22 ms·

Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

286 points by ucha 6y ago

plutonorm 6y ago
They'll also get a burst of creativity. I know that whenever I am unemployed my creativity just gets diverted into the nearest interesting endeavour. One of those might have paid off and become a business. Quite likely in fact, if I hadn't had to work. I've often considered going on benefits so that I can work on my own ideas unhindered by work life. But I wanted a family more than I wanted time to pursue my other dreams. I am very sure there are a great many others who are taking the opportunity to follow their dreams now that they have been forced to stay at home, out of work.
- Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  What sorts of dreams can you follow when you are broke? I mean, realistically? And creative endeavors - how are your affording these things? Are your hobbies cheap? Does the stress of non-work bother you? Were you lucky enough to have decent compensation when you were unemployed or have someone else to support you? How in the world do you "go on benefits" if you are able-bodied? Are you in a country where benefits mean you get more than poverty money?
  - plutonorm 6y ago
    Poverty would be fine if I had the chance to work on what I want to work on. All I need is a computer for my work. I could work on mathematics, physics, I could write a novel. I could read academic papers day in day out, gorge on information. It would be wonderful.
    - andi999 6y ago
      Who buys you food?
    - kyuudou 6y ago
      And shelter? Sewer? You could conceivably be a nomad but that takes some effort and still has baseline costs.
    - Broken_Hippo 6y ago
      In other words: Yes, your hobby is cheap. You only have to buy a computer every once in a while, though you'll run into trouble the moment it gets too out of date or breaks. Poverty doesn't allow you to replace such things. Lots of hobbies require investment. I do art: more specifically, draw and paint, both of which require supplies. My mother sews, but that requires material and making a shirt is more expensive than buying it unless you get material, thread, and things for free. Spouse makes music: Some guitars eat strings and synths take space and electricity (not to mention the cost: Used synths are still expensive).
      - plutonorm 6y ago
        Then I would use the computer in the local library. Failing that I'm quite comfortable just working on things with a pencil and paper, I could quite easily lose myself in mathematics for a life time.
- brazzy 6y ago
  Please actually read the article. You couldn't be further from the truth. This isn't about people temporarily out of a job for whom having a lot of free time is a breath of fresh air. This is about people who have spent decades without a job or on-and-off underpaid jobs because they missed a critical, narrow window in their lives where full-time employment with actual career prospects was available. They feel stifled and useless, not creative.
  - plutonorm 6y ago
    I have understood the article. I am saying for a minority this will be a liberation from duty and will allow for their natural creativity to express itself. Many will feel stifled, useless and un creative - but a few will have an opportunity to create that a normal life would not have afforded them.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - t0mbstone 6y ago
    I read the article and all I could think was, "wow, what a load of excuses". The idea that you can only get a job if you take advantage of a critical window in your life is nonsense. There is plenty of work for people who are willing to work. For example, you could go door to door in your apartment complex and offer to take people's trash out to the dumpster. You could offer to clean their house, wash their dishes, do their laundry, walk their dogs, whatever. Mow people's lawns, weed their flowers, whatever. If you are trustworthy and reliable and even slightly entrepreneurial, you will have more work than you know what to do with. It might not pay well (or hardly at all) at first, but it will build over time. But instead, these losers are sitting at home watching anime and listening to K-Pop and moaning about how they missed their window of opportunity, while they live off their parents for years. Gimme a friggin break. I could definitely see this as being an issue with culture and depression, though. If the culture represses and shames entrepreneurs or people doing menial labor, for example, that would be a big issue. And if you are depressed, it's hard to find motivation to get out there and work and be rejected by all of the people who turn you down as you go door to door.
roenxi 6y ago
The things that stand out to me about Japan: * 3rd largest economy. * 11th largest population (top 10 until recently, they basically tie with Mexico). * If you look at a table of countries by area, they are there. Even in the top half, thanks to places like Tuvalu. I think there is a very strong on-the-face-of-it argument that they just have too many people and not enough for them to do, economically speaking. If they could drop their population and keep the economy about the same (and if they have so many dead-end jobs and so few opportunities, they could) then they would be both a wealthy country and absurdly wealthy on a personal level.
- brazzy 6y ago
  That's not how economy works. There is no such thing in general as "too many people for the economy". "The economy" is the sum of goods and services produced and consumed. Everyone who lives consumes, and could easily consume more. The economy is generally limited by the ability to produce, and is generally limited by the number of working-age people to do the producing. Unemployment can be result of production being bottlenecked by something else: * raw materials - but Japan never had an abundance of those even when their economy looked like it would dominate the world in the 80s * education - but the people the article talks about have university degrees * capital - again not something Japan lacks So it's not one of those. I submit that it's organization - the Japanese society and economy is extremely rigid and maintains some egregious inefficiencies in the labor market, simply because it's always been done that way. Companies would rather hire a new 22 year old graduate at full pay than give a 30 year old with an even better degree a chance at a 30% discount, not out of concerns over the 30 year old's skills being outdated but simply because hiring new graduates is what you do. They'll hire non-graduates only on temporary contracts when short of workers, but never in a million years consider promoting them and converting them to regular employees, no matter how good they are.
  - sprash 6y ago
    That is exactly how the economy works. Demand and supply. Oversupply in labor results directly in diminishing incomes and the ability of employers to be extremely picky about who to hire (e.g. like you said nobody over 30).
pmlnr 6y ago
Japan has the problems now we, Western society will be facing in 20 years. This has been true since the 80s, so it's be nice to learn from it, and not follow it.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > This has been true since the 80s, so it's be nice to learn from it, and not follow it. Unfortunately, history has a tendency to repeat itself. And, even when it's recent history, people are unlike to enact drastic change. Just look at the climate change "debate" :'(
- maddyboo 6y ago
  I agree with you but I think we are already starting to face the same problems now.
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  In my opinion, the end of cheap fossil fuels necessitates we'll look like either Japan or Africa, and I know which of those I'd prefer. Shrinking GDP or shrinking GDP per person may seem like a difficult call for a country's leader, but as a citizen it's a rather obvious choice.
- langitbiru 6y ago
  > not follow it. How? Any idea?
  - netcan 6y ago
    The obvious method would be to have more children.
    - pmlnr 6y ago
      You obviously didn't read the starting article.
    - inglor_cz 6y ago
      Biology puts some limits on that. Fertility of women goes down in the fourth decade of life. The # of aneuploid ova rises sharply. It is possible that there will be scientific development solving that, but so far, we do not have enough young fertile people to practice your obvious method, unless they were ready to have 4+ kids each.
latch 6y ago
I've traveled a fair bit, and every part of Japan that I've been to feels like I've timed-traveled 20 years into a better future [compared to anywhere else I've been]. Yet there seems to be a fairly constant negative economic narrative about Japan (and this narrative seems to be decades old). What's the deal? Are my observations superficial, or are economists just annoyed that Japan doesn't fit their world-view (low growth must equal disaster).
- ginko 6y ago
  >I've traveled a fair bit, and every part of Japan that I've been to feels like I've timed-traveled 20 years into a better future That's strange. To me traveling Japan feels like entering an alternative history where the 80s never ended.
  - contingencies 6y ago
    Japan seemed to me a case study in hiding sociocultural problems with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition and specifically some sort of perverse derivative of Confucianism. Korea has the same problem. It's a dead-end culture: China and Vietnam finally threw off the shackles in the 20th century at great cost, but Northeast Asia's sociocultural and political economies are apparently still largely running on ideas generated by a 5th century upwardly mobile accountant.
    - baud147258 6y ago
      China's behavior in their Western provinces doesn't convince me they have really dropped their shackles last century
      - inglor_cz 6y ago
