>Naoshiro Ogawa says that the Japanese have developed a unique
>lifestyle of being sexually active without marrying or cohabiting or
>having children:
Then there's this trend (though it does seem like the actual numbers are smaller than the headline)...
Wall Street Journal - December 29, 2005
Generation Gap
In Aging Japan, Young Slackers Stir Up Concerns
Changing Attitudes Prompt People to Quit Job Search; A Demographic Time Bomb
Mr. Isozaki's Lack of Urgency
By GINNY PARKER WOODS Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
TOKYO -- Japan needs Yuta Isozaki in the work force. With the number of young workers shrinking, it's crucial to get the 23-year-old -- and every other Japanese youth -- toiling away in jobs to stave off a looming labor shortage.
Mr. Isozaki, however, doesn't feel that urgency. Last year, he dropped out of engineering college. He failed to land part-time jobs at electronics and convenience stores. Discouraged, he spent his days playing videogames and watching cartoons on television, living off his parents and wondering what to do.
A year and a half later, he's still in limbo. An ideal job is one "that feels like going to the park and having a good time," says the pudgy Mr. Isozaki. "I'm not someone who can fit into a rigid framework."
Japan, which has long prided itself on its unbeatable work ethic, faces a troubling trend: the swelling ranks of young slackers. Spurred by a more casual attitude toward work and a tendency to hold out for dream jobs, an estimated 640,000 unmarried Japanese between ages 15 and 34 had dropped out of the work force or failed to enter at all last year. This is up from 400,000 in 1993, the first year for which Japan's Labor Ministry has figures.
The government, scrambling to assess the trend, calls these slackers NEET, or "not in education, employment or training" -- a term first used in the United Kingdom in the late 1990s. Japan, which started labeling NEETs last year, uses the term specifically for young people who have given up looking for a job and often get financial support from their generous parents. They are not considered unemployed since they are not actively looking for a job.
The phenomenon has shocked Japan because the nation considers its highly trained, hard-working labor force to be its most valuable resource. As a result, the NEET issue has set the nation abuzz.
Worried parents are snapping up books with names like "Saving our Children from Becoming NEETs." Schools are handing out guidebooks laying out the financial perils of not having a full-time job. And career-counseling centers are springing up around the country. A recently published short-story collection titled "NEET" attempts to expose the inner-lives of these youths with a tale in which an adult writer befriends a young NEET.
Alarmed by the growing number of NEETs, the government dished out nearly $8.5 million this year to launch a range of job-searching programs, including a three-month camp that aims to inspire youths to work through temp jobs ranging from farm work to city cleanup. But these are tiny experiments -- only 224 people have enrolled in the three-month program, and 18 have found jobs after completion.
To be sure, the total number of NEETs in Japan is still relatively small. Last year's NEET population made up only about 2% of Japan's 33 million 15-to-34-year-olds. There are 63 million people in the work force, while the country's overall population is nearly 128 million.
The U.S. doesn't track NEETs, but in the closest equivalent, nearly 9% of people in the U.S. ages 16 to 24 were not in school, not working and not looking for a job. Japan's numbers include only unmarried people, while the U.S. group includes both married and unmarried. The U.S. number has remained relatively steady over the past several years and this group isn't viewed as much of a social threat.
But NEETs could exacerbate a demographic problem that's starting to plague Japan and will soon affect other nations, too: an aging society, combined with a shrinking work force. In Japan, the proportion of people over 65 will reach 20% next year, compared with 10% just 20 years ago. This number is expected to reach 35% in 2050. At the same time, a declining birth rate means the labor pool is shrinking. The working-age population -- from 15 to 64 -- is expected to drop to 54% of the total in 2050 from 68% in 2000.
Unlike the U.S., Japan doesn't want to rely on immigration to boost its work force. That means it needs to make use of every Japanese of working age, especially young people, if it wants to prevent its economy from shrinking in the long term. The number of NEETs could reach 1.2 million by 2020, says Takashi Kadokura, an independent economist who has researched the NEET issue. The growing ranks of people who've failed to join the work force could cut economic growth by an average of half a percentage point per year between 2010 and 2020, he says.
"The economy won't be able to grow," Mr. Kadokura says. "It's crucial to educate people to prevent them from becoming NEETs."
Change in Hiring
One reason for Japan's increasing NEET population stems from a change in corporate hiring practices. Unlike in the past, when companies hired young Japanese en masse straight out of school, the economic slump in the 1990s and early 2000s has encouraged firms to curtail full-time hiring and rely more on part-timers. That trend continues despite a recent economic recovery, which means more young Japanese are still having a tough time getting jobs.
It doesn't help that Japanese corporations' old-fashioned hiring practices make it difficult for people who've hopped from one low-paying job to another to get hired for full-time, long-term company work.
Kanta Murakami, 31, tried being a security guard, convenience-store cashier and a fast-food worker. But when he realized the difficulty of getting a full-time position, he got discouraged and retreated to his parents' house for about eight months.
