Japan's Lost Generation: The Silent Sufferers that Grew up in Post-Bubble Japan 

The capitalists love this shit. They make the 99% lose everything and they buy it up for pennies on the dollar.

Came across an aerospace engineer studying his masters a few years back. The guy was working as a barista in his spare time, and told me that when he’s finished with his degree he would like to open his own cafe… I suppose there just aren’t that many jobs available in the field of advanced technologies, and people are increasingly focusing on practical matters at hand these days.

Same here. Graduated in 2010 as a marine engineer. Worked as a part-time employer and as a freelancer so I could get some work experience in engineering and as an electrician. After 13 years of sending out job applications to all craft and industrial companies in my country, I have now given up looking.

TBH, Australia has stupid good money compared to any other country. As a Brit who spent 2 years there, the money Aussies earn is *per week* is silly.

Yeah i had a pen pal there they live like high class in australia but i wouldnt be able to handle their creepy crawlies

There is a young married Japanese couple in my small hometown here in Sweden. They left because of the lack of jobs were they lived and moved to find opportunities elsewhere and finally ended up here. Both are highly skilled Sushi chefs and run a small restaurant here. Me and my GF have built up a friendship with them. We eat there once per week and it's truly delicious.

@@mariotaz our cost of living is also bloody eye watering, so its not exactly like we're sitting pretty

@@moltencor8610 Are you Australian?

How do you know that they're not even Christian

​@ninab.4540 you must be the life of the party

I disagree. I think the US is in the Best position. The problem is that the US reather than invest in domestic worker. Keep importing them, Indian and Chinese for high skills and latin american for low skill. This is China in 2023. China will go though this right now. I notice that in the 1980s the US was competetive but less. Now days is just toxic, if you get a B+ in high school you lose a scholarship. I think the US should cut down on imigration, free trade with China helped cause a big problem deindustrialization, but the rust belt was declining a little before the open up China in 1970, China industrialization just speed up something that would eventually happened, but industry probably would go to China, the deep south and maybe Mexico, and China just made the situation it worst, and I think. The number of internation students should be limited. Trade and professonal schools just be free. And the government should give scholarship for intelligent american people to study stem or medicine, is better than to keep importing workers from third world, no american voted for this. It just the political system is corrupt. If you think about it chinese students, most of them, is studing at ivy league because their perants had corrupt connection with the CCP and many help cause the problem that the rust belt are facing, I am not being racist against chineses or asians, I just think they should not be rewarded for this, limting international admition will still make some people from china or india to come but will help more american citizens. Propably the best internatinional student will still come, but I notice many univesities and collages are having majority foreign student, they are the cash cow.

@@derek4412 Play the vidya

awesome bro, keep at it! haha we must be of the same generation because i have a very similar situation and mindset; after all the shit in life keep your finances on tight leash, support your loved ones, and for the rest stabilize and heal from the shit in life. All the best out there, and i wish good health to your parents!

See the book Pure Invention by Matt Alt - it talks about how Japan reached “the future” ahead of the rest of the world in many different areas, and now we’re starting to catch up/become more like Japan. We can see it now, how after the recession many of the social phenomenon seen in the post bubble japan are now more common in the US. It’s also why anime made in the post bubble years resonated so strongly with young people in the US in the early 2000s.

Devils attack to good people.

Congratulations ! Would you ever consider going back to Japan for work ?

@@marvin9409 “NO” i like the freedom and space i have in the USA i never expected at my age to have acres of land and open sky not obscured by skyscrapers

@MayumiC-chan9377 oh wow haha. I was just asking, because I recently saw a comment of an australian man who married a japanese woman. The woman studied in Japan and I think worked in the finance sector. She hated it but as she didn't know about any working conditions elsewhere, she just endured it. When she worked for a year in Australia tho, she told her husband she'd never in her lifetime work for a japanese company again 😂 I just found your comment funny because it reminded me of it and I wanted to know, if it's really THAT bad. Unfortunately I think that's true. Wish you all the best and greetings from Germany 👋

