence. After that, both children became independent. A few years later, his eldest daughter built a home nearby with her family. “My grandchild comes every day,” he said, smiling with genuine joy.

He has another face.

He is a part-time mandarin orange farmer. His land spans an entire mountain. He began with a small orchard, gradually taking over groves abandoned due to aging owners. When he first showed me his work shed, I mistook it for a proper house. Inside were a sorting machine, a speed sprayer for pest control, transport vehicles, and a low-temperature storage facility. Equipment easily worth tens of millions of yen.

He grows what is known as a premium brand of mandarins. Even so, facing over a decade of low market prices, he would laugh and say, “It’s just a hobby.” I believe he truly loves citrus farming. During thinning and harvest seasons, he takes over a week of paid leave. On other days, he heads into the mountain before and after work. Adding farm labor at dawn and dusk to a job that already demands thirty thousand steps a day, he joked that he sometimes exceeds one hundred thousand steps.

Now, with unstable weather and rising demand, mandarins are scarce. Prices have tripled—and so has his income. It is enviable. But this is not a stroke of luck. It is the result of enduring long years that offered little reward.

In him, I see the aesthetics of a man who has done everything to the end. Quiet, unboastful, dignified. Even when no one is watching, he endures for the sake of his own principles, protecting his dignity as a human being.

To Mr. Masaka,
I offer my salute.

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