        Uh, they just shackled someone else. This is depressingly common across human history.
    - giantDinosaur 6y ago
agd 6y ago
Does Japan really have a ‘lost generation of jobless’ if their unemployment rate is only 2.29%? That seems incredibly low to me. Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/unemployment-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/unemployment...
- baud147258 6y ago
  Do they count people as unemployed only if they are actively looking for work? If it was the case, there could be many people without a job and not looking for one, which could explain the discrepancy
chiefalchemist 6y ago
Presuming this will undermine birth rates (read: low or no population growth) Japan might be stuck in the cycle for years to come. That said, many First World economies have leaded on immigration to back fill the gap of low birth-rates. For examples: In the USA, that's been a noticeable growth in Spanish-speaking residents. In Germany and France, there's been growth in the Middle Eastern (mainly Muslim) residents. Needless to say, these shifts - economically necessary - have sociopolitical implications. It's possible these disconnects amplify as robotics and AI take over more and more jobs. Japan? What would be Japan's source of new immigrants? How easily or not can they assimilate into that culture? Or is a relative lack of diversity a positive as the socio-political fabric in the West gets more and more frayed, and not just at the edges.
- baud147258 6y ago
  In France it's more North and Sub-Saharan Africa than Middle/Near-East
Saint_Genet 6y ago
I went to university in the same city I grew up in, and made the mistake of living with my with my parents for the first two years. Let me tell you, you don't really become an adult until you move out.
- glouwbug 6y ago
  The stresses of university already propels you into adult hood, and by living with your parents, the extra money you save on housing will set you up better for when you do move out. Living with your parents is not the definition of childhood. The definition of childhood is not realizing rent and food cost large sums of money, or that credit systems allow you to purchase rent and food without money, or that houses can be bought with the bank's money. I'd go one step further to say childhood ends when one realizes the fictional settings in books and video games are just linearly connected thoughts etched into their respective paper or magnetic mediums, but that's another topic.
  - creata 6y ago
    What stresses do you have in mind? (I'm a third-year right now and I've had nothing to stress about and nothing to do. I just read HN and developer blogs all day. I'd definitely hesitate to say I'm an adult.)
    - com2kid 6y ago
      Planning your own meals, fixing things around the apartment when they break[1], unclogging the toilet, planning your own schedule. That said college is much less stressful, success criteria are well defined (homework, tests, internships, graduate, job) and a lot of things are taken care of for you. But it is a huge step up compared to high school. [1] Assuming you don't live in a dorm and you are renting from some semi-shady place that is slow to respond to maintenance requests because they don't figure students will complain.
    - glouwbug 6y ago
      I found university fairly difficult. I studied a Bachelors of Applied Science in a mix of mechanical, electrical, and software engineering, and I had lots of sleepless nights, feeling as if though I was running some sort of daily mathematical gauntlet. I had my parents to help with the cooking and the (rent-free) living, but the daily commute, the 8 hour days of class, the 2AM study sessions, projects, and homework assignments, really threw me into what I perceived to be adult hood. To each their own, though. If one doesn't feel challenged in higher education, then I can see how one could perceive University to just be an extension of high school. The real kicker is, much doesn't change after University. A day job can be easier, and less stress, and learning how to toss a couple chicken breasts on the pan after work is pretty simple
watwut 6y ago
The American obsession over living or not with parents sounds almost pathological to me. Being jobless is issue. Long term inability to find partner is issue. But, if you don't have partner, what exactly is the reason for moving to live alone and why is focus specifically on "omg someone lives with parents"? I mean, multigenerational households were historical norm. It is not something super special that happened just now nor catastrophy. It does have disadvantages, especially when relationships are bad. But, if you get along then it is a good thing and pretty often makes living together rational decision. Also, every time topic of loneliness comes out, hacker news is full of lonely people talking about how it sux. One way to be less lonely is to live with other people and keep close contact with family - assuming no one is narcissist or overly controlling or something like that.
- gfxgirl 6y ago
  You need to help spread the idea that the reason people don't live with their parents is corporations brainwashed them into wanting to move out so they'd buy cars, rent apartments, and fill those apartments with things. No idea if it's true Of course corporations brainwashed us into believing smoking is cool and wedding rings are required and no amount of try to point that out as made a single % dent in getting people to stop wanting either. Maybe sponsor a few movies a year showing happy families living under the same roof caring for each other.
- decafninja 6y ago
  Completely agree. I'm a Korean American in my thirties, and most of my East Asian American friends lived with their parents until they got married, or they had to move a very long distance away for work. Several of my friends who are now entering their early 40s and are still unmarried continue to live with their parents. All are doing at least above average financially and could easily afford to move out, but they (myself included) don't see the point. In contrast, my non Asian friends are shocked when the hear about stuff like this. It's like they cannot possibly imagine living with your parents beyond college. It's tantamount to admitting you are a failure at life. I once lived on my own for two years in my twenties just to see what it was like. My apartment was barely 15 minutes away from my parents home. After two years, I came to the conclusion it was pointless because all I did at my place was sleep, so I moved back in. I didn't move back out until I got married many years later. I will admit, I was not exactly a big hit with women and at least part of the reason I chose to move out back then was to see if it would improve my love life. It did not. YMMV, but many of my aforementioned Asian friends who are happily living with their parents today at an "advanced age" are also happily dating. For that matter, I was completely dateless/loveless when I was living on my own, but it ironically improved significantly after I had moved back in with my parents, culminating in my marriage.
yorwba 6y ago
I wonder how much the stories about Japanese unemployment are just driven the the need for a good story vs. looking at actual figures. The Japanese labor force participation rate for 15-64 year-olds rose from about 70% in 1990 to 79% in 2020, as estimated by the International Labour Organization. In that time frame, it overtook China and the US (both have falling labor force participation rates) and the only other country with a similar trajectory I could find is Germany. Most other countries I tried have much lower rates. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.ZS?locations=JP-US-KR-HK-CN-FR-DE https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.ZS?location...
- brazzy 6y ago
  The participation rate is a really coarse measure. In Japan, it has increased mainly because among the younger generation, far more women stay in the workforce after their 20s. But as the article describes, their career prospects are very limited and few of them ever get a chance at stable lifetime employment that used to be the norm (but is also becoming less and less available) for men.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    The male labor force participation rate grew from 83% to 86%. So although the increase was greater for women (from 57% to 72%), that hasn't reduced male employment. Male https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.MA.ZS?locations=JP-US-KR-HK-CN-FR-DE https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.MA.ZS?locat... Female https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.FE.ZS?locations=JP-US-KR-HK-CN-FR-DE https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.FE.ZS?locat... By "stable lifetime employment" do you mean staying at a single company for one's whole working life? Do you have any statistics showing that this is decreasing? (Even if it does, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.)
    - brazzy 6y ago
      > By "stable lifetime employment" do you mean staying at a single company for one's whole working life? Mainly I mean a full-time, non-temporary work contract. Traditionally, in Japan that kind of contract also implies "staying at a single company for one's whole working life". > Do you have any statistics showing that this is decreasing? Look at the second chart here: https://www.nippon.com/en/currents/d00151/ https://www.nippon.com/en/currents/d00151/ > Even if it does, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. You think so because in the US and Europe, "staying at a single company for one's whole working life" is usually sub-optimal for the employee's career and earning potential. When switching companies, you can usually negotiate a higher salary than you could get via raises at your old company. In Japan, it's different. High salaries and career prospects are basically only available in those "staying at a single company for one's whole working life" gigs, and they are given only to fresh university graduates. If you don't manage to get one of those (because companies weren't hiring when you were a fresh graduate), you'll be forever a second-class employee with a temporary contract, lower pay and less benefits.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gfxgirl 6y ago
