From Overseas Press

Japan may suffer second "Lost Generation" of youth

(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-04-23 10:09

Editor's note: Confronted with the tough labor market and hiring policy of companies, Japanese youth are at risk of becoming the second "Lost Generation" trapped in unstable, low-pay jobs.

Japanese college student Hiroki was keen to graduate last month and start his first full-time job, but despite applying to 40 firms, from IT ventures to big media companies, nary an offer was in sight.

So Hiroki did what a growing number of students are doing to avoid joining what some experts fear will become a "Lost Generation" of young Japanese trapped in unstable, low-pay jobs. He stayed at university and kept looking.

"If you're a 'freeter', there's no security," said the slender, 23-year-old Hiroki, who declined to give his full name, referring to youth who flit from part-time job to part-time job after leaving school.

Japan already has one "Lost Generation" of youth stuck in insecure jobs as part-timers, contract workers and temps after failing to find steady employment when they graduated from high school or college during a hiring "Ice Age" from 1994 to 2004.

Now the country's leaders worry that a still-fragile recovery from Japan's worst recession in 60 years and cautious corporate hiring plans are putting a second batch of youth at risk, raising prospects of a further waste of human resources the country can ill afford as it struggles with an aging, shrinking population.

Experts share the concern, but critics charge that efforts by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's government to fix the problem, including planned new limits on employing temporary workers, fall short at best, or, at worst, aggravate the problem.

"What they should be doing is redressing the protection and security of the permanent workers, making it easier to change jobs, improving pension mobility, and making the differences (between regular and non-regular workers) narrower," said Richard Jerram, chief economist at Macquarie Securities (Japan) Limited.

"If you do the opposite, all that happens is that you reduce overall enthusiasm to hire. They are going about it in exactly the wrong way."

"ONE CHANCE IN A LIFETIME"

That an economic downturn and sluggish recovery spell a tough job market is hardly surprising and indeed, at 4.9 percent, Japan's jobless rate is still the envy of many other countries.

Even at the depth of Japan's employment "Ice Age," some 90 percent of university graduates had jobs when they left school.

But a system in which companies hire masses of new graduates each April, often after making offers a year earlier, means the chances of stable, career track jobs narrow sharply for those left out.

"There are some people who become regular employees after working as temps, but not many," said Shin Hasegawa, vice president of Tokyo's Aoyama Gakuin University, where students can now opt for a fifth year for half tuition.

"You could say it's one chance in a lifetime."

The system, cemented during Japan's era of rapid economic growth after World War Two, provided a steady source of cheap and malleable workers for companies' life-time employment systems, where firms provided training and salaries rose steadily with age.

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