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Heads up, people. A Japanese city is suffering from a dire shortage of ninjas and needs our help. And they are even willing to pay you for your ninja services.
Iga, a city with a population of around 91,000, located about 40 miles southwest of Kyoto, is known as “the birthplace of the ninja.” They also host an annual ninja festival that draws about 30,000 tourists. So you can see why keeping the ninja population up in the city is very important to them.
The reason for their current ninja shortage is, you guessed it, millennials. (They really do kill everything.)
Turns out that, as reported on an episode of the NPR “Planet Money” podcast, the youngs are leaving smaller towns like Iga for “life in the big city like Toyko or Yokohama.”
Add that to an unemployment rate of just 2.5 percent in Iga and there just simply aren’t enough ninjas to go around.
“Right now in Iga, we are working very hard to promote ninja tourism and get the most economic outcome,” explained Iga’s mayor, Sakae Okamoto. “For example, we hold this ninja festival between late April to around the beginning of May. During this period visitors and also local people come here. Everybody will be dressed like a ninja and walks around and enjoys themselves — but recently I feel that it’s not enough.”
So that’s why, as Sally Herships reported on NPR, “Ninjas can earn anything from $23,000 to about $85,000, which is a really solid salary, and in fact, a lot more than real ninjas used to earn in medieval Japan.”
If you care to apply for one of the ninja jobs, you can get hooked up with the folks in Iga right here. No word yet on whether internet legend “afro ninja” will be applying for one of the positions.