Japan has a joke: a student doing casual work has an “arubaito,” while a middle-aged adult has a “part.” There is no legal age chart. The labour ministry mainly defines part-time status by shorter prescribed weekly hours than ordinary workers at the same employer, not by the label. “Student arubaito” and “housewife part” became conventional pairings; JILPT research notes that workforce composition helped shape them. Thus the same 20-hour supermarket job may sound like arubaito at 20 and part at 40–50, but there is no exact cutoff. At 30, a graduate student may naturally be an arubaito while family context may favor part: context matters more, not the law changing. Fixed-shift distinctions and “full-time part” can be company labels; freeter is a separate social category. We thought we were classifying the job; often we were classifying the character doing it.
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