Kato is a child of Japan’s “Heisei Recession,” a downturn that began shortly after its namesake, the Heisei emperor, Akihito, ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne in 1989. Kato and his generational cohorts are coming of age at a time when Japan’s economy has run out of steam. Gone are the days when most young men expected to climb the corporate ladder at Sony, Mitsubishi or another industrial giant, while their sisters took “office lady” positions until marriage. Nowadays Japan Inc. simply isn’t creating middle-class opportunities like it used to, and while young Japanese might fantasize about jobs-for-life, most end up with something much different: paid-by-the-hour temporary work.
Japan has a name for its swelling legion of part-timers. They’re called freeters (derived from the English word free and the German word for worker, Arbeiter)– a term that describes not just an employment category but a lifestyle. By reputation, freeters are a bit like America’s Gen-X slackers: they work only when they need cash, hang out, travel whenever possible and celebrate their rejection of their parents’ old work-aholic lifestyle. Japan’s new workers froth cappuccinos, pump gas, pack boxes and run cash registers. “I couldn’t be a salaryman,” says Yoshinari Nozaki, a 30-year-old design-school dropout. “Getting up early even in winter, crushing yourself into a commuter train, working late and drinking with your superiors to ingratiate yourself. Where’s the freedom in that?”
To older Japanese, these live-for-the-moment rebels are a bunch of spoiled moochers. But that’s too simple: the freeters embody a generation that’s been marginalized by a decadelong economic tailspin. Japan’s unique form of capitalism, based as it is on huge industrial groups called keiretsu, is beginning to fade. For several years now, Japan Inc. has quietly exported its production and downsized through attrition–a process that denies opportunities to new workers. There has been job growth, but it’s been in Japan’s expanding service sector, where giants like Starbucks and casual-wear sensation Uniqlo’s are perpetually hiring part-timers. Most of Uniqlo’s 18,000 employees earn hourly wages starting from $8. “With the lifetime employment and seniority systems collapsing,” noted a recent Nikkei commentary, “the meaning of ‘work’ is in flux.”
For the first time in Japan’s postwar experience, many college graduates can’t land meaningful jobs, and a third of those who do quit in less than three years. Moreover, part-timers now constitute the fastest-growing segment in Japan’s labor market. According to the Recruit Corp., Japan’s largest job-placement publishing house, 3.4 million freeters 19 to 30 now do part-time work. On average, says Recruit, they’ve been freeters for three years, changed jobs 4.3 times and now earn about $1,000 a month. Six in 10 of them still live at home.
Ten years ago such behavior was virtually unheard of. From the early 1960s until the demise of Japan’s “bubble economy” in 1992, career jobs awaited not just college grads but kids out of high school as well. Major corporations recruited aggressively at top universities, where male students willing to trim their hair and don three-piece “interview suits” had their pick of careers inside Japan Inc. All the while, major manufacturers sought fresh high-school grads to staff factories and sales offices. The good times ended when companies reined in hiring, and universities began to feel shushoku hyogaki, or the “job-seekers’ ice age.” It’s been a long freeze. In 2000 only eight in 10 college grads landed jobs of any sort after matriculation.
Anyone entering the job market these days must be both creative and aggressive. Magazines like From A: Part-Time Work Navigator and Travail offer a mix of how-to articles on waiting tables or working retail. The publications are chock-full of help-wanted listings of unskilled, short-term positions. Typically, the ads emphasize a job’s ease, flexibility and fun–not old-fashioned draws like status or career promise. Reads one: “For this job you are free to choose your own clothing and hairstyle. You can get up late in the morning. You don’t have to ride crowded trains. Even if you have no experience, you get a good rate of pay. Yes, all these selfish wishes can come true!” The position advertised: $11-an-hour telemarketing.
Ads like that appeal to 21-year-old Hideki Akita. Since high school he’s worked in a convenience store, a Western restaurant and a warehouse. His current employer, a warehouse in Chiba, won his services by tolerating his collar-length dreadlocks. “I couldn’t get a serious job looking like this,” he says, running his hand through the thick strands, “but this is how I need to look to express myself.” His other expression, a late-model Jeep Cherokee, takes most of his salary to maintain. To save rent Akita still lives at home. His parents, both education-department bureaucrats, try to be understanding. But they question their son’s latest career goal: becoming a professional DJ. “I’ve always wanted to escape, to live more easily, more playfully,” he says. “I think I’ve neglected my filial duties, though, because my parents expect greater things from me.”
Many of Japan’s freeters harbor artistic aspirations. Chino, Sumi and Daiki, for example, earn meager wages passing out fliers in a gritty railway underpass in Tokyo and spend their free time composing rap lyrics and angling to be discovered. Daiki, 20, still lives at home, while his friends rent $490-a-month rooms in the capital. They all hang out in clubs at night. “If my folks are still up when I get home, I get an earful,” says Daiki. “When I wake up in the afternoon, I hear the same refrain: ‘Get a job!’ My elder sister is in a company, so she’s all right. My brother wants to go to university. My dad’s a mechanic and he works very hard. That’s why they never let up on me.”
As originally coined, the term freeter described “artists and musicians with a purpose in life who needed part-time work to make a living,” says Reiko Kosugi, an expert on part-time Japanese workers at the Japan Institute of Labor, a government-funded think tank. Even today, she adds, young people with entrepreneurial or artistic ambitions make up one of three main subgroups. The other two are kids who tried unsuccessfully to land career jobs and drifters with no firm plans. Kosugi believes the last group, the drifters, to be the fastest growing. “As children they saw only the backs of their fathers. They have no idea what they want to do. All they say is: ‘I don’t want to be a salaryman.’ In this sense, Japan’s economic situation is reflected inside the family.”
In 1999 Kosugi and her JIL research team interviewed 97 part-timers about their employment perspectives and motivations. Their study, entitled “Freeters: Their Reality and Thinking,” profiles a generation adrift. Most part-timers want freedom and flexibility, it concludes, but either lack firm career goals or “tend not to have any means of connecting their present situations to a future career.” At times, the dysfunction is staggering. One interview subject, a 31-year-old male, completed a doctorate in biology, then abandoned the field abruptly–to attend beauty college. Another, a 19-year-old high-school graduate, quit a vocational business school to work in a club. “I had an eye on one bar I kind of liked,” she told scholars. “I was hired as a part-timer. I enjoy the job now, but I am also interested in fashion. I don’t know if I will try to become a full-fledged bartender, or quit. I’m not sure.”
Many young Japanese land career-track positions only to find them too painful to endure. Nami Kawase, now 30, found a great position at Konica but stayed on just long enough to finance a passage to India. Later, she worked at a major advertising agency until she developed “a debilitating paranoia of the fast lane,” she says. She now makes ends meet by nurturing her true passion: photography. Recently she’s seen modest success selling travel pictures from South Asia in several Tokyo galleries.
Among freeters, telling Japan Inc. to (as country singer Johnny Paycheck once crooned) “take this job and shove it” is deemed praiseworthy, even heroic. The book “Living on Easy Street as a Part-Timer,” for example, opens with a comic strip about a woman who explains to a friend why she resigned from a first-rate company. “I mean, I was totally bored,” she tells her wide-eyed companion. After quitting, “first, I went overseas to do bungee jumping and skydiving. After returning to Japan I did part-time work every day while collecting my unemployment benefits. Of course, I didn’t declare my income!”
Traditionally minded Japanese find these antics heretical. To them, the young generation’s self-indulgence breaks a time-tested social contract that emphasizes ganbaru, or guts before glory. Conventionally, Japanese salarymen work for decades within rigidly hierarchical corporations until they are eventually rewarded in the form of fat retirement bonuses. Freeters take the diametrically opposite approach: work as little as necessary, then have fun for as long as possible until the money runs out.
Masahiro Yamada, a sociologist at Gakugei University in Tokyo, thinks Japan’s self-indulgent youngsters constitute a bloodsucking “affluent class that can live like Japan’s ancient aristocrats.” In a controversial Japan Quarterly essay published this year and called “Parasite Singles Feed on Family System,” Yamada charges that Japan’s kids “hinder the nation’s economy and sap the nation’s vitality.” His prescription: young Japanese should move out from their parental homes, marry earlier and have more kids. It’s a view many older Japanese share. “I want him to get out and become independent,” the mother of a live-at-home 29-year-old son told NEWSWEEK. “I want him to discover what he wants to do with his life and be happy.”
Throughout the postwar boom, Japan’s children typically stayed in the nest only long enough to save a down payment for a flat of their own, and then married. Yet today’s high housing costs and relatively low wages have made it tough for most young people to follow the job-marriage-mortgage path. They lack options, argues Shintaro Nakanishi, a sociologist at Yokohama City University, and for that reason adopt the freeter lifestyle. “Parents used to be sure that if they gave their children the proper education, they would certainly get a full-time job,” Nakanishi writes in a long rebuttal to Yamada published this month in a prominent education journal. “But this old-style life course is crumbling before their eyes.”
A revival of old-style Japan Inc. wouldn’t necessarily resurrect the self-sacrificing work ethic that made Japan an industrial titan. Too many Japanese now think there’s more to life than a prestigious name card and a pension. Generation X begot many of the Internet visionaries who remade the U.S. economy in the 1990s. Could it happen in Japan? It’s too early to say whether the American model is taking root, but there are reasons to hope. Whereas traditional Japanese companies view part-timers with suspicion, high-tech firms have begun to favor them. “Freeters are seen as having extra skills in areas such as game design or other creative fields,” says Yasuto Sakane of the consulting firm E-Agent in Tokyo, which head-hunts for clients including Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco Systems. Koji Yamazaki, a graduate of Waseda University’s prestigious law department, is betting his future on an e-commerce start-up. To make ends meet, he now works at a seedy karaoke bar in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. “Most freeters have something they really want to do in the future,” he says. “But we can’t make a living on it yet, so we do this kind of thing. Freedom is what freeters are all about.”
Hondasu (a pen name) graduated from university with a degree in agriculture, then abandoned the field to be a writer. His Web site, Hints for Thinking About Life, is part freeters’ how-to guide and part advice column. His postings challenge young Japanese to consider their future and accept that jobs for life are gone forever. He writes about raising kids on a limited income and building lives as perpetual part-timers, declaring it “a luxury not to worry about how to make a living.” Still, the message is upbeat. Freeters are “a huge wave,” he declares, and “the only [Japanese] with time to think about society.” Hondasu plans to publish “Hints” in book form, then travel the world. He’s already been to India, actually. He went to taste real curry.