A friend of mine works at Amazon Japan. She's working 10-12 hrs a day, 6 days week. She gets paid no overtime. AFAIK that's illegal in Japan but here Amazon is doing it.
- falcolas 6y ago
  Companies demanding unpaid overtime and long workweeks is common enough that Japanese literature has a term for them: Black Companies.
- bobloblaw45 6y ago
  Isn't it like a cultural thing over there where you're expected to work overtime and essentially kill yourself for your company? Might be dated info but I remember someone saying nobody even thinks about going home before the boss regardless of when they got in so the boss never has the chance to see them leave.
  - justicezyx 6y ago
    No that's the government deliberately practice no oversight on corporations.
- tasogare 6y ago
  Not a big news, Amazon is a crap company exploiting its workers worldwide and creating a lot of externalities. If the practice is illegal, an employee could sue (and win) but that personal choice. On the 10-12 hours, the concept of "work" in Japan is a big different than in the West, in particular because there seems to have almost no notion of productivity. I often see 4 people on a task that would be allocated to one worker in Europe, or 12 person cleaning the same square meter. That combined with perfectionism (again, with no notion of productivity) that if 1% improvement can be done with 300% effort they try to do it, is a perfect cocktail to raise the total "worked" hours. And finally there is the bureaucracy. Today I spoke with someone about implementing an idea, where the implementation of the idea is literally sending an email. I spend 10 minutes explaining it. But that could not be done directly! No, that person need to consult her boss. How long this will take? Probably at least half an hour... 2 or 3 times more if there is back and forth with me through the intermediate person. How many "worked" hours does this represent in total? I plan on a least one man/hour. In my country: doing the task directly, which represents at least a 120 times better productivity...
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/dyEN7 https://archive.is/dyEN7
maerF0x0 6y ago
I feel like the "Jobless and living with parents" pejorative is missing the mark. Jobless -- So what? If a country has figured out how to provide for its people w/o jobs, so what? For example if we had perfect AI-robot slaves we'd all be jobless. Would it be a problem? Maybe we should ask people why they want a job, maybe what they want to do doesnt require one? "Living with their parents" - Again, so what? Much of the world and across much of history this was just how it was. No one denigrates someone 0-20 for living with their parents, why should a 30 yr old be denigrated for the same. Plus, for many of us so lucky the same scenario, with opposite take, will occur-- our parents will move in with us later in their life and we'll "live with our parents" again. Plus when you add that median sq foot of homes (at least in USA) is rising, you can comfortably live with more people in "home". With double master bedrooms more common and more square feet we're blurring the lines of what a single home means. Some houses are so big that you could just put a dividing wall and a separate entrance and you'd have 2 homes...
- saagarjha 6y ago
  That's because the scenario you've mentioned does not describe these households. The problem here is that there are adults who are partially or wholly supported by their parents in a house where they are not living with (nor was it designed for them to live with) a spouse or children.
  - maerF0x0 6y ago
    Again. We're failing to address the "so what?" What does this scenario represent that is _the actual problem_ of the matter?
    - NewOrderNow 6y ago
      This comment seems to be the antithesis of what this community is trying to accomplish, which is asking the what
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      It's just not sustainable if everyone did this. The economy needs people who are gainfully employed and not single and living with their parents. I say this as someone who is single and currently living with my parents.
offtop5 6y ago
>Under Katsube’s direction, Junko also enrolled in a program that helps shut-ins learn social skills by engaging in activities such as gardening, music, sports, and volunteering. America desperately needs this. I fear the rise of social media has caused more and more people to stay inside all day without interacting with any real humans. I've found Meetup to work very well for getting out of the house. I did find it interesting how closely moving out and getting married was linked here. I've seen members of my family have children, without moving out and I definitely moved out while single.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  > I've found Meetup to work very well for getting out of the house. Except a lot of the meetups where I live either haven't come back or they are "virtual". :(
  - offtop5 6y ago
    I was thinking before Corona, last year was very good for me. Once you realize social media is mostly fake validation seeking behavior you can decide if that's what you want . Ends up being tons of stress and mental anguish for nothing at all. I'll say without a doubt people are absolutely meaner via social media vs real life. I recall when I lived in Chicago how everyone in certain areas knew each other. Act like a jerk and word travels fast. Thus this keeps people friendly. On Reddit, which I had to step back from , it take 10 seconds to create a username. Then you can throw out all types of vitriol at people you'll never meet. Why be apart of that ? I do find Reddit to be very helpful if you have a specific technical question, but the moment you venture out of tech people get really nasty really fast. I'm still debating if it's worth returning to. It's at the point where I might hire someone to run the social media accounts for a product I may be releasing. I have absolutely no interest in using social media myself. I have a sort of live now list for once Corona ends
    - aapppwe 6y ago
      what are some good meetup for young folks? i find it hard to meet new people when i move to new city like seattle or sf
sirspacey 6y ago
The article clearly identifies the source of this challenge: HR culture I’ve worked in HR in the US. To say it is unbearably broken doesn’t begin to cover it. Japan’s rigid hiring rituals are specific but I’ve encountered quite a bit of rigidity in HR culture in the US as well. As we see nearly daily here on HN, the “filter process” HR uses is highly resistant to change and based on traditions that are objectively useless and horribly biased. Somehow we seem to miss that economists are not the best experts to consult with here. Put another way - fix HR and suddenly economists wouldn’t need to “explain” so much when it comes to labor market dislocations. So why haven’t we fixed these issues? I know hundreds of people in HR trying to address these challenges. They invariably run into the fact that executives and hiring managers are the source of the misconceptions driving these systemic problems. That’s not a category of people who get overridden in companies. I encountered this even in my own startups. Board members and company leaders believed they had near clairvoyance on how to hire - despite rarely being correct in practice. tl;dr; The people (execs, hiring managers) who set the expectations around hiring have an unreasonable and inflexible dedication to their assumptions about how hiring should be done, leading those given the job of managing the hiring process (HR) to design woefully inefficient and biased hiring processes, leading to endemic dislocation in the job market that destroys the lives of people who didn’t pass the first check-point in their careers. Checkout “DIY University” for more history on this issue. This is a problem that can, and has, destroyed nations.
- marrianeKK 6y ago
  >The article clearly identifies the source of this challenge: HR culture I don't think so. I don't think the problem here is companies struggling to find the right people. It seems to me that companies have slashed hiring. There are too few regular job positions and too many people seeking them.
  - sirspacey 6y ago
    I can see that point. Supply & demand are usually the go-to explanation. However, liquidity in the labor market is rarely well-understood. This article specifically addresses people who are never able to enter the workforce. In the US the data is stark - there are literally hundreds of thousands of positions that are never filled, despite millions of job seekers. To oversimplify with one major hiring filter - most jobs require X years of experience in Y narrowly-defined industry/region/tool/skill. Liquidity in the labor market is the only answer to this problem - to get experience you have to be able to get a position in the first place, often in a role unrelated to where you end up. Economists see jobs as “widgets.” Of course, we all know we spend most of our time doing none of the things listed on the job we originally applied for (or were tested for in interviews). Supply/demand explanations mask the fact that most work today is fluid. Getting people into the workforce creates economic growth. The barrier to that growth is a broken HR system. It doesn’t seem to be, at first, a root cause that is significant enough in size to hobble a whole economy. Until you consider that nearly every employer has the same issue.
