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Work hard? Young Japanese have other ideas
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TOKYO--Their heroes are athletes and actors, comedians and television personalities. They tell pollsters they dislike math and science and that they aspire to become beauticians and video game creators. Many color their hair blond and orange and change their jobs frequently, more often than their parents in a lifetime.
As a generation they do not yet have a name. But young people in Japan might as well be called Generation Slump: For the past 10 years they have lived in the shadow of the country's deepest postwar economic recession, a decade that has left many of them disillusioned and apathetic.
If they stick to their promises and dreams the Japan of tomorrow could look very different from the rigidly corporatized country the world has come to know.
Young people are showing little loyalty to a system that once delivered unparalleled prosperity to Japan but is paralyzed now by inertia and crisis.
At universities across the country students are already reshaping the labor force of tomorrow, choosing liberal arts degrees over engineering - for decades the occupation that buttressed Japan's manufacturing prowess.
Graduates are postponing career choices and marriage, taking time to travel, dabble in temporary work and just hang out; one economist popularized the term "parasite singles" to describe young people who are content to live off their parents well into their 20s and beyond.
But perhaps most significantly, young people are rejecting their parents' job choices and heavily structured lifestyles.
They want to become "salarymen" and "office ladies" about as much as young Americans in the 1960s wanted to become loyal company employees with a house in the suburbs.
Less than 5 percent of teenagers polled by an advertising agency last year said they admired the job of "business executive," the pinnacle of salaryman culture. The profession of "nurse" garnered 7 seven percent.
"Their parents don't seem to enjoy life," said Yoshiko Ikoma, deputy editor of the Japanese edition of Vogue magazine in Tokyo. "They're workaholics. They're serious. Young people look at them and say, 'Is that our future?'"
Yuki Hiroshi, a 17-year-old high school student who lives in a middle-class suburb west of Tokyo, says most of his friends' fathers are salarymen, but virtually no one, he says, admires their lifestyle.
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