Almost everywhere across the world, youth culture is on the rise. Young adults in Cairo and Tunis are marching for revolutionary change. South Korean teens are inventing new ways to use media and gaming sites to create imaginative online communities. Chinese students are flocking to universities in record numbers, while university graduates are streaming abroad to deepen their technical expertise and their understanding of the world.
Yet what of Japan’s young people? They remain eerily placid and disturbingly silent, even if they have plenty of grounds for their own uprising. Fewer are venturing overseas to study.
The data seems to point convincingly to an “ice age” facing young Japanese, even as their parents and grandparents retain their comfortable pensions and paid-off homes. Last year, for instance, 45% of those aged 15-24 in the work force were labeled freeters, or those holding irregular and part-time jobs that don’t offer paid pensions and benefits. In 1988, at the nation’s economic zenith, the comparable figure was 17.2%. In addition, only slightly more than half of all college graduates received job offers last year—a record low—in a society that doesn’t offer many midcareer job opportunities to those left out of the employment market just after college.
As the old tenaciously cling to their jobs and hold fast for their government pensions, they refuse to make room for the young in a nation that desperately needs new vigor and entrepreneurship.
I recently participated in a conversation about the Japanese market in which the Americans in the room did not understand the implications of this. In the West, a “default” position is that products should be marketed to young people, as they are the trendsetters. Moreover, once you get a young person “hooked” on your product or service, they will be a customer for life. But in Japan, I counseled, you need to think more cogently about the opportunities to sell products to the “silver” set, since they have time and money.
Indeed, this represents yet another area in which Japan turns a marketer’s typical logic on its head. Young Japanese are reluctant to marry and form households, helping depress the nation’s growth rate. They often live with their parents well into their 20s or 30s—even if they are regular “working people” and not reclusive shut-ins, or hikikomori. They can clearly envision a future in which neither their jobs nor their old-age benefits will be guaranteed—and yet they have never tried to organize political action or robust economic protest to demand better.
This is especially ironic because, ever since I first began visiting Japan in the early 1980s, the press and social critics have regularly proclaimed the emergence of a new class of young people, or shinjinrui, that was bound to permanently transform hidebound Japanese society.
Alas, we are still waiting.
Why has there been so little upheaval among a demographic group that has been continuously betrayed? Is it simply because young Japanese remain wealthier, on paper, than their counterparts in China and South Korea, and so much more so than those in Egypt and Tunisia? Is it because they have been so well-socialized through rigorous school careers, disciplined family relations and inherent Confucian values in the workplace to “shut up and do as you’re told”? Or do they simply lack the drive, passion and courage to question authority?
I am troubled to report that I really don’t know the answer, but I can suggest that the entrepreneur, foreign investor or political leader who can tap this wasted resource will reap enormous windfalls and astounding influence. Young Japanese are desperate for something to believe in—a vision that their future will be better than that of their aging parents, and that their docile, inward-looking homeland might stage a global revival after years of flat-lined economic growth.
Who would think that today’s crop of young Japanese would do well to find role models in the chaotic streets of Cairo?
Michael Zielenziger, a Pulitzer-prize finalist for his reporting from China, works with Monitor Group analyzing issues related to Asia and globalization and is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. The former Tokyo bureau chief for Knight Ridder Newspapers, Zielenziger is the author of Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) which describes the social malaise and economic decline that now confronts an aging Japan. As a consultant, he advises corporations and governments on developing strategic priorities and discerning emergent trends. He is a former John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He can be reached at Michael_Zielenziger AT Monitor DOT com.