cryptica 6y ago
I don't think it's a coincidence that Japan has the highest debt-to-GDP ratio and also the largest number of jobless youth living with their parents. Debt fueled by inflationary government money-printing drives wealth inequality between asset owners and salary earners. Newly printed currency boosts asset prices and inflates away salaries. As Milton Friedman pointed out, it also increases the tax burden on citizens two-fold because inflation causes salary earners to be pushed into higher tax brackets over time as some of their salaries are eventually negotiated upwards to offset inflation. My guess is that it has something to do with what happened in 1971 when the US dollar (and all currencies which were pegged to it) moved off of the gold standard. This was the time when asset values started inflating. This is why it only affected millennials and they could not afford their own house. Japan took on more public debt than any other country which is why they felt this effect more strongly since they ended up having to print their national currency at a higher rate (thus resulting in worse asset-inflation) in order to pay off the interest on their debt.
- mshumi 6y ago
  This is probably closer to the truth. It's not a coincidence that Japan was the first developed country to experience stagflation and is experiencing these problems.
- ivalm 6y ago
  That’s a lot of words but your facts are false. 1. Japan has low wealth inequality 2. Japan does NOT have high inflation 3. Japan has both low unemployment and high labor participation [1] https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SI.POV.GINI/rankings https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SI.POV.GINI/rank... [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/inflation-cpi https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/inflation-cpi [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_market_of_Japan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_market_of_Japan
  - cdavid 6y ago
    2 and 3 are true, 1 is more debatable. Gini coefficient of Japan is quite higher than most European countries, though it measures income not wealth. US are at 0.39, Japan at 0.34, most Western European countries below 0.3. A lot of people here also base their thinking on visits to Japan, but that's sampling bias. Poverty is less obvious than in the US or even Europe, but Japan poverty rate is at ~15.5 %, much closer again to the US (~17.5 %) than to Western European countries, closer to 10 % or even below. There are plenty of "dead" cities in Japan that are depopulating fast, but they are not on a typical tour when you visit the country. Some of them are < 1 hour of train from center Tokyo.
hikerclimber 6y ago
good. hope this happens in the U.S.
mixmastamyk 6y ago
If they forced all the folks working sixty-hour weeks down to thirty, and hired the unemployed to fill the gaps, the country would be healthier.
- jjnoakes 6y ago
  What would that do to wages?
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    They would adjust depending on how paid, salary or hourly. I believe productivity would be boosted over time as the rusty unemployed got back into the groove.
  - diob 6y ago
    It'd probably do wonders for their economy, given the results from that Microsoft test where they only worked 4 days a week (https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-says-4-day-workweek-boosted-workers-productivity-by-40 https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-say...). With that boost, people could work less and they could afford to pay them more. It's a win win situation, but it's hard to change views when it comes to work. Folks want to believe that working more is better, but really it's about quality over quantity. We'd see crazy economic benefits if we stopped being traditionalists about work and started following the science / data.
    - AA-BA-94-2A-56 6y ago
      People working 60 hours aren't going to have time to consume services. If everyone worked 30 hours instead, you'd probably see an increase in the demand for services (entertainment, fitness, etc). This would result in an increase in GDP, growth in the economy, and likely more demand for workers. But that's just my econ 101 knowledge.
      - diob 6y ago
        Yup, and they'd have time to start their own pursuits or small businesses. It's really a win win.
adultSwim 6y ago
Sounds like America
info781 6y ago
I blame the parents for this, they should have kicked the kids out of the house when they were 22. Then they could live with roommates, men and women and learn how to live. There was a show about that in the '90s bunch of good-looking men and women and sometimes a monkey. I can't remember the name of it though.
- jxramos 6y ago
  I was wondering about that "enabling" angle as well. I remember when I was in my young twenties a good friend of mine had a parent who pushed him out of the nest. I remember being shocked and offended by the crazy act and thought it equally outrageous as he did. Years later I look back and see that it actually taught my friend the ropes and the difficulties in life taken for granted with the parents taking care of things they figured out years ago. People won't know how hard life is until they get their hands dirty and make it on their own. I always found it curious how the various species out there push their offspring on to adulthood. Trial by fire, diving in to learn how to swim, there's a lot of wisdom in all that. Life is hard, and at some point you realize people don't get get old by default, unencumbered by adversity and trials and tribulations--all those older folks you see are actually survivors.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    I bet for every one like your friend that succeeds there will be another that ends up lying in the gutter somewhere.
8bitsrule 6y ago
To which entity are they 'lost'? To the state? To corporations? "Those who successfully navigate the arduous corporate recruiting process will be rewarded with a secure place on the corporate ladder" Those who do not see that (+ the 60-80-hour weeks) as rewarding will not be motivated to pursue it. Economic slavery is over-rated. They may or may not be 'lost' to themselves, depending on what they're doing with all that time. Across Asia, many people found themselves meditating for decades. They weren't jacked into any perverse realities. "The rest are largely condemned to flit from one low-paying job to the next, with little avenue for advancement and zero job security." Wow, judgemental much? Many well-known authors, poets, artists, composers, DJs,even hackers found themselves in that position. It's a fair cop, but society's to blame.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  This is delusional. It would be fine if all these shut-ins were living personally satisfied, fulfilling lives. But the vast, vast, vast majority are not. Most live with deep regret, shame, depression, and isolation, and romanticizing their situation as some sort of meditative peace is f'd up in my opinion.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    It's not delusional, it's a simple statement of fact. It would also be nice if we would stop shaming these people and instead protect them and encourage them to socialize and study. Maybe they wouldn't be so angry on internet forums.
kwargs 6y ago
Another jap article, can't go a week on HK without mentioning japan this, japan that.
timoth3y 6y ago
The hikikomori are written about a lot in the Japanese and western press, and I think it's great that Japanese society is making a conscious effort to reach out to people and see how they can be made more happy and productive. The stats in the article are probably correct, but leaves out some very important context. - Many Japanese adults live with their parents. Multi-generational households are quite common, especially outside of the big cites. This is not new. In fact, it is becoming less common, not more. - Japan has an official unemployment rate of about 2%, but for almost all jobs there are more openings than applicants. From the article: > For the class of 2021, the ratio is set to dip to 1.53 jobs per graduate, from 1.83 this year. “It’s like the employment ice age,” Kubo says. “It’s happening again.” The situation for these people is not nearly as dire as many try to paint it.
rbrbr 6y ago
Can’t view the article without paying
garfieldnate 6y ago
After watching this I feel a little bit ungrateful. I lived there for a while and had a permanent position, which is really coveted. I left after a year and half because I just hated the working culture so much. Because I speak English I was able to leave. Japan is largely monolingual, and the English education for children stresses test performance over communication. Japan has always had a powerful enough economy that monolingualism worked okay for the country as a whole. But for the miserable individuals who believe they have no opportunities, monolingualism is a trap that keeps them in the system where they do not find the opportunities. Meanwhile I speak English and can therefore work in dozens of countries if I so choose, though as a linguist I actually savor opportunities to study new languages).
acd 6y ago
Japan never cleaned up the debt created by its banking system during the Lost decade. This enormous debt makes it harder for young people to own their own place, in effect tget rent from the bank through loans. This is despite that Japans population is shrinking and there should be more houses on the market. Free debt creation creates a generational ladder where older generations own their houses and younger rent due to high debt creation. Old could buy before the exponential growth of debt was created. Lost decade https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan) Demographic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan

