It's a popular saying about the indigenous Okinawan language — though standard Japanese does have everyday words for retirement
A line often repeated in longevity writing holds that Uchinaaguchi, the indigenous language of Okinawa, has no real equivalent for 'retirement' — the idea being that elders simply keep doing what gives them purpose. It's a romanticized framing rather than a hard linguistic fact, and it doesn't apply to Japanese as a whole: standard Japanese has common retirement words such as teinen (the mandatory retirement age) and taishoku, and fixed retirement ages are a deeply institutionalized part of Japanese working life.
