Japan’s Jobless Generation

At 21, Yoshiyuki Tenmei feels his life is over. He just spent a grueling year sending out hundreds of job applications, being grilled by personnel experts and taking a battery of tests.

Now, in this nation where company affiliation defines status, identity--one’s very life--he is about to graduate from college as the embodiment of social failure: He is a man without a meishi, or business card.

“I feel like a complete social dropout,” confessed the young man in black.

Tenmei is not alone. In what popular magazines are calling “a super ice age,” record numbers of Japanese college graduates are failing to get jobs. And those who do often must settle for their last choice or for not getting company benefits once taken for granted.

Japan’s youth are bearing the brunt of corporate restructuring.

After five years of near-zero growth, companies are struggling to cut costs. Unwilling to risk mass layoffs of older workers who are family breadwinners, they are taking another route--cutting back on shiny-faced new recruits.

But the growing joblessness among the young, both college and high school grads, is not caused just by shrinking payrolls. Today’s applicants are the children of Japan’s baby boomers, a demographic bulge that means there are more people looking for jobs.

Some analysts say that changing values are also driving up unemployment.

The young have new heroes and ideals that nurture fragile dreams of individualism rather than a commitment to company drudgery. They are different from their elders, who emerged from the nation’s postwar poverty willing to put up with long hours and often tedious work in exchange for stability.

Today’s young people want their jobs to be fun. Otherwise, they’ll quit.

The result? Japan’s Generation X is being forced to adapt: In a land where 45% of young people already attend college or junior college, they are staying in school longer, working for foreign companies, taking part-time jobs with little future and depending more on parents to subsidize their extravagant consumer lifestyles.

Many say they are losing faith in the system.

“People of my generation had no doubts about the country,” said Haruo Shimada, 53, a labor economist at Keio University near Tokyo. “It provided them with hope, confidence and tangible rewards.”

Now, he said, the rewards are less clear: “Work hard and you don’t know what you will get.”

Short-term, analysts say, the growing joblessness is causing everything from depression and delinquency to exhilaration, as youths are freed from the nation’s traditional career treadmill to pursue alternatives.

Long-term, the job squeeze may bring about a diversification of the rigid, postwar employment system. Rather than entering one company for life, workers may transfer. Rather than becoming corporate cogs, they may become entrepreneurs.

Official figures put unemployment among 18- to 24-year-olds at a postwar high of 6.1%, though many experts say the figure may be closer to 20%.

In 1995, the overall unemployment rate in this nation, noted for its full-employment economy, reached a postwar high of 3.2%, and it climbed to 3.5% in the first quarter of 1996.

Among four-year-college graduates in 1995, the most recent year for which figures are available, 68.7% of men and 63.7% of women found jobs. That contrasts with 1990, when, at the height of Japan’s “bubble” economy, 81% of both male and female four-year-college graduates found jobs.

Among junior college graduates, most of whom are women, only 50% have found jobs this year, compared to 88% at the height of the boom.

The dearth of traditional, full-time job alternatives amid five years of unemployment problems is causing alarm among bureaucrats, business people and politicians.

Toyota Motor Corp. says that, because of the strong yen, the slowed economy and gradual transfer of production overseas, it has slashed new hires by more than 75% since 1991.

Sony reduced new hires from 1,750 in 1992 to between 300 and 400 for each of the last four years; during the same period, Toshiba Corp. dropped its annual new hires from 1,400 to 400 as it sought to slash costs.

Toyota is expected to increase hiring for the first time in six years in 1997, and IBM and Sony have said they plan to increase the number of new graduates they hire next year.

But the slight growth is hardly a turnaround.

“Lots of young people . . . get so discouraged about finding a job they give up before they even start looking,” said Akiyoshi Takumori, chief analyst for Sakura Securities who recently published a study of unemployment.

But even if they find work--and unemployment among the young here, statistically speaking, is less than it is in the United States--Japanese youth have less than rosy prospects. There are plenty of jobs to be had, but most have no future and may never provide the income or sustain the standard of living many of today’s youth are accustomed to, said a spokesman for Keidanren, Japan’s largest business organization.

Most young people hold at least a part-time job, making enough to pay for ski weekends, name-brand clothes and nights out at swank Tokyo clubs while they live with their parents.

Many parents, in turn, seem happy to support their offspring indefinitely, often giving them generous allowances besides a roof over their heads.

“Japanese parents go out of their way to give children everything they want,” said Mariko Fujiwara, director of research at the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living, the research arm of the huge Hakuhodo advertising agency. “Americans push their children to be independent much sooner.”

Young men, who expected to ride Japan’s educational conveyor belt into big, stable companies, appear to be the most traumatized by the dire employment conditions. For them, deviating from the accepted social track can jinx chances for marriage and for career and social status; graduates also say they fear a detour could be come permanent.

Parents encourage graduates who have been unsuccessful finding jobs to take a year off and then try again for a top job rather than settle in at a lesser-known small- or medium-sized firm. And since young people are often living at home, it can be hard from them to say no.

“They listen to what their parents say,” said Shoshichi Usui, head of the Meiji University Job Center, who has helped students find jobs for 30 years. “The students are lazy, relaxed. But parents have hopes for their children, and it’s ultimately a family decision.”

Tenmei lives at home and works nights in the mail room at a posh hotel.

He plans to attend night school, then reapply next year to work at a publishing house.

Meanwhile, he said, the pressure is intense.

