First off, I’d like to thank the Washington Post for defining “20-34” as “young” in an October 25, 2010 article on the changing socioeconomic landscape in Japan for young men. That makes me 5 years older than young. That makes me feel good :)
Secondly, however, I’d like to point out some bad reporting in the same article and after that I’ve got a question. Check out this cutting:
To hear the analysts who study them tell it, Japanese men ages 20 to 34 are staging the most curious of rebellions, rejecting the 70-hour workweeks and purchase-for-status ethos that typified the 1980s economic boom. As the latest class of college graduates struggles to find jobs, a growing number of experts are detecting a problem even broader than unemployment: They see a generation of men who don’t know what they want.
I emboldenededed that last bit for a reason I’ll get to in a second. So, wow—an entire generation are just fumbling around in the proverbial dark, clueless as to what they are doing or where they are heading. If that’s true, then don’t “the experts” answer the question I emboldenededed in that same paragraph? “The experts” say these guys are “rejecting the 70-hour workweeks” etc, etc. So, doesn’t it follow that they know exactly what they want? Less time at work, more time with people they care about and more personal fulfillment? I mean, who can blame them? Why work your life away for some company? Why ignore any potential dreams you may have, just some other guy can get rich?
At this point, I realized this scenario was starting to sound familiar. However, there was one more point in the article that said to me that maybe “the experts” and the person writing this article, weren’t connecting the fairly obvious dots as they should be. Here’s another cutting from much further on in the piece (important bit emboldenededed by me):
Japan’s dim economic climate, experts say, has spawned a generation of unsentimental job-seekers who see only a spectrum of flawed options.
So, there you go. There’s your answer. There’s no mystery here, Mr. or Ms. WaPo Reporter. It sounds like “the experts” know that, too. What’s more is how this scenario sounds all too familiar.
A “dim economic climate,” you say? “Job-seekers who see only a spectrum of flawed options,” huh? Dude, you just described America. You just described me.
Our way of life has crashed and burned around us. The Japanese have shared this with us for decades—their whole “salaryman” movement was just an analog to the “Me Generation,” here in the US, that idolized Gordon Gekko from the Oliver Stone movie “Wall Street”. So, it follows that we’re both seeing all of the same promises made to us by society broken.
