Japanese Baseball Players Pension

Yes, there is a pension plan. It's called "senshu seimei" which literally means "player's life" (as in "life insurance"). I would venture a guess that "life" in this case means "pension."

Anyway, I know that it takes a number of years to "reach senshu seimei," but I haven't yet been able to find the complete conditions.

I appreciate your response regarding my question about a pension for players in the Japanese league. Is there any way to find out what the qualifications would be to qualify for this "life insurance"? In the U.S., one day in the major leagues qualifies a player for lifetime medical coverage. Forty days on a major league roster and a player is vested in the pension plan. I was just wondering how the Japanese league compared to the American leagues?

I know that I had a six year career in Japanese baseball and really have nothing much to show for it.

Thank you for your time.

I'm really surprised at how little information there is on this topic on either the Official NPB site or the Japan Professional Baseball Players Association site. So I'm not exactly sure which organization is in charge of player pensions. I would suggest contacting your old team, but the Hankyu Braves were sold to Orix long ago, and I have no idea how many old records they keep or for how long.

If it's the Players Association that deals with player pensions, then I'm afraid that you probably wouldn't have qualified. In fact, the NPBPA wasn't founded until 1979 (after the idea was rejected by the Commissioner in 1966). According to the NPBPA history page, the first fund for helping support retired players was established in 1980.

I've heard, but have not confirmed, that foreigners didn't pay into the Japanese national pension plan (like welfare) until the 1990s. All I can say for sure is that I have been paying into it since 1991. I don't suppose you have many papers in files from the 1960s to check?

It's my understanding that unless you pay into a pension plan, you don't get anything out of one. That so much time is required to "reach senshu seimei" because one is actually paying into a policy to which a certain base amount is required to recieve full benefits. (Any insurance salesmen out there to clarify this? My understanding may be completely wrong.)

So much has changed in the last 40 years, it's hard to compare benefits from one era to another. Were there even pension plans in Japan in the 1960s? Wasn't Japan was still in the re-building phase then? Without much excess capital?

Notheless, I wish you the best, "Windy."

This might be getting slightly off topic from Mr. Windhorn's original post, but it's my (unsubstantiated) guess that there was some kind of pension scheme in the 1960s. I say this because you have to have paid into the national scheme for at least 25 years to receive a pension, and people were drawing pensions in the 1980s. So wouldn't that mean that they were paying into it at least as far back as the 1950s and '60s?

The whole pension scheme is a bone of contention right now in Japan (esp. the national diet members' scheme), but this isn't the place to debate that.