“My relatives and siblings are always whispering among themselves: ‘What’s wrong with him? Why doesn’t he have a job?’ ” said Tenmei, nibbling on his over-chewed cuticles.

He said he feels shame for not having a real job, but added that he believes, ultimately, this will be a good thing. He has returned to old interests--including acting in Kabuki plays--and said he now has time to think about what he really wants to do.

For women, the employment situation is even worse. They tend to be funneled into clerical work or “office lady”--OL--jobs. These often are the first to go in a recession.

Unrestrained by a toothless equal-employment law, companies have been trimming such jobs for years.

But in a move many fear will become an industry trend, Mitsubishi Shoji, one of Japan’s largest international trading companies, has announced that it will cut OL positions completely this year, replacing clerical jobs with computers.

Many observers suspect that the change will be permanent.

Some women get so discouraged that they drop out of the system or flee to the United States, Hong Kong or Singapore in search of better opportunities.

For other women, the drying up of dead-end OL positions means more chances to get jobs where their talents are recognized.

Yasuyuki Nambu, who runs Pasona, an employment agency for part-timers, said most of his workers are women.

He said they prefer to work as part-time consultants because they can avoid the oyabun-kobun (boss-follower) relationship that dominates corporate hierarchies.

Rather than serving tea, they are treated as outside professionals.

With her sassy haircut and Doc Marten boots, Mika Tanaka, 26, is among this hip new breed of young women who demand respect.

After free-lancing for three years for a hit Japanese TV quiz show in Los Angeles, she returned to Tokyo to take on odd jobs for TV studios.

She feels contempt for sacrificing “salarymen,” or white-collar workers, and pity for the professional kowtowing required of corporate workers of her parents’ generation.

“They had to work their whole lives, just saying yes to the people above them, never having dreams of their own,” she said.

For now, experts say, a key issue in youth employment is diverging expectations of work.

Today’s young have come of age in a rich nation that is flush with creature comforts and rising expectations.

Many seek independence and variety and reject Japan’s economic system and the traditions it demands: the company loyalty that promotes a lifetime employment system; the sense of gisei, or self-sacrifice, that straps workers into hours of unpaid overtime; the respect for seniors that undergirds the age-based promotion system.

An extensive survey of Japan’s second baby-boomer generation, “Middle Class at Last,” done by the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living, supports these trends.

In an indication of their increasing individualism, only 18.6% of today’s 18- to 23-year-olds said they identify with a group; only 31% said they want to work in the same company until they retire. Three-quarters said they believe that promotions should be based on merit, not seniority, and that they want an interesting job--even if the salary is not high.

Fujiwara, Hakuhodo’s director of research, said this generation is characterized by its “hang loose, let it be” attitude.

Take Miki Morimoto, 24, who has sold musical instruments, taught swimming, sold computers, worked at a jazz cafe and delivered lunches in the past three years. She has been at her current job two months and is ready to quit.

“For me, work is not a question of money,” she said. “It is like a hobby. I am still looking for what I really like.”

Some of the older generation support career exploration but scoff at the lazy sense of entitlement they see in young people who believe that they deserve to be handed a job upon graduation.

“That’s a psychological sickness,” said Nambu of the Pasona agency. “Today’s young people have got no fire. They graduate from college without direction.”

Young people themselves see it differently. There is a sense among them that Japan’s dreams have run their course. Some say they believe that they were born at a bad time. Left to their own devices, they drift.

Tsuyoshi Namai is a college junior who wants to start a music company. He is independent, motivated, intense--but he speaks of a loss of hope among his peers.

“For my parents’ generation, to graduate from high school and college was a big deal,” Namai said.

The older generation dreamed of making Japan into a rich country, he said, “but we have all that now. Young people’s chance to have a dream is shrinking. People don’t have a purpose.”

Magazines, books and television shows exhort young people to make the most of the stalled economy and start their own companies.

Business people and academics urge them to take advantage of the myriad opportunities on the Internet.

But Japan remains hostile to new ideas and new companies. Complex licensing agreements prevent easy entry into any market, and taking out a loan is close to impossible.

So where will they go?

Analysts say some young people will start companies but that many will probably end up delivering pizzas and working in convenience stores.

Many, like Morimoto and Tenmei, live with parents, receiving generous allowances, watching TV and playing video games between short-term, part-time jobs.

But, in what experts say could portend growing social unrest among disenfranchised youth, a few have turned to crime.

Recently, the nation was appalled when police arrested two unemployed 27-year-olds who lived with their parents on charges of burning more than 15 buildings in the last few years. Experts warn that the Aum Supreme Truth religious cult, which allegedly launched a poison gas attack in the Tokyo subway system last year, signals the mounting rage and frustration among Japan’s young.

These cases, though, are rare. Analysts say strong families will keep much of the nation’s unchanneled energy in check.

No one yet knows the effect this generation will ultimately have on Japan’s traditional employment system. But most surmise that it will be great.

Analysts say Japan has entered an era in which no one will be secure in a job the way workers once were.

Japanese companies traditionally hired young, unskilled workers, molded them into proud company members by giving them professional training, and employed them until they retired. But companies will be looking for people with real skills now.

“Young people have the responsibility of preparing themselves for what the economy needs,” Hakuhodo’s Fujiwara said. “The mismatch [between skills and jobs] we are seeing doesn’t just happen at middle age.”

Hideaki Tsuchie, an editor for TYPE, a glossy magazine for twentysomething salarymen, said he believes that this is the generation that will change Japan.

“Japanese society will suddenly change,” he said, “when fathers and sons are both fired by their companies.”