286 points by ucha 6y ago

They'll also get a burst of creativity. I know that whenever I am unemployed my creativity just gets diverted into the nearest interesting endeavour. One of those might have paid off and become a business. Quite likely in fact, if I hadn't had to work. I've often considered going on benefits so that I can work on my own ideas unhindered by work life. But I wanted a family more than I wanted time to pursue my other dreams. I am very sure there are a great many others who are taking the opportunity to follow their dreams now that they have been forced to stay at home, out of work.

Broken_Hippo 6y ago
What sorts of dreams can you follow when you are broke? I mean, realistically? And creative endeavors - how are your affording these things? Are your hobbies cheap? Does the stress of non-work bother you? Were you lucky enough to have decent compensation when you were unemployed or have someone else to support you? How in the world do you "go on benefits" if you are able-bodied? Are you in a country where benefits mean you get more than poverty money?
- plutonorm 6y ago
  Poverty would be fine if I had the chance to work on what I want to work on. All I need is a computer for my work. I could work on mathematics, physics, I could write a novel. I could read academic papers day in day out, gorge on information. It would be wonderful.
  - andi999 6y ago
    Who buys you food?
  - kyuudou 6y ago
    And shelter? Sewer? You could conceivably be a nomad but that takes some effort and still has baseline costs.
  - Broken_Hippo 6y ago
    In other words: Yes, your hobby is cheap. You only have to buy a computer every once in a while, though you'll run into trouble the moment it gets too out of date or breaks. Poverty doesn't allow you to replace such things. Lots of hobbies require investment. I do art: more specifically, draw and paint, both of which require supplies. My mother sews, but that requires material and making a shirt is more expensive than buying it unless you get material, thread, and things for free. Spouse makes music: Some guitars eat strings and synths take space and electricity (not to mention the cost: Used synths are still expensive).
    - plutonorm 6y ago
      Then I would use the computer in the local library. Failing that I'm quite comfortable just working on things with a pencil and paper, I could quite easily lose myself in mathematics for a life time.
brazzy 6y ago
Please actually read the article. You couldn't be further from the truth. This isn't about people temporarily out of a job for whom having a lot of free time is a breath of fresh air. This is about people who have spent decades without a job or on-and-off underpaid jobs because they missed a critical, narrow window in their lives where full-time employment with actual career prospects was available. They feel stifled and useless, not creative.
- plutonorm 6y ago
  I have understood the article. I am saying for a minority this will be a liberation from duty and will allow for their natural creativity to express itself. Many will feel stifled, useless and un creative - but a few will have an opportunity to create that a normal life would not have afforded them.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- t0mbstone 6y ago
  I read the article and all I could think was, "wow, what a load of excuses". The idea that you can only get a job if you take advantage of a critical window in your life is nonsense. There is plenty of work for people who are willing to work. For example, you could go door to door in your apartment complex and offer to take people's trash out to the dumpster. You could offer to clean their house, wash their dishes, do their laundry, walk their dogs, whatever. Mow people's lawns, weed their flowers, whatever. If you are trustworthy and reliable and even slightly entrepreneurial, you will have more work than you know what to do with. It might not pay well (or hardly at all) at first, but it will build over time. But instead, these losers are sitting at home watching anime and listening to K-Pop and moaning about how they missed their window of opportunity, while they live off their parents for years. Gimme a friggin break. I could definitely see this as being an issue with culture and depression, though. If the culture represses and shames entrepreneurs or people doing menial labor, for example, that would be a big issue. And if you are depressed, it's hard to find motivation to get out there and work and be rejected by all of the people who turn you down as you go door to door.

roenxi 6y ago

The things that stand out to me about Japan: * 3rd largest economy. * 11th largest population (top 10 until recently, they basically tie with Mexico). * If you look at a table of countries by area, they are there. Even in the top half, thanks to places like Tuvalu. I think there is a very strong on-the-face-of-it argument that they just have too many people and not enough for them to do, economically speaking. If they could drop their population and keep the economy about the same (and if they have so many dead-end jobs and so few opportunities, they could) then they would be both a wealthy country and absurdly wealthy on a personal level.

brazzy 6y ago
That's not how economy works. There is no such thing in general as "too many people for the economy". "The economy" is the sum of goods and services produced and consumed. Everyone who lives consumes, and could easily consume more. The economy is generally limited by the ability to produce, and is generally limited by the number of working-age people to do the producing. Unemployment can be result of production being bottlenecked by something else: * raw materials - but Japan never had an abundance of those even when their economy looked like it would dominate the world in the 80s * education - but the people the article talks about have university degrees * capital - again not something Japan lacks So it's not one of those. I submit that it's organization - the Japanese society and economy is extremely rigid and maintains some egregious inefficiencies in the labor market, simply because it's always been done that way. Companies would rather hire a new 22 year old graduate at full pay than give a 30 year old with an even better degree a chance at a 30% discount, not out of concerns over the 30 year old's skills being outdated but simply because hiring new graduates is what you do. They'll hire non-graduates only on temporary contracts when short of workers, but never in a million years consider promoting them and converting them to regular employees, no matter how good they are.
- sprash 6y ago
  That is exactly how the economy works. Demand and supply. Oversupply in labor results directly in diminishing incomes and the ability of employers to be extremely picky about who to hire (e.g. like you said nobody over 30).

pmlnr 6y ago

Japan has the problems now we, Western society will be facing in 20 years. This has been true since the 80s, so it's be nice to learn from it, and not follow it.

mschuster91 6y ago
> This has been true since the 80s, so it's be nice to learn from it, and not follow it. Unfortunately, history has a tendency to repeat itself. And, even when it's recent history, people are unlike to enact drastic change. Just look at the climate change "debate" :'(
maddyboo 6y ago
I agree with you but I think we are already starting to face the same problems now.
SuoDuanDao 6y ago
In my opinion, the end of cheap fossil fuels necessitates we'll look like either Japan or Africa, and I know which of those I'd prefer. Shrinking GDP or shrinking GDP per person may seem like a difficult call for a country's leader, but as a citizen it's a rather obvious choice.
langitbiru 6y ago
> not follow it. How? Any idea?
- netcan 6y ago
  The obvious method would be to have more children.
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    You obviously didn't read the starting article.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    Biology puts some limits on that. Fertility of women goes down in the fourth decade of life. The # of aneuploid ova rises sharply. It is possible that there will be scientific development solving that, but so far, we do not have enough young fertile people to practice your obvious method, unless they were ready to have 4+ kids each.

latch 6y ago

I've traveled a fair bit, and every part of Japan that I've been to feels like I've timed-traveled 20 years into a better future [compared to anywhere else I've been]. Yet there seems to be a fairly constant negative economic narrative about Japan (and this narrative seems to be decades old). What's the deal? Are my observations superficial, or are economists just annoyed that Japan doesn't fit their world-view (low growth must equal disaster).

ginko 6y ago
>I've traveled a fair bit, and every part of Japan that I've been to feels like I've timed-traveled 20 years into a better future That's strange. To me traveling Japan feels like entering an alternative history where the 80s never ended.
- contingencies 6y ago
  Japan seemed to me a case study in hiding sociocultural problems with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition and specifically some sort of perverse derivative of Confucianism. Korea has the same problem. It's a dead-end culture: China and Vietnam finally threw off the shackles in the 20th century at great cost, but Northeast Asia's sociocultural and political economies are apparently still largely running on ideas generated by a 5th century upwardly mobile accountant.
  - baud147258 6y ago
    China's behavior in their Western provinces doesn't convince me they have really dropped their shackles last century
    - inglor_cz 6y ago
      Uh, they just shackled someone else. This is depressingly common across human history.
  - giantDinosaur 6y ago

agd 6y ago

Does Japan really have a ‘lost generation of jobless’ if their unemployment rate is only 2.29%? That seems incredibly low to me. Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/unemployment-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/unemployment...

