As work forces go, it is a little unusual. The workers all sit at their tables facing in one direction, they all wear green and have identity numbers on their green hats. They all sit quietly with not a murmur among them. They don’t even look up or around. They’re all old, with no prospect of retirement. But this isn’t the usual corporate Japan Inc. workplace; these workers are the elderly inmates of Onomichi Prison.

Only the occasional bark of orders by guards and the sound of shuffling feet by an inmate on the way to his daily medication handout break the silence. The six-hour working day of light labor activities has begun, and the prisoners are making basic products for companies that I’m not allowed to name. The men sit, folding cards, making small beaded accessories and threading cards together, all at a very slow pace.

Onomichi, a showcase prison sitting on a hilltop overlooking the Seto Inland Sea in Hiroshima prefecture, is home in part to about 70 such elderly prisoners, a small percentage of the rapidly rising population of over-65s in Japan’s prisons. With elderly inmates now comprising more than 12 percent of the country’s prison population, three new prison wards estimated to cost a total of ¥8.3 billion are being planned in Takamatsu, Hiroshima and Oita prefectures. That’s because while Japan’s over-60 cohort grew by 17 percent from 2000 to 2006, the prison population of the same age group soared by 87 percent. Experts attribute this to changing family and community arrangements, record levels of elderly poverty and a lack of professional help for these people.

These new facilities must face the challenges that incarcerating the infirm bring – ramps enabling easier access to bathrooms, handrails in corridors, adjustable chairs in workrooms, fewer stairs to climb or elderly inmates all housed on one floor. Special diets and daily medicinal needs must be enforced via notes affixed to cell doors.

When Onomichi’s inmates finish their work and recreation time begins, it is raining. So they go to the gym. Old men peddle slowly on exercise bikes that take them nowhere; some try the rowing machine, perhaps dreaming of floating to freedom; others flick through religious books and magazines on a side table; and one or two croon to themselves on the karaoke gear in the corner, watching images of landscapes with happy couples dancing far outside the walls of Onomichi Prison. ❶