@@marvin9409 my husband introduced me to a hobby i never thought i would be part of my husband taught me to hunt and it’s so much fun

Exactly. This is hardly a Japanese only issue anymore

Ok but he is talking about what happened in Japan

Probably through Sony and Toshiba and even more stuff we don’t even realize

Same. It’s absolutely fascinating to me. I’ve always been fascinated with Japan since I was a kid growing up with dragonball, Nintendo, etc. excellent content on this channel

Good/ fascinating art is often created during hard times so it kinda makes sense tbh. The economic crisis is probably the reason why Anime started exploring deeper topics during that time. Artists are less worried about things being profitable or consumer friendly because the profits aren't going to come in the first place...

@@h0eera.115 That's an excellent point. I think of Japanese nihilism exuded in their art, like Neon Genesis Evangelion or Berserk, where the protagonists has to find some deeper existential purpose in order to deal with the overwhelming evil that they have to contend with. To inspire a generation of Japanese youth, when no hope remains.

​​@@h0eera.115 When one looks at the Japanese Frontsoft Games like the Souls series or Elden Ring, you'd also get the feeling that the games represent Japan. The world once had its heyday but now it is slowly and surely falling into ruin. Like what Japan is now. But what is the resolution? To win the game, your character ends up burning down everything, killing the god that held up the order in the hopes of a new but lasting order taking its place. And it seems as if Japan is in that situation now.

They are suffering from mental health problems that dont get solved These kind of problems should be prevented rather than corrected but nobody really cares to do either

Also helps to have a prepper mindset. Buy a little extra and squirrel away food, money, whatever you think you might need for a rainy day.

"ableist" Maybe you wouldn't be so miserable if you learned proper skills instead of garbage words like that lol

Man wtf is wrong with you 😂

Nice attempt at dark humor.

While the lost generation had its impact, I'd argue that Japan's rise in football can be more closely attributed to the Yuutori generation (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutori_education). With their increased free time and less pressure towards traditional corporate roles, many delved into their passions, such as gaming and sports. This shift in focus might've nurtured Japan's football talents and spurred their excellence on the field

I’ve heard the US be compared to a dementia patient that constantly thinks it’s still in the 1950s when it barely understands or even remembers that era and what made it so prosperous. Yet they insist on still living in the rotting husk of an era that’s long dead and probably never coming back.

@@Colddirector it may be more common for people to kick out their kids when they are 18, but it is more and more common for people to live with their parents. So I think the attitudes you try to convey aren’t quite correct in your usage of them as completely common or pervasive. (Also, I have never known of parents basically abandoning their kids in the United States. Maybe I am insulated from this by family middle class income mostly.)

I think it’s less that they don’t think life is worth passing on, more that they simply can’t afford to have children. I mean they *could* afford it but not without giving themselves and their child a significantly worse standard of living, and nobody in their right mind would do that just to contribute to some vague sense of economic or demographic preservation.

23 looking to graduate, no job/experience. Not planning on procreating any time soon. Heck I’m not even willing to date

@@Colddirector Not even. Everyone I've spoken to that didn't want children, simply said it's because they do not want kids. It's less about money, and more about the doom and gloom that people keep pushing. If you have kids today, they will not grow up struggling to breathe because the fucking plants are dying off. Kentucky will not be beach front property. They will live the same, boring, trivial life that you did, and your parents did. And since OP wants to pretend to be an economist, they'd understand that basic economics states that Individuals will do whatever benefits them the most, particularly if there is an incentive. However, the politicians have twisted this, and tell people their children will grow up in a hellscape, with no clean air, water, fresh food, etc. Which is a load of horse shit, but they seem to have taken some pointers from the nazis, because they keep repeating the same lie they've been telling for the last fifty years, and finally a bunch of idiots have latched onto it. The truth is, most people are not going to be rich, and most people are not going to land some job paying six figures. That shouldn't stop them from having children. In fact, if people lack meaning in life, they should absolutely have children, because that is literally our ONLY reason to exist. To pass on our genes to the next generation. Living isn't as expensive as people make it out to be, people have been doing it in Appalachia for generations. If you have to eat four day old soup, that's just the way it has to be. it' s not any worse for you than fast food is. However, it is important that you at least work enough to pay the bills, and provide the bare necessities. Before I went back to college, I was living extremely comfortably, and could pay all my bills, and buy over $1000 worth of groceries a month. I paid $1000 for rent, drove and hour to work every day, and had a brand new iPhone. I live in Appalachia. My Job required zero experience.(though I had it.) Fucking Toyota pays double what I was making, to stand at an assembly line all day. If you want kids, get to work, and make it happen.

I don't see how any of you can make these arguments if people in horrible poverty in Africa and India manage to have kids, and most of them can afford growing up

@@mrDjuroman You're not wrong, but it's an observable trend across every country--including India, which even at its relatively low level of development and income, has fallen just below the population of replacement level of total fertility rate of 2.1. As countries become richer, they have fewer children, very consistently. It's pretty simple, really; people compare themselves to those closest to them in determining their subjective quality of living. It's harder for most people to compare their quality of life to people thousands of kilometers away than their next-door neighbors, and even as inequality between countries has shrunken these past few decades, it's worsened within many. This is one of the major issues that capitalist development models seems at least to dramatically worsen. Even if it's difficult to directly establish causation, the inequality such development creates is a problem, too. Unsurprisingly, inequality is a pretty significant correlative with low fertility rates. This is visible in the U.S., where birthrates are really only being buoyed by fairly high rates of immigration, and higher rates of reproduction among recent immigrants, too. For all the complaining conservatives do about immigration, America's fairly high rates of immigration are all that's keeping it from eventual population decline.

It's hard to change that since most of the decent jobs require people to hold a degree. The researcher used in the example is a tragic case, but is not a proper view on the job market. People taking engineering and business courses also have it tough hunting for proper jobs. There are even people who put up with being in "black companies" cause it's hard to find another job once you lose one. There are just as many cases of suicide from people that have jobs. Admittedly this issue is slowly being healed in recent years and isn't as harsh before. There is also a subset of people who have jobs that aren't reliant on degrees which was mentioned in the video which were the "furiita"/freelancers, the ones that take part time or other low end jobs.

What would you say it a good alternative to the push for higher education? Education has always been key for social mobility.

@@mrs.potatohead8471 Vocational education is useful. My point was that education for its own sake is the problem. Appropriate education leads to social mobility. Untargetted education just leads to misallocation of resources - which ultimately makes everyone poorer.

People should be free to educate themselves in whatever subject they want People aren’t supposed to be wage slaves whose lives are only valued through economics The rigid view on what is and isn’t valuable is not the future

@@dj_koen1265 people are indeed free to choose to pursue education or not and which subject(s) they wish to study. However, they must own the consequences of their choices.

South Korea and China are catching up

Nah my country will probably just get another coup before another Lost Decade

Nah the Chinese government got that covered.

I’ll recommend this book to pretty much everyone who has a remote interest in Japanese pop culture, but Pure Invention by Matt Alt. It’s not a book about the bubble per se, but it does speak about how the echoes of the bubble years have influenced the rest of the world via the creators who came out of it, like Hideaki Anno (Evangelion) and others.

You might also enjoy Tokyo Junkie by Robert Whiting. An autobiography of an American military officer who first came to Tokyo in the 1960s and has lived there since. It was published in 2021 so it covers how Tokyo has changed over the past 60 years through the eyes of an outsider who lived it.

I believe he said “freeters” :)

Looked too close to London 😅

Nihilism is an L

It’s a garbage economical system

Let’s hope they don’t decide a good ol fashioned war is what’s needed to kick the economy back into shape

I wonder what that leaves millenials and Gen Zs

Least regarded nihilist:

Who would you blame?

Bro