baud147258 6y ago
Do they count people as unemployed only if they are actively looking for work? If it was the case, there could be many people without a job and not looking for one, which could explain the discrepancy

chiefalchemist 6y ago

Presuming this will undermine birth rates (read: low or no population growth) Japan might be stuck in the cycle for years to come. That said, many First World economies have leaded on immigration to back fill the gap of low birth-rates. For examples: In the USA, that's been a noticeable growth in Spanish-speaking residents. In Germany and France, there's been growth in the Middle Eastern (mainly Muslim) residents. Needless to say, these shifts - economically necessary - have sociopolitical implications. It's possible these disconnects amplify as robotics and AI take over more and more jobs. Japan? What would be Japan's source of new immigrants? How easily or not can they assimilate into that culture? Or is a relative lack of diversity a positive as the socio-political fabric in the West gets more and more frayed, and not just at the edges.

baud147258 6y ago
In France it's more North and Sub-Saharan Africa than Middle/Near-East

Saint_Genet 6y ago

I went to university in the same city I grew up in, and made the mistake of living with my with my parents for the first two years. Let me tell you, you don't really become an adult until you move out.

glouwbug 6y ago
The stresses of university already propels you into adult hood, and by living with your parents, the extra money you save on housing will set you up better for when you do move out. Living with your parents is not the definition of childhood. The definition of childhood is not realizing rent and food cost large sums of money, or that credit systems allow you to purchase rent and food without money, or that houses can be bought with the bank's money. I'd go one step further to say childhood ends when one realizes the fictional settings in books and video games are just linearly connected thoughts etched into their respective paper or magnetic mediums, but that's another topic.
- creata 6y ago
  What stresses do you have in mind? (I'm a third-year right now and I've had nothing to stress about and nothing to do. I just read HN and developer blogs all day. I'd definitely hesitate to say I'm an adult.)
  - com2kid 6y ago
    Planning your own meals, fixing things around the apartment when they break[1], unclogging the toilet, planning your own schedule. That said college is much less stressful, success criteria are well defined (homework, tests, internships, graduate, job) and a lot of things are taken care of for you. But it is a huge step up compared to high school. [1] Assuming you don't live in a dorm and you are renting from some semi-shady place that is slow to respond to maintenance requests because they don't figure students will complain.
  - glouwbug 6y ago
    I found university fairly difficult. I studied a Bachelors of Applied Science in a mix of mechanical, electrical, and software engineering, and I had lots of sleepless nights, feeling as if though I was running some sort of daily mathematical gauntlet. I had my parents to help with the cooking and the (rent-free) living, but the daily commute, the 8 hour days of class, the 2AM study sessions, projects, and homework assignments, really threw me into what I perceived to be adult hood. To each their own, though. If one doesn't feel challenged in higher education, then I can see how one could perceive University to just be an extension of high school. The real kicker is, much doesn't change after University. A day job can be easier, and less stress, and learning how to toss a couple chicken breasts on the pan after work is pretty simple

watwut 6y ago

The American obsession over living or not with parents sounds almost pathological to me. Being jobless is issue. Long term inability to find partner is issue. But, if you don't have partner, what exactly is the reason for moving to live alone and why is focus specifically on "omg someone lives with parents"? I mean, multigenerational households were historical norm. It is not something super special that happened just now nor catastrophy. It does have disadvantages, especially when relationships are bad. But, if you get along then it is a good thing and pretty often makes living together rational decision. Also, every time topic of loneliness comes out, hacker news is full of lonely people talking about how it sux. One way to be less lonely is to live with other people and keep close contact with family - assuming no one is narcissist or overly controlling or something like that.

gfxgirl 6y ago
You need to help spread the idea that the reason people don't live with their parents is corporations brainwashed them into wanting to move out so they'd buy cars, rent apartments, and fill those apartments with things. No idea if it's true Of course corporations brainwashed us into believing smoking is cool and wedding rings are required and no amount of try to point that out as made a single % dent in getting people to stop wanting either. Maybe sponsor a few movies a year showing happy families living under the same roof caring for each other.
decafninja 6y ago
Completely agree. I'm a Korean American in my thirties, and most of my East Asian American friends lived with their parents until they got married, or they had to move a very long distance away for work. Several of my friends who are now entering their early 40s and are still unmarried continue to live with their parents. All are doing at least above average financially and could easily afford to move out, but they (myself included) don't see the point. In contrast, my non Asian friends are shocked when the hear about stuff like this. It's like they cannot possibly imagine living with your parents beyond college. It's tantamount to admitting you are a failure at life. I once lived on my own for two years in my twenties just to see what it was like. My apartment was barely 15 minutes away from my parents home. After two years, I came to the conclusion it was pointless because all I did at my place was sleep, so I moved back in. I didn't move back out until I got married many years later. I will admit, I was not exactly a big hit with women and at least part of the reason I chose to move out back then was to see if it would improve my love life. It did not. YMMV, but many of my aforementioned Asian friends who are happily living with their parents today at an "advanced age" are also happily dating. For that matter, I was completely dateless/loveless when I was living on my own, but it ironically improved significantly after I had moved back in with my parents, culminating in my marriage.

yorwba 6y ago

I wonder how much the stories about Japanese unemployment are just driven the the need for a good story vs. looking at actual figures. The Japanese labor force participation rate for 15-64 year-olds rose from about 70% in 1990 to 79% in 2020, as estimated by the International Labour Organization. In that time frame, it overtook China and the US (both have falling labor force participation rates) and the only other country with a similar trajectory I could find is Germany. Most other countries I tried have much lower rates. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.ZS?locations=JP-US-KR-HK-CN-FR-DE https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.ZS?location...

brazzy 6y ago
The participation rate is a really coarse measure. In Japan, it has increased mainly because among the younger generation, far more women stay in the workforce after their 20s. But as the article describes, their career prospects are very limited and few of them ever get a chance at stable lifetime employment that used to be the norm (but is also becoming less and less available) for men.
- yorwba 6y ago
  The male labor force participation rate grew from 83% to 86%. So although the increase was greater for women (from 57% to 72%), that hasn't reduced male employment. Male https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.MA.ZS?locations=JP-US-KR-HK-CN-FR-DE https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.MA.ZS?locat... Female https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.FE.ZS?locations=JP-US-KR-HK-CN-FR-DE https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.FE.ZS?locat... By "stable lifetime employment" do you mean staying at a single company for one's whole working life? Do you have any statistics showing that this is decreasing? (Even if it does, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.)
  - brazzy 6y ago
    > By "stable lifetime employment" do you mean staying at a single company for one's whole working life? Mainly I mean a full-time, non-temporary work contract. Traditionally, in Japan that kind of contract also implies "staying at a single company for one's whole working life". > Do you have any statistics showing that this is decreasing? Look at the second chart here: https://www.nippon.com/en/currents/d00151/ https://www.nippon.com/en/currents/d00151/ > Even if it does, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. You think so because in the US and Europe, "staying at a single company for one's whole working life" is usually sub-optimal for the employee's career and earning potential. When switching companies, you can usually negotiate a higher salary than you could get via raises at your old company. In Japan, it's different. High salaries and career prospects are basically only available in those "staying at a single company for one's whole working life" gigs, and they are given only to fresh university graduates. If you don't manage to get one of those (because companies weren't hiring when you were a fresh graduate), you'll be forever a second-class employee with a temporary contract, lower pay and less benefits.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

gfxgirl 6y ago

A friend of mine works at Amazon Japan. She's working 10-12 hrs a day, 6 days week. She gets paid no overtime. AFAIK that's illegal in Japan but here Amazon is doing it.