"I don't have any money," says Mr. Murakami, who has enrolled in a program to help NEETs get back on track. He worries, however, about the stigma. "I'm just hoping to find some place where they'll hire me, even though they know that I'm a NEET." But Japan has also experienced a quiet revolution in work attitudes. Many Japanese in their 40s and 50s who sacrificed their lives for stable but grueling corporate jobs don't want their children to do the same. As a result, they're encouraging them to pursue dream jobs -- even seemingly unattainable ones -- and are willing to support them in the process. Compared with the U.S., the pressure on parents to push grown children out of the nest is low in Japan, where families have traditionally housed and financially supported children until marriage.
Young people, too, are tiring of corporate life. A recent study by Japan's Nomura Research Institute of 1,000 full-time company employees in their 20s and 30s found that three-quarters said they felt unmotivated at work. Half said they would quit if given the chance.
"The parents are from an era where you entered a company and stayed there your whole life," says Michiko Miyamoto, a sociologist and a NEET expert. Younger people "are looking for more diversity."
Mr. Isozaki and his mother, Misao, symbolize the generational shift in how they view work. The 52-year-old Ms. Isozaki graduated from college with a degree in child-care and moved to Tokyo from a smaller city nearby to work at a day-care center. She was forced to return home two years later to help her family business. Shortly afterward, she became a stay-at-home mother after marrying Mr. Isozaki's father, a busy employee for a machinery maker who was rarely home when his children were growing up.
Ms. Isozaki, disappointed in her own curtailed career and her husband's all-consuming career, was determined to allow her children to pursue their dream jobs. Her daughter, Manami, 24, who longed to become a musician, fulfilled her goals, becoming a professional pianist after years of lessons and music school. But her son, Yuta, never found that drive -- something that baffles Ms. Isozaki. She has tried to brainstorm on his behalf, suggesting, for example, that he become a baker since he likes to eat bread, but to no avail.
"He won't come up with something and pursue it," says Ms. Isozaki, who has a round face and a sweet voice. "He thinks too much. He can't make a decision."
Ms. Isozaki became worried about Yuta after he quit school and withdrew from other members of the family. Frustrated, she tried to motivate her son by putting him in charge of caring for the family's two dogs. Worried that he might be depressed, she took him to a doctor, who said he was fine. As a last resort, she took him to a nonprofit support group called Sodate Age Net, or "Bringing Up Network," that tries to help NEETs enter working society.
Kei Kudo, the organization's 28-year-old founder, says many NEETs become stymied by the notion that they have to somehow come up with their dream job. With the mantra "work first, think later," he tries to open NEETs' eyes by telling them that there are about 30,000 different types of jobs in Japan, so the chance of stumbling upon that one perfect profession is about as likely as winning the lottery.
"Dreams are for when you're asleep" Mr. Kudo says. "When you're awake, you have to think about reality." His strategy: Get them to figure out what they absolutely don't like, then pick a job from what's left.
Mr. Kudo -- who is about the same age as many of his programs' participants -- says he can sympathize with NEETs because he himself dropped out of college in Japan. He then moved to the U.S., where he studied at a community college in Washington state and was accepted as a transfer student at the University of Washington. Just before enrolling however, a British friend told him about England's youth unemployment problem. Realizing that Japan might eventually face something similar, he decided to return home to do something about it.
Mr. Kudo, whose father also runs an organization to help troubled youth, used his connections and public-speaking skills to drum up support for his idea. After two years of planning, he accepted his first participants in September 2004. Now, he works 14-hour days in the organization's small office in the suburbs of Tokyo, dispatching participants on jobs ranging from elderly care to archeological digs in hopes of building their confidence and helping to narrow their choices.
A Confidence Boost
The ultimate goal is for participants to find a permanent job on their own -- something 20 out of 40 have done so far. Yuichi Murata, a 29-year-old with a bowl haircut, is nearing this point, having recently found a one-month position with a railway company helping to seat passengers during the holiday season.
Mr. Murata arrived at Sodate Age Net about a year ago, sent by his father who was frustrated that his son hadn't worked for six years. His one work experience was a part-time job at a convenience store, which Mr. Murata says he quit after a falling out with his co-workers. He also spent four months studying for a certificate to do computer-related work, but failed the final test.
Mr. Murata says his confidence level at that point was near zero. Mr. Kudo put him in charge of a janitorial crew made up of other participants. The chance to direct others gave Mr. Murata a real boost. "Before, I thought that I couldn't do anything, and I didn't know what to do" he says. "Now, I just want to keep working."
Getting to that point takes time. Mr. Isozaki has spent a year in Sodate Age Net's program but has yet to find a job that will allow him to go off on his own. His mother worries that he's getting too comfortable, and she's considering giving him a deadline for finding a job. When asked about a date, though, she hesitates.
"By the end of the year," she says tentatively. "Or maybe in March."
Mr. Isozaki, for his part, concedes that some people might see him as lazy, and he says he knows he needs to find permanent work eventually. He adds, however, that he simply needs more time to experiment -- something he's never had a chance to do. "In high school, all you do is study," he says. "When I actually thought about working, I realized that I didn't know what kind of work I wanted to do."