All the free coffee and upbeat Muzak could not lift Naoki Ijiri from his jobless gloom. The 25-year-old polytechnic college graduate had come to the job-placement office this spring after searching fruitlessly for work for six monthslong enough to convince himself that he would never find a career to match his training as an environmental-systems engineer.
Opportunities in Japan's second largest metropolis are scarce; Osaka prefecture's unemployment rate of 6.4% was the third highest in the nation last year. Even if he could find work, Ijiri says he feels unprepared to join the winner-takes-all rat race of postindustrial Japan. He longs for his father's era, the heyday of Japan Inc., when young adults were whisked directly from college into a womblike corporate career, where they would be sheltered by a paternalistic business culture for life. "People like me who aren't particularly talented at anything are happier with the old system of lifetime employment and seniority-based salaries," he says. "The supposed 'chances and opportunities' that a competitive economy offers is for those who are already steps ahead." Ijiri later found work as a security guard, hardly the future he once envisioned for himself.
In Japan today, reduced expectations are becoming increasingly common. As the world's second largest economy struggles to evolve from its mainstay manufacturing base into technology and high-value service industries, several generations of Japanese are in danger of becoming lost in transition. Following the crash of the early 1990s that ended the Japanese postwar economic miracle, Japan's public and private sectors have been slashing their work forces, cutting off bad-risk borrowers, and streamlining operations in an attempt to remain competitive in an increasingly global economy. Many of its world-class companies have succeeded in doing just that, and economic growth is beginning to nibble at the unemployment figures. In April, Japan's jobless rate was 4.4%, the lowest since December 1998.
But the success of some is being offset by the struggles of many, for whom jobs are no longer plentiful or secure. Japan, a country that prides itself on social harmony, homogeneity and an equitable distribution of wealth, is bifurcating along geographic and social lines into camps of permanent winners and perpetual losersthe former a highly educated and trained core of lite employees and entrepreneurs working for internationally competitive companies, the latter an increasingly marginalized yet growing sector of society comprising primarily elderly rural poor and despairing urban youths like Ijiri. "In the past, people believed that the whole nation was getting wealthier, and the rich were simply the people who got there quicker," says Toshiki Satou, a sociologist at the University of Tokyo (U.T.). "But that is changing. People are becoming more aware of class."
This increasingly distinct divide between rich and poor is so vivid in the national consciousness that it has been given a name: kakusa shakai (a society of disparity). It isn't hard to find statistical evidence of the phenomenon. In a land once noted for its armies of workaholic salarymen, part-time employees now account for 30% of the labor force. In February, the government announced that the number of people on welfare rose 60% over the last 10 years, reaching 1 million citizens for the first time since the program started in 1950. And according to recent findings by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 15% of Japan's households today are living in poverty (defined as having incomes that are half the national average or less). That compares with an average of 10% of households below the poverty line for all 30 OECD countries. In wealthy Scandinavia, the average is less than 5%. Japan's rich-poor divide is particularly worrisome, warns a January OECD report, because of the "lack of movement between the two segments of the work force, trapping a significant portion of the labor force in a low-wage category from which it is difficult to escape."