falcolas 6y ago
Companies demanding unpaid overtime and long workweeks is common enough that Japanese literature has a term for them: Black Companies.
bobloblaw45 6y ago
Isn't it like a cultural thing over there where you're expected to work overtime and essentially kill yourself for your company? Might be dated info but I remember someone saying nobody even thinks about going home before the boss regardless of when they got in so the boss never has the chance to see them leave.
- justicezyx 6y ago
  No that's the government deliberately practice no oversight on corporations.
tasogare 6y ago
Not a big news, Amazon is a crap company exploiting its workers worldwide and creating a lot of externalities. If the practice is illegal, an employee could sue (and win) but that personal choice. On the 10-12 hours, the concept of "work" in Japan is a big different than in the West, in particular because there seems to have almost no notion of productivity. I often see 4 people on a task that would be allocated to one worker in Europe, or 12 person cleaning the same square meter. That combined with perfectionism (again, with no notion of productivity) that if 1% improvement can be done with 300% effort they try to do it, is a perfect cocktail to raise the total "worked" hours. And finally there is the bureaucracy. Today I spoke with someone about implementing an idea, where the implementation of the idea is literally sending an email. I spend 10 minutes explaining it. But that could not be done directly! No, that person need to consult her boss. How long this will take? Probably at least half an hour... 2 or 3 times more if there is back and forth with me through the intermediate person. How many "worked" hours does this represent in total? I plan on a least one man/hour. In my country: doing the task directly, which represents at least a 120 times better productivity...

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/dyEN7 https://archive.is/dyEN7

maerF0x0 6y ago

I feel like the "Jobless and living with parents" pejorative is missing the mark. Jobless -- So what? If a country has figured out how to provide for its people w/o jobs, so what? For example if we had perfect AI-robot slaves we'd all be jobless. Would it be a problem? Maybe we should ask people why they want a job, maybe what they want to do doesnt require one? "Living with their parents" - Again, so what? Much of the world and across much of history this was just how it was. No one denigrates someone 0-20 for living with their parents, why should a 30 yr old be denigrated for the same. Plus, for many of us so lucky the same scenario, with opposite take, will occur-- our parents will move in with us later in their life and we'll "live with our parents" again. Plus when you add that median sq foot of homes (at least in USA) is rising, you can comfortably live with more people in "home". With double master bedrooms more common and more square feet we're blurring the lines of what a single home means. Some houses are so big that you could just put a dividing wall and a separate entrance and you'd have 2 homes...

saagarjha 6y ago
That's because the scenario you've mentioned does not describe these households. The problem here is that there are adults who are partially or wholly supported by their parents in a house where they are not living with (nor was it designed for them to live with) a spouse or children.
- maerF0x0 6y ago
  Again. We're failing to address the "so what?" What does this scenario represent that is _the actual problem_ of the matter?
  - NewOrderNow 6y ago
    This comment seems to be the antithesis of what this community is trying to accomplish, which is asking the what
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    It's just not sustainable if everyone did this. The economy needs people who are gainfully employed and not single and living with their parents. I say this as someone who is single and currently living with my parents.

offtop5 6y ago

>Under Katsube’s direction, Junko also enrolled in a program that helps shut-ins learn social skills by engaging in activities such as gardening, music, sports, and volunteering. America desperately needs this. I fear the rise of social media has caused more and more people to stay inside all day without interacting with any real humans. I've found Meetup to work very well for getting out of the house. I did find it interesting how closely moving out and getting married was linked here. I've seen members of my family have children, without moving out and I definitely moved out while single.

ravenstine 6y ago
> I've found Meetup to work very well for getting out of the house. Except a lot of the meetups where I live either haven't come back or they are "virtual". :(
- offtop5 6y ago
  I was thinking before Corona, last year was very good for me. Once you realize social media is mostly fake validation seeking behavior you can decide if that's what you want . Ends up being tons of stress and mental anguish for nothing at all. I'll say without a doubt people are absolutely meaner via social media vs real life. I recall when I lived in Chicago how everyone in certain areas knew each other. Act like a jerk and word travels fast. Thus this keeps people friendly. On Reddit, which I had to step back from , it take 10 seconds to create a username. Then you can throw out all types of vitriol at people you'll never meet. Why be apart of that ? I do find Reddit to be very helpful if you have a specific technical question, but the moment you venture out of tech people get really nasty really fast. I'm still debating if it's worth returning to. It's at the point where I might hire someone to run the social media accounts for a product I may be releasing. I have absolutely no interest in using social media myself. I have a sort of live now list for once Corona ends
  - aapppwe 6y ago
    what are some good meetup for young folks? i find it hard to meet new people when i move to new city like seattle or sf

sirspacey 6y ago

The article clearly identifies the source of this challenge: HR culture I’ve worked in HR in the US. To say it is unbearably broken doesn’t begin to cover it. Japan’s rigid hiring rituals are specific but I’ve encountered quite a bit of rigidity in HR culture in the US as well. As we see nearly daily here on HN, the “filter process” HR uses is highly resistant to change and based on traditions that are objectively useless and horribly biased. Somehow we seem to miss that economists are not the best experts to consult with here. Put another way - fix HR and suddenly economists wouldn’t need to “explain” so much when it comes to labor market dislocations. So why haven’t we fixed these issues? I know hundreds of people in HR trying to address these challenges. They invariably run into the fact that executives and hiring managers are the source of the misconceptions driving these systemic problems. That’s not a category of people who get overridden in companies. I encountered this even in my own startups. Board members and company leaders believed they had near clairvoyance on how to hire - despite rarely being correct in practice. tl;dr; The people (execs, hiring managers) who set the expectations around hiring have an unreasonable and inflexible dedication to their assumptions about how hiring should be done, leading those given the job of managing the hiring process (HR) to design woefully inefficient and biased hiring processes, leading to endemic dislocation in the job market that destroys the lives of people who didn’t pass the first check-point in their careers. Checkout “DIY University” for more history on this issue. This is a problem that can, and has, destroyed nations.

marrianeKK 6y ago
>The article clearly identifies the source of this challenge: HR culture I don't think so. I don't think the problem here is companies struggling to find the right people. It seems to me that companies have slashed hiring. There are too few regular job positions and too many people seeking them.
- sirspacey 6y ago
  I can see that point. Supply & demand are usually the go-to explanation. However, liquidity in the labor market is rarely well-understood. This article specifically addresses people who are never able to enter the workforce. In the US the data is stark - there are literally hundreds of thousands of positions that are never filled, despite millions of job seekers. To oversimplify with one major hiring filter - most jobs require X years of experience in Y narrowly-defined industry/region/tool/skill. Liquidity in the labor market is the only answer to this problem - to get experience you have to be able to get a position in the first place, often in a role unrelated to where you end up. Economists see jobs as “widgets.” Of course, we all know we spend most of our time doing none of the things listed on the job we originally applied for (or were tested for in interviews). Supply/demand explanations mask the fact that most work today is fluid. Getting people into the workforce creates economic growth. The barrier to that growth is a broken HR system. It doesn’t seem to be, at first, a root cause that is significant enough in size to hobble a whole economy. Until you consider that nearly every employer has the same issue.

