For the past decades, the standard career path in Japan was to graduate from college and join a company and to stay there until retirement which meant one job for life. However, as the salary level is down more than 12 percent over the last decade amid an uncertain labor market, young and single Japanese are increasingly seeking for a second or even third job.

¡±It¡¯s not that I hate my main job, but I want to have a stable income without being completely dependent on the company,¡± said Hiroko Yokogawa who started doing a side job recently. ¡°I initially started doing extra work to be well-off financially. But now, I try to do work that will be useful to me in the future.¡±

Some deliver leaflets or work in convenience stores. Some trade foreign currencies online. Others sell items on Internet auction sites. A survey in January by the Internet market research company Ishare found that almost 17 percent of workers aged 20 to 50 had a side job.

Japan is the country with the eighth-longest working hours in the world, according to a recent measure, though with overtime often going unreported and unpaid. Despite such long working hours, almost half of the workers surveyed last year by the government-affiliated Japan Institute for Labor Policy and Training expressed interest in side jobs. Nearly 90 percent said the main reason was a desire to have extra spending money.

¡±The biggest cause of the increase is that young people are trying to increase their short-term earnings in the face of severe economic and income conditions,¡± said Toshihiro Nagahama, chief economist at Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo. ¡°But it¡¯s also a form of risk management for workers fearful of losing their main jobs.¡±

¡±The Japanese economy is not just stagnant, it¡¯s in retreat,¡± one citizen said. ¡°When people believe the future is going to be better than the present, they are happy. But if they think that the future holds no hope, then they become unhappy. It¡¯s that unhappiness that people are trying to negate with side jobs.¡±