With two kids in college and one about to finish high school, I’m no longer required to spend countless hours at a sports field or in a gym watching others compete. This gives me more time to pursue my interests, so I’m considering new hobbies. I like the idea of music, but I’ve been told my natural abilities are lacking. Maybe I could jump on our demographic bandwagon and buy a motorcycle, adding a bit of excitement to the next phase of my life.

There are lots of possibilities, and I’ll consider many different things. But there’s at least one area that holds no interest for me: potted plants.

While I appreciate greenery in a plastic bucket as an accent in a room, I don’t think of establishing and caring for potted plants as much of a hobby. That’s not to say it isn’t work. I get that growing vibrant, diminutive trees and flowers is difficult. I’ve killed more than my share of indoor vegetation. But it doesn’t really strike me as, well, active.

Maybe I’m too American. Even as adults, we tend toward hobbies that scream we’re still vibrant, still in the prime of life. It could be that we still have that Wild West attitude about us, even though the West was tamed over a century ago. Or it could be that, collectively, we’re still young.

The situation in Japan is very different.

The demographics of the Land of the Rising (or is it setting?) Sun are well known.

One in four people are over the age of 65. They have more household pets than children under the age of 15. More adult diapers are sold in Japan than baby ones.

We can now add another qualification to the group, and this one sounds like the start of a joke. The people of Japan are so old, they think of potted plants as a hobby!

Once every five years, the bureaucrats behind the Statistics Bureau of Japan (SBJ) scrutinize the 585 items they track as a reflection of daily life. These items make up the country’s inflation measurement.