cryptica 6y ago

I don't think it's a coincidence that Japan has the highest debt-to-GDP ratio and also the largest number of jobless youth living with their parents. Debt fueled by inflationary government money-printing drives wealth inequality between asset owners and salary earners. Newly printed currency boosts asset prices and inflates away salaries. As Milton Friedman pointed out, it also increases the tax burden on citizens two-fold because inflation causes salary earners to be pushed into higher tax brackets over time as some of their salaries are eventually negotiated upwards to offset inflation. My guess is that it has something to do with what happened in 1971 when the US dollar (and all currencies which were pegged to it) moved off of the gold standard. This was the time when asset values started inflating. This is why it only affected millennials and they could not afford their own house. Japan took on more public debt than any other country which is why they felt this effect more strongly since they ended up having to print their national currency at a higher rate (thus resulting in worse asset-inflation) in order to pay off the interest on their debt.

mshumi 6y ago
This is probably closer to the truth. It's not a coincidence that Japan was the first developed country to experience stagflation and is experiencing these problems.
ivalm 6y ago
That’s a lot of words but your facts are false. 1. Japan has low wealth inequality 2. Japan does NOT have high inflation 3. Japan has both low unemployment and high labor participation [1] https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SI.POV.GINI/rankings https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SI.POV.GINI/rank... [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/inflation-cpi https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/inflation-cpi [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_market_of_Japan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_market_of_Japan
- cdavid 6y ago
  2 and 3 are true, 1 is more debatable. Gini coefficient of Japan is quite higher than most European countries, though it measures income not wealth. US are at 0.39, Japan at 0.34, most Western European countries below 0.3. A lot of people here also base their thinking on visits to Japan, but that's sampling bias. Poverty is less obvious than in the US or even Europe, but Japan poverty rate is at ~15.5 %, much closer again to the US (~17.5 %) than to Western European countries, closer to 10 % or even below. There are plenty of "dead" cities in Japan that are depopulating fast, but they are not on a typical tour when you visit the country. Some of them are < 1 hour of train from center Tokyo.

hikerclimber 6y ago

good. hope this happens in the U.S.

mixmastamyk 6y ago

If they forced all the folks working sixty-hour weeks down to thirty, and hired the unemployed to fill the gaps, the country would be healthier.

jjnoakes 6y ago
What would that do to wages?
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  They would adjust depending on how paid, salary or hourly. I believe productivity would be boosted over time as the rusty unemployed got back into the groove.
- diob 6y ago
  It'd probably do wonders for their economy, given the results from that Microsoft test where they only worked 4 days a week (https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-says-4-day-workweek-boosted-workers-productivity-by-40 https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-say...). With that boost, people could work less and they could afford to pay them more. It's a win win situation, but it's hard to change views when it comes to work. Folks want to believe that working more is better, but really it's about quality over quantity. We'd see crazy economic benefits if we stopped being traditionalists about work and started following the science / data.
  - AA-BA-94-2A-56 6y ago
    People working 60 hours aren't going to have time to consume services. If everyone worked 30 hours instead, you'd probably see an increase in the demand for services (entertainment, fitness, etc). This would result in an increase in GDP, growth in the economy, and likely more demand for workers. But that's just my econ 101 knowledge.
    - diob 6y ago
      Yup, and they'd have time to start their own pursuits or small businesses. It's really a win win.

adultSwim 6y ago

Sounds like America

info781 6y ago

I blame the parents for this, they should have kicked the kids out of the house when they were 22. Then they could live with roommates, men and women and learn how to live. There was a show about that in the '90s bunch of good-looking men and women and sometimes a monkey. I can't remember the name of it though.

jxramos 6y ago
I was wondering about that "enabling" angle as well. I remember when I was in my young twenties a good friend of mine had a parent who pushed him out of the nest. I remember being shocked and offended by the crazy act and thought it equally outrageous as he did. Years later I look back and see that it actually taught my friend the ropes and the difficulties in life taken for granted with the parents taking care of things they figured out years ago. People won't know how hard life is until they get their hands dirty and make it on their own. I always found it curious how the various species out there push their offspring on to adulthood. Trial by fire, diving in to learn how to swim, there's a lot of wisdom in all that. Life is hard, and at some point you realize people don't get get old by default, unencumbered by adversity and trials and tribulations--all those older folks you see are actually survivors.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  I bet for every one like your friend that succeeds there will be another that ends up lying in the gutter somewhere.

8bitsrule 6y ago

To which entity are they 'lost'? To the state? To corporations? "Those who successfully navigate the arduous corporate recruiting process will be rewarded with a secure place on the corporate ladder" Those who do not see that (+ the 60-80-hour weeks) as rewarding will not be motivated to pursue it. Economic slavery is over-rated. They may or may not be 'lost' to themselves, depending on what they're doing with all that time. Across Asia, many people found themselves meditating for decades. They weren't jacked into any perverse realities. "The rest are largely condemned to flit from one low-paying job to the next, with little avenue for advancement and zero job security." Wow, judgemental much? Many well-known authors, poets, artists, composers, DJs,even hackers found themselves in that position. It's a fair cop, but society's to blame.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
This is delusional. It would be fine if all these shut-ins were living personally satisfied, fulfilling lives. But the vast, vast, vast majority are not. Most live with deep regret, shame, depression, and isolation, and romanticizing their situation as some sort of meditative peace is f'd up in my opinion.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  It's not delusional, it's a simple statement of fact. It would also be nice if we would stop shaming these people and instead protect them and encourage them to socialize and study. Maybe they wouldn't be so angry on internet forums.

kwargs 6y ago

Another jap article, can't go a week on HK without mentioning japan this, japan that.

timoth3y 6y ago

The hikikomori are written about a lot in the Japanese and western press, and I think it's great that Japanese society is making a conscious effort to reach out to people and see how they can be made more happy and productive. The stats in the article are probably correct, but leaves out some very important context. - Many Japanese adults live with their parents. Multi-generational households are quite common, especially outside of the big cites. This is not new. In fact, it is becoming less common, not more. - Japan has an official unemployment rate of about 2%, but for almost all jobs there are more openings than applicants. From the article: > For the class of 2021, the ratio is set to dip to 1.53 jobs per graduate, from 1.83 this year. “It’s like the employment ice age,” Kubo says. “It’s happening again.” The situation for these people is not nearly as dire as many try to paint it.

rbrbr 6y ago

Can’t view the article without paying

garfieldnate 6y ago

After watching this I feel a little bit ungrateful. I lived there for a while and had a permanent position, which is really coveted. I left after a year and half because I just hated the working culture so much. Because I speak English I was able to leave. Japan is largely monolingual, and the English education for children stresses test performance over communication. Japan has always had a powerful enough economy that monolingualism worked okay for the country as a whole. But for the miserable individuals who believe they have no opportunities, monolingualism is a trap that keeps them in the system where they do not find the opportunities. Meanwhile I speak English and can therefore work in dozens of countries if I so choose, though as a linguist I actually savor opportunities to study new languages).

acd 6y ago

Japan never cleaned up the debt created by its banking system during the Lost decade. This enormous debt makes it harder for young people to own their own place, in effect tget rent from the bank through loans. This is despite that Japans population is shrinking and there should be more houses on the market. Free debt creation creates a generational ladder where older generations own their houses and younger rent due to high debt creation. Old could buy before the exponential growth of debt was created. Lost decade https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan) Demographic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan