With millions unemployed or underemployed, Japanese youth are taking to the streets …
Japanese youth, long perceived as the lazy lost generation by the older generation, are taking to the streets and demanding jobs and better pay. “Let us lead a decent life! let us work like human beings!” read banners at a recent demonstration in Tokyo, a city generally known for its political apathy.
Although the Japanese economy is slowly recovering from a huge job slump, the country lost approximately 4 million full-time jobs in the last six years; these were replaced by part-time and temporary jobs. Something like five million single youth are stuck in dead-end jobs with no opportunity for advancement or for acquiring the skills and experience necessary to acquire better employment. As part-time workers, men are paid 60 percent and women 40 percent of what a full-time worker earns for the same work. As a result, unions are starting to organize themselves.
The government estimates that there are 1.9 million “freeters” or workers without stable employment aged under 35, a number which has doubled in the last 15 years. Their wages are almost equivalent to insurance claimed by the unemployed, the disabled and single mothers. Meanwhile companies are takng advantage of their desperation by soliciting these potential “spot workers” by email.
The phenomenon and the demonstrations has forced the Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to take action. “Second Chance” programs have been created to provide job trainings, labor laws have been passed to require companies to increase the wages of part-time workers. Critics claim these changes are only band-aid solutions.
There is a term in Japan called “tenkou,” to describe the process in which young Japanese youth shed their extreme fashion, lifestyles and ideas to enter the suit-and-tie workforce and metaphorically “adulthood.” Japanese extreme fashions are generally tolerated by the older generation because it is presumed they will be shed as soon as an opportunity for gainful employment and entrance into respectability — and appropriate apparel — comes knocking. In the last five years, however, as more and more youth remain centered around fashion, music and design, while whiling away their enforced spare time as “Internet cafe refugees,” parents have started to wonder if their children wil be the first generation to reject tenkou and a passage to the respectable “adult” lifestyle.
This article was published Wednesday, July 25, 2007.
