
Japan's Economic Stagnation Is Creating a Nation of Lost Youths - georgecmu
http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/careers/japans-economic-stagnation-is-creating-a-nation-of-lost-youths/19580780/
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patio11
Lifetime employment has an outsized impact on salarymen and on Western
perceptions of Japanese employment, but it is -- and always has been -- a
minority of the Japanese employment market. Perhaps a third of private sector
laborers were covered by it at the peak of the practice a few decades ago.

It is difficult to say with certainty, because lifetime employment is
generally an understanding, not a contractual term. The lines in my employment
contract which my employers and I understood meant lifetime employment reads,
literally, "This employment contract shall last for three years and be
renewable upon mutual agreement."

草食系男子 (grasseating men) is, like metrosexual, a term which sells many books
and means rather little. It has about as much relevance to Japanese employment
as Twilight does to American unemployment. ("American teenage girls, facing a
reality where 50% of prospective suitors are unemployed, have increasingly
escaped into a fantasy where fantastically rich hundred year old vampiric
pedophiles cater to their every material and romantic need. We go to Keiko
Tanaka with the story...")

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hga
Understood and that agrees with my much more distantly acquired picture of
Japan.

What I've gathered is that Japan was divided into a low risk/high gain segment
(the 1/3 or so who were salarymen or above) and a high risk/low gain segment
(pretty much the rest).

If that picture of some decades ago is true, what has and does it mean as that
path to the future (for those who could make it) got and continues to get
increasingly closed off?

Great economic catastrophes tend to result in changes of social contracts and
resulting secondary effects. Surely some, perhaps a lot of that has been
happening in the last couple of decades?

(I do like your Twilight analogy. :-)

