I read an interesting story about a young man in Japan who was an engineer. Although he was good at his job, he just couldn't seem to get on with a company in more than a temporary low-paid capacity.moda0306 wrote: A few things I'd be interested to know is what Japan's unemployment rate and "quality of life" have been during this time of stock-market malaise. Maybe we're looking at the wrong statistics.
Finally, he moved to Taiwan where he found many opportunities and felt that it had allowed him to get his career back on track.
I think what we are going to see in coming years in Japan is not an influx of immigrants from other countries, but rather an exodus of young Japanese who are fed up with their stratified society that creates enormous amounts of stress but provides many fewer opportunities than it did in the past for people just starting out. This dynamic will only aggravate Japan's underlying demographic problems. When an economy is experiencing a structural contraction, ironically I think it is often the youngest who are hurt the most (even though in theory the young people should be valued since there are relatively fewer of them relative to other age groups) as more powerful members of society scramble to protect their pieces of the economy. This manifests itself in the form of people not retiring when expected to, and not being promoted out of lower and mid-level positions when historically they would have been.
If you Google around you will find many stories of youth culture in Japan and how a fatalism and despair has set in in recent years as a result of young people feeling the same high expectations from their families as previous generations felt, but many fewer opportunities to fulfill those expectations.
