Yakult ladies are an icon in Japan

From the article:

Dr. Minoru Shirota invented the sweet, milk-based probiotic at Kyoto University in 1931. Formulated from Dr. Shirota’s own strain of lactobacillus — a strain of Lacticaseibacillus casei called Shirota — the drink was designed to promote a healthy digestive tract, quality sleep, and immunity. Today, that halo of health still surrounds the brand. My sister works in a Chicago hospital where a doctor sponsored by Yakult researches the benefits of lactobacillus on immune health. Influencers push it on followers as a health supplement for their families.

While the majority of Yakult is sold in stores, the company employs thousands of Yakult ladies to sell bottles in person. As of 2024, there were about 32,000 Yakult ladies operating in Japan, and another 50,000 outside of the country, mostly in China, South Asia, Brazil, and Mexico (where the uniforms can differ from the iconic blue color scheme in Japan). They deliver their wares on foot, bicycle, and motorcycle. With powder blue visors and matching pantsuits, they cut recognizable figures wherever they make their rounds.

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Kazuhiro Noguchi, a Yakult franchise owner in Hiroshima, first introduced the delivery women in the mid-’50s. Believing it was easier for a housewife to enter a fellow housewife’s kitchen than for a salesman to get in the front door, he created a job for working women that fit with midcentury gender expectations.

“Especially for women with young children, this type of thing — where they could work while the children were at school — was a very attractive job because it allowed the household sphere to still hold their attention,” says Hilary Holbrow, a sociologist at Indiana University who specializes in labor and gender in Japan. The Yakult lady proved to be a success, and by 1963, she became formalized as a company-wide sales system. Today, Yakult still tries to attract working mothers with flexible schedules and on-site day care facilities.

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“Most Yakult ladies start their shifts around 8:30 a.m. and finish by 1 p.m., unless they work a full-time shift, in which case they work till 5,” she told me. Yakult ladies bike everywhere, cycling around town for hours, sometimes going out of their way to make a single delivery. Though most Yakult ladies deliver to private homes, the team at the Osu Kannon center have corporate routes, meaning they’re dipping in and out of office buildings to hand off drinks to clients. They’re also supposed to stop and chat with anyone who strikes up a conversation on the street.

Yakult ladies aren’t classified as full-time employees, but kojin jigyo usha (roughly “sole proprietors”), essentially making them owners of bicycle-sized franchises. They purchase product from Yakult and make a profit based on what they can sell. Yakult says the average earnings of a Yakult lady are roughly $682 USD a month, compared to an average of $1,774 per month for Japanese women broadly. In Yahoo Answers forums, Yakult ladies claim wildly different profits: Some say they work only three hours a day and make more than the company average. Others claim to work far more, selling roughly $2,700 worth of product in a month to take home about $600, roughly a 22 percent cut.

They may decide their own schedules, but Yakult ladies don’t have designated holidays or sick days. The company encourages them to manipulate their schedules to accommodate time off. Even with an electric bike, it can all take a physical toll, and the manager told me Yakult ladies need to “get creative” to make it work. That might not be worth it to some mothers.

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At the Yakult Center, many of the Yakult ladies seemed to be in their 60s, which tracks with national trends. Nearly a third of Japanese citizens are 65 and older, and the national fertility rate is at an all-time low. The women working at the Osu Kannon center may have been some of the same women I saw delivering drinks when I was a kid. I didn’t see new mothers — mothers who look like me — among their ranks.

Still, Yakult positions its delivery workers more as mothers than salespeople. “We don’t do sales because everyone knows what Yakult is,” the manager told me. “The price hasn’t changed in years, so we don’t negotiate.” Instead, Yakult ladies are mijika na sonzai, roughly “known entities,” implying they’re not only familiar to their customers but close to them.