The Dark Side of Japan: The Lost Generation

Japan as a country is clean, orderly and safe because Japanese society is ULTRA-RIGID. It is also inflexible, unhappy and broken because it is ULTRA-RIGID. Discipline is a double-edged sword, on a personal as well as social level.

I was assigned to a project as Project Manager with a Japanese Plant. My role was change management. After one particularly frustrating week, the Japanese Plant Manager took me to one side and asked “Richard-san, how many Japanese does it take to change a lightbulb?”. I repled that I didn’t know. He laughed and said “Ah…it’s a trick question, nobody ever changed anything in Japan”.

I'm a Japanese guy in the 40's, who was born during the Ice Age. I believe this video talks about Japan completely right, especially about how the Japanese companies get new hires. Once you miss on the Shushoku Katsudo, you will almost never get accepted. Once you get settled at a company as a regular employee, they find you as if you were a family member and you start to look down on non-regular employees, which gives them a sense of eliteness in a wrong way. The problem is, "No one tries to get out of this malicious circle and start to live in their own ways. Once you do, you know what will happen, right? You will get kicked out of society and will have to settle for low-income life. Japan LOOKS a great country, but what makes it so is the under-wage non-regular employees, who work at cheap Ramen restaurants or elsewhere. Lots of Japanese regular employees cry out saying that their wages do not go up. The reason is clear: because they are there as regular employees.

I am from the generation of Japanese people known as the Lost Generation, but many of my friends started freelance work around the age of 20 or so, instead of working for a company, they got on track early and are enjoying their own lifestyle since then. As I remember there were a lot of kids who graduated from good universities struggled to find a job.

As a teenager, i used to think grown adults who remain frustrated with minimal employment were just not trying hard enough. Then it happened to me. I was stuck in a job I hated, paid no better than Mcdonalds but working or travelling to work most of my life, and wasted my youth.

As a Japanese, I found this is incredibly correct. I guess many of you don’t believe the fact that Japanese company doesn’t give you a job description and most employees don’t even know what is it. What does this mean? It means the Japanese labor market has extremely low flexibility. Lacking definite job description says like “You will work for the Company ABC in any department”, and this is what “Lifetime employee” means. Believe or not. It’s true. So basically in this country people work for a company and not for families, nor careers. From management stand point, Japanese workforce is the most “controllable” resource in the world. They never leave company even their pay cut off, relocated by company. In a nutshell, company is where they “live” not “work” so once they lose the chances to join in the community, they’ll be isolated from society for the rest of their lives. Stable employment is essential for stabling society but when it overkilled it’ll waste energy from a country just like Japan….

The Lost Generation's struggles reflect a broken system. It's alarming how millions have slipped through the cracks. This story isn't just Japan's - it's a cautionary tale about the fragility of societal structures.

This might explain why when I went to Japan, fulfilling a long-time dream, I felt absolutely nothing in Tokyo and Kyoto. There was no buzz of life. I literally felt like I was surrounded by robots. Osaka felt better and people were more relaxed, but overall there wasn't a whole lot of energy on my trip. Hell, just being in the LAX airport changing flights it felt more alive than the whole of Japan which is really sad because the culture has so many beautiful things about it.

"If I were a young Japanese and I could speak English, I would probably choose to emigrate." Said the late Lee Kuan Yew in 2013. And that really says something, considering that Mr Lee is a well known admirer of Japanese work ethic. Do not throw your lives away. There is more to living than simply withdrawing or toughing it out in the land of your birth.

I was in Tokyo a few weeks ago and I was shocked by how miserable the people in suits looked. And they were showing clear signs of overworking themselves yet trying to smile. It was sad to witness. Such a beautiful country, with such a beautiful culture and people have been eclipsed by this unfortunate fact.

This video is largely true. I am exactly in my 40's and in the middle of the Lost Generation. In high school I studied 3 hours every day outside of school and my academic deviation was 70. Do you know what 70 deviation means? I then went on to a famous private university, this time studying 8 hours every day for 8 years to get my attorney certification. Why? Because I wanted to get a job at Andersen Consulting after graduating from university, but I failed. I forget what the job placement rate was at the time at Andersen Consulting. I only remember that it was an unusual job placement ratio. In any case, I failed to find a job, so I could not get a job in the new graduate slot after university graduation. So I had to study even harder and go through an exam that I wasn't sure if I would pass or fail. I had to obtain a national certification, which is now likely to be eliminated by AI. My parents gave me all the support I needed to pass the exam. I was lucky in that respect. There are many of my classmates who are missing. You will not have much difficulty finding someone with mental illness in Japan today. If you throw a stone, you will hit a mentally ill person. We either survive the excessive competition for survival, or we end up on the streets or shut up at home. We, the Lost Generation, have a very difficult time being ”normal”.

This is the first time I've heard of the lifelong employment system. While in today's unstable job market it sounds idyllic at first, aside from the problems covered in this video I'm concerned what it means for company culture as well. Every company has some asshole employees, but the knowledge that you're trapped with a boss that hates your guts or worse, actively harasses you and you can't even quit the job and find a new one? Terrifying.

A wise man once said "Japan is a great country to visit but not to live"

I live in rural Japan, I'm a 33 year old male, of hikkikomori ilk but not hikkikomori because I've always been trying 100percent in whatever jobs I can get. Anyway I started working in a Japanese company this year (2022) and though its only been a few months these are my observations: the management sit upstairs on high salaries and order the workers to work like supermen for a salary that doesn't make ends meet even in rural life, most new workers quit because they physically can't do what's asked of them so the ones that don't quit do daily overtime of at least two hours but more often than not 3 to 4 (with only the first 2 being paid), the company (which im sure is making an absolute mint) is doing so little to A make working conditions easier and B to incentivising people to enter the company to even replace the leavers. Obviously its stupid because its unsustainable and the managements ambition for growth isn't looking possible with such high quitting rate, but I think that herein lies the root of the problem: the management are stupid- they haven't realised that their role in society at large is to benefit the community and country, they only seem interested in protecting what they gained by virtue of luck. I am less inclined to stay myself with each hardworking honest coworker I see get rinsed for all their hardworking until they feel that they can't do it, im only still there as I want to give it at least a year because I've been through hell and back looking for jobs in general. Its sad though, to see people basically mistreated. Its not just Japan either. I expect things would change the the elderly management retire, but old folks these days, the rich ones, they probably will be like 75 before they get out of the road. They'll probably try to take the road with them.

Same everywhere the whole 21 century is gonna be lost worldwide

I'm 50 years old this year. Born in a regional city in Shizuoka, after graduating from a university in western Japan, I returned to my hometown and got a job at a medium-sized IT company. It's a stable company, but most of the employees used to work there from their parents homes. In Japan, there is a large disparity in salaries between large companies and small and medium-sized ones, and it's also difficult to get a new job at a large company once one fails to join such a company as a new graduate. It's because of all kinds of discrimination. And the Ice Age generation was created by large companies not hiring new graduates in order to protect the employment of the elderly people working there under the permanent employment system.

There's an Ancient Greek proverb: "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in". The elderly in Japan destroyed their children's futures so quickly that they'll end up get sunburnt along with them.

As a Japanese who grown up in the American culture, when it was time for me to find a work here, I was weirded out how everyone looked the same in job exhibitions. It seemed as though companies wanted a robot / slave-like worker, rather than an INDIVIDUAL who can bring new branches of growth for the company. Hence, the rigid environment felt that innovation / new thinking / new perspective does not seem to be in the highest priority...

Greatly made video. I was intrigued from start to finish.

Thanks for the video.