Japan's future is in danger.. Why are the Japanese reluctant to marry and have children?

Introduction to translation

Japan is currently facing a problem that is very similar to another facing Arab youth, which is the anxiety and intense work pressure in unstable, fluctuating professions, as the country is witnessing a huge rise in temporary employment rates.

Alana Simules, editor of The Atlantic, focuses on the heavy social repercussions of this problem, represented in the reluctance of Japanese youth to marry and have children, a situation worthy of contemplation in light of unmistakable similarities with our Arab reality.

translation text

Although Japan is one of the most developed countries in the world, the birth rate is moribund, as last year witnessed for the first time a surprise in which the number of births reached less than a million, while the population, in turn, decreased by more than 300,000 individuals.

Some attribute the reason for this phenomenon to the lack of interest of Japanese youth in intimate relationships, as well as women who were busy with their professional lives and preferred to work to marry and start a family.

However, one of the most surprising reasons in a developed country like Japan is that it is difficult for young people to get good jobs.

In Japan, men are seen as the sole breadwinner for the family, so the lack of good jobs may make the desire to marry and have children almost impossible to achieve, which throws them and their partners in a state of reluctance to marry because they cannot afford it, and this unveils the life of The Japanese, whose character is mixed with surprise and tragedy.

The curse of the free worker

In the same context, Ann Allison, professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University, says: “This phenomenon is consistent with the worldwide trend in terms of a precarious future, a low birth rate, and even a low rate of association; most people attribute the first reason This leads to job and economic insecurity.” However, this seems surprising in Japan, as a country where the economic situation is booming so strongly that unemployment rates are less than 3%.

The main reason behind Japan's shrinking economic opportunity lies in the high proportion of precarious employment.

For a long time after the war, Japan used to provide its citizens with stable jobs with multiple benefits and reliable salaries until retirement age, but on condition that they make desperate efforts in their work, but the situation has now changed a lot, according to Jeff Kingston, a professor at the University of Japanese Temple and author of several books on Japan.

Kingston sees that 40% of the workforce in Japan does not hold stable jobs with good companies that provide regular salaries, on the contrary, these workers occupy temporary part-time jobs with low salaries that do not entail any benefits (the problem is that these temporary workers appear in government statistics as full-time employees).

To make matters worse, only 20% of these workers can get stable jobs, so the price for the rest is a constant worry that they are far from achieving what they aspire to. Stable jobs in Japan between 1995 and 2008 amounted to nearly 3.8 million workers, while the number of workers in irregular jobs increased by 7.6 million.

These temporary workers in Japan are sometimes called "freeters", a combination of "freelance" and the German word "arbeiter", which means "worker", eventually meaning "free worker". .

According to Kingston, the beginning of the rise of workers in precarious jobs in Japan was in the early 1990s, when the government decided to make some changes in labor laws to exploit as many temporary workers and contract workers with intermediary companies as possible.

With the advent of globalization, pressure on companies to cut costs has increased;

This fueled its growing appetite for a temporary workforce, a trend that Japan aggressively embraced during the Great Depression.

One of the deepest fears and hardships that a Japanese citizen faces is not getting a stable job on which he can count, because without it he loses his chance to be a desirable marriage partner.

Similarly, Machiko Osawa, a professor at Japan Women's University, agrees with Kingston's view that Japan's evolution in its employment models has negatively affected recent graduates who are finding it very difficult to secure a foothold on the career ladder.

In a culture that strongly emphasizes that men are responsible for providing for the family, and when you add this to the fact that getting a permanent job is becoming more difficult, it all paves the way for them to survive under the weight of an unwillingness to marry, while increasing their reluctance to have children.

One of the deepest fears and hardships faced by the Japanese citizen is the lack of a stable job that he can count on, because without it he loses his chance to be a desirable marriage partner.

Commenting on this, Ryosuke Nishida, a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, who previously wrote about youth unemployