Being Young in Super-Aging Japan

Formative Events and Cultural Reactions

Patrick Heinrich, Christian Galan, Patrick Heinrich, Christian Galan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351025041
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

Japan is not only the oldest society in the world today, but also the oldest society to have ever existed. This aging trend, however, presents many challenges to contemporary Japan, as it permeates all areas of life, from the economy and welfare to social cohesion and population decline. Nobody is more affected by these changes than the young generation.

This book studies Japanese youth in the aging society in detail. It analyses formative events and cultural reactions. Themes include employment, parenthood, sexuality, but also art, literature and language, thus demonstrating how the younger generation can provide insights into the future of Japanese society more generally. This book argues that the prolonged crisis resulted in a commonly shared destabilization of thoughts and attitudes and that this has shaped a new generation that is unlike any other in post-war Japan.

Presenting an inter-disciplinary approach to the study of the aging trend and what it implies for young Japanese, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese culture and society, as well cultural anthropology and demography.

1 Introduction

Studying the young generation in super-aging Japan

Patrick Heinrich and Christian Galan

Introduction

The young are no longer what they used to be. They never were. Being different from one’s parents is a major issue for the young. For parents, on the other hand, getting old involves the difficulty in understanding attitudes and behaviors of the young. For parents, youth often entails “problems” which call out for a “solution” – for the young, older generations are seen to not “really” be up-to-date. Any book devoted to what it means to be young is well advised to declare how it confronts such multifaceted views on youth.

In this book, we attempt to tackle present-day youth in Japan in a twofold way. We will, firstly, focus on generation-making mechanisms, and secondly on how young Japanese themselves “make sense” of their present situation. This introduction outlines what we mean by this in concrete terms. Towards this end, we will first sketch out the socioeconomic situation into which young Japanese were born, familiarize readers with existing research and terminology on Japanese youth, delineate how to study generation-making mechanisms, and finally turn towards how to study youth from the perspective of the young themselves. As a whole, this book seeks to show that present-day Japanese youth is remarkably different from other Japanese generations, and that this, in turn, implies the naissance of a society that is dissimilar from the Japanese post-war society as we knew it. Heisei is a new period in many ways.

Something happened

When the Heisei period began on 8 January 1989, the Nikkei Index had just passed 30,000 points, and it was heading straight on towards the 40,000 mark. For many, Japan was on the top of the world. The Nikkei Index reached 38,000 in December 1989. It started slipping back towards the 30,000 mark when Satō Ryōei made worldwide headlines 1990 for buying Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet for 82 million dollars and Renoir’s Au Moulin de la Galette for 78 million dollars two days later. There was no awareness then that the dropping Nikkei Index was not simply on a “course correction”. It would continue its decline for many more years. In June 1995, the Nikkei dropped below 15,000 and went on straight towards the 10,000 mark. By then it was clear that the days of “Japan as Number One” were over. This was a serious economic crisis. At the end of the 1990s, the crisis remained unresolved. In an attempt to leave it behind, once and forever, and to make a fresh start into the new millennium, Prime Minister Mori Yoshirō’s advisor coined the term “lost decade” (ushinawareta jūnen). However, the past would not go away. The economic crisis lingered on, and at the end of the zero years the term “two lost decades” (ushinawareta nijūnen) appeared. There will be no need to coin a term for “three lost decades”. Economic stagnation, growing public debt, and deflation have become the new normality for Japan. The past, the economic bubble, and everything that came along with it, is the anomalous today. For no one is this truer than for those who have been born after the bubble burst.

There is more to the Heisei period. The second fundamental change made fewer headlines, though, as its effects were seen to be less pressing at the start. Nonetheless, the degree of change is extraordinary here as well. In 1989, the Japanese population was growing by more than 1,100 persons a day – in 2017 it is shrinking by 1,000 people day. In 1989, 12 percent of the total population was older than 65 – in 2017, 26 percent of the population is older than 65 (Countrymeters 2017). Japan’s population decline is irreversible. It will continue for many decades to come (Coulmas 2007), unless Japan fundamentally changes its immigration regime, for which there is no sign at the present. Japan has undergone the process of social aging faster than most other societies. Today, it is the oldest society in the world, making it also the oldest society to have ever existed in history. Japan transformed itself from an “aging society” (8 percent of the population older than 65) to an “aged society” (14 percent older than 65) in a record-setting pace of 24 years. Japan’s aging and declining population has far-reaching ramifications. It affects Japan’s economy, welfare, social cohesion, education, and on an international plane its competitiveness, exchange and relations to other countries.

Beyond these figures lies profound social change, and young Japanese have been most crucially shaped by it. Growing up in an economically stagnant and socially aging Japan, they were socialized in a very different setting from that of their parents or grandparents. For young Japanese, “Japan as Number One” is a distant tale from the past – unconnected to their experiences and lives. Social aging also affects the young by increasing the “passive part” of the population, which in turn enhances the duties and the obligations of the “active part”. Already in 2020, two “active people” will correspond to one “passive person”. Moreover, due to social aging, the young generation is exposed to deeper layers of past attitudes and experiences than ever before. Put simply, more past is part of the present, or more past is “made to fit” the present.

The generation born between the end of the 1980s and the 1990s differs from previous generations, in that its membership does not simply rely on age as the sole criterion, in the sense of “young people are no longer what they used to be!” The generational ruptures are played out on a different level now. It’s more like “society is no longer what it used to be!” The young have been dealt a different “set of cards” than their parents and grandparents. The present and the future are no longer safe or guaranteed, as it had been before. Social trajectories have become blurred and uncertain (except for elites). Any society, writes Mauger (2015: 3, translation ours) on inter-generational continuity, requires the “biological reproduction of the group, the production of the quantity of goods needed for its subsistence, and inseparably, the reproduction of social structures, where such reproduction takes place.” If we place Mauger’s idea in the contexts of Japan’s super-aged society, and consider the relations between the young and the older generations, we realize that Japanese society is undermined on each of these three points. The sustenance of Japanese society as it was formed in the post-war period is under threat.

The social and economic changes of the Heisei period are far-reaching. Personal economic decline is more than a “potential source” of anxiety. Surveys reveal that 37 percent have personally experienced social decline in the past ten years (Hommerich 2014: 457). Japan has today the second highest level of poverty of all OECD countries – only the US has a higher percentage. More than 15 percent of the population, that is more than 20 million people, are officially poor. One third of the employees are irregularly employed and do not receive the social, economic and psychological benefits that come along with regular employment. Being poor is the rule rather than the exception among the non-regular employed. The young are most severely affected from non-regular employment and its many social consequences (Sato and Imai 2011). Unsurprisingly, therefore, young adults have a lower average monthly consumption than retired people, despite the fact that retirees are supposed to be “set up” and also no longer have work related expenditures (Matsuura 2011: 163).

In contrast to the generation of their parents and grandparents, many young Japanese will not succeed in living an ordinary life (hitonami no seikatsu), i.e., graduate, enter the workforce, marry, have children and raise them safely. The young fare worse than their parents, and they know this. The idea of an all-middle-class society (sōchūryū shakai) or a super-stable society (chō-antei shakai) no longer applies. Japan is today a society of socioeconomic difference (kakusa shakai), and young people can neither ignore nor bypass this fact. There also exists inter-generational inequity (sedai-kan kakusa) with far-reaching consequences (Shigeyuki, Oguro and Takahashi 2010). Japanese society is liquidizing and is transforming itself into a relationless society (muen shakai). Increasingly often, group membership simply entails responsibilities, but individuals are left “on their own” in case of difficulties. Unsurprisingly, therefore, we find a fervent carving for security among the young. Allison (2013: 68) reports that 85 percent of young women aspire to become full-time homemakers (sengyō shufu), but young men who could offer such a lifestyle to their young wives are few and far between today. Furuichi Noritoshi (2011) also has a point in writing that “if the standard for becoming an adult is becoming a ‘seishain’ [regular worker] or ‘sengyō shufu’ […], then more and more young people will not be able to become adults. They’ll stay disconnected from age altogether, or simply stay [forever] young” (quoted from Allison 2013: 261–262).

Making sense of the Heisei period requires new adaptions, a task for which young Japanese have not been prepared. A large part of Japan’s young generation is, voluntarily or involuntarily, not well integrated into society. There are ±700,000 hikikomori and ±1.5 million potentially being tempted by this type of social withdrawal. To add, there are 1.8 million freeter and ± 760,000 young or young adults between 15 and 34 years who are NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training).¹ Such lack of participation in society is a matter of concern for a country, which has the oldest society of all OECD states.

A survey conducted for the Japanese Cabinet Office (Naikakufu 2010) showed that 83 percent of the hikikomori declared to see themselves as having no or almost no talent at birth, against 67 percent for the control group. 71 percent of those who thought to have no talent also declared that there were many things for which they had to apologize to their family, against only 32 percent for the control group. 34 percent of those who saw themselves to be without talent also declared that they had nobody or almost nobody in whom they could trust in the past, against 7 percent for the control group. The concern of the government is, however, less about insecurity or public health. It is mostly concerned with the negative economic impact of hikikomori as a long-term phenomenon. Nonetheless, the problem is more complex than inactivity negatively affecting the economy. NEET and also the under-employed, job-hopping freeters often are not in this situation entirely by their own choice. Many of them are only given an option between withdrawal, on the one hand, or low-paid, insecure and demeaning employment, on the other hand (Genda 2011: 89). They see little reason to be positive about their futures. Most famously, perhaps, this mood has been articulated by novelist and social commentator Murakami Ryū (2000) in his bestselling novel Kibō no kuni no ekosodasu (The Exodus of a Country of Hope).

A French survey conducted in 25 countries on the “youth of the world” found that Japanese turned out to be more negative and pessimistic than the youth of any other country (Reynié 2011). Here are some findings of this study. Only 43 percent expressed to find their own future promising, and only 24 percent thought that the future of Japan was promising. 74 percent were dissatisfied with the economic situation, and 60 percent with their own work. 32 percent hoped that their work situation would improve in the future. 61 percent declared to be dissatisfied with the epoch they were living in. A lack of inter-generational solidarity becomes apparent with only 35 percent declaring that they support the idea of paying for the pensions of the older generations, and with 50 percent strictly opposing this idea. Furthermore, the Japanese youth showed the lowest rate on a number of factors such as the importance of time spent with the family (79 percent), the importance of the family for the construction of the personal identity (73 percent), and only 69 percent expressed satisfaction with the family they were born into. Only 26 percent considered establishing a family of their own a top-priority for a satisfactory life, and only 37 percent declared that having children was a part of their top-three priorities in the next 15 years. Somewhat hard to relate to these attitudes is the fact that 52 percent of the Japanese youth thought sexual relations should only take place in marriage (fifth position after Morocco, India, South Africa and Turkey). As a general conclusion, this international comparative survey revealed, “when most of the young people are dissatisfied of the general situation of their country, they declare, on the other hand, that they are satisfied with the epoch they are living in” (Reynié 2011: 10, translation ours). There is one exception to this trend. In Japan, young people are both dissatisfied with the general situation and with epoch they are living in. Another somewhat contradictory finding was that only 46 percent of the young Japanese have the conviction that they are able to make their own life decisions, but 70 percent believed that “people can change society by their choices and their actions”. These contradictions must be understood as a manifestation of changing attitudes among the young.

The current evolution of Japanese society amounts to nothing less than a question of the survival of a society that developed after 1945 and stabilized from the 1960s until the early 1990s. This social change is being pushed ahead by economic stagnation, social aging and population decline, on the one hand, and it is further accelerated by the neoliberal policies pursued all across Japan since the late 1990s, on the other hand. What does it mean to be young in such a situation? We argue that the socio-economic changes of the Heisei period led to a commonly shared destabilization of thoughts and attitudes. As an effect, the generational break between those born in the post-war period and those born during the Heisei period is stronger than the “habitual destabilization” between generations.

We are not the first to write about young generations in Japan. There exists a whole genre, wakamono-ron (“theories on the young”), with a long history devoted to this topic in Japan.² This genre has generated a large number of ascriptions and labels for Japanese “young generations”. Upon inspection, however, many of these designations turn out to be nothing more than media buzzwords, absent of sociological or historical considerations. A common weakness of them is that labels are simply superimposed on a specific age cohort. It is therefore questionable whether these labels actually designate “generations as social groups” in a serious sociological or historical sense. It is nevertheless instructive to recapitulate the most well-known of these designations, because they offer a perspective on how “being young” is thought to differ across time. For the sake of brevity, we will start our review in the 1970s.

A genealogy of young generations

Since the early 1970s, we can attest an intensive discussion of young generations in Japanese scholarship and the Japanese public (Furuichi 2011: 65–69). Prominent scholars include the sociologist Inoue Shun, who first outlined the field of youth sociology in Japan. Other experts of the field such as Miyadai Shinji are well-known public figures in Japanese mass media. They, and many others, have compiled a large corpus of literature on Japanese youth over the years. When reviewing this literature, one finds a new catchword – seen to capture the essence of the young generation – in every new decade. As an effect, the generations portrayed correspond, more or less, to age cohorts comprising ten years (Ichikawa 2003). Furthermore, some generations, like the shirake sedai (“Apathic generation”) of the 1970s, have not left much impression, while others are said to have introduced entirely new attitudes and behaviors to Japanese society. The shinjinrui (“new breeds”) are seen as an example of the latter type of generation.

The shinjinrui were the first who had not experienced foreign occupation or the restrictions of the post-war reconstruction years. Born between 1961 and 1970, they were identified as “new breeds” when the first of them reached adolescence in the late 1970s. The term diffused in the 1980s and actually became “word of the year” in 1986. Shinjinrui referred to young middle-class Japanese in the then new Japanese consumer society. They were said to have developed behaviors and values that appeared disruptive to older generations. The term itself retains an ambiguous character, oscillating between the positive and the negative. It was mainly used to describe a new mode of consumption, using, as it did, marketing vocabulary to refer to them. The catchy “new breed” was only one of many terms that existed at the time, but all others have slipped into oblivion. Shinjinrui flourished in the media, both in Japan and overseas. Abroad, the term was often misunderstood, especially because of its Nietzschean ring and the prominent discourse of “Japan as Number One” in the 1980s. The shinjinrui saw the appearance and development of otaku (“obsessive fandom”) culture, a term first used in this sense in 1983 by social commentator Nakamori Akio. Otaku, in its early manifestations, referred to individualistic and frantic consumers who spent their childhood, adolescence, and the start of adult life in the secure cocoon of the economic bubble.

The term shinjinrui was not intended as a criticism, nor was it an ironic reference to a generation who played Space Invaders. It was sought to point out to a new type of “salaryman” – a new type of employee or social being, who would primarily be defined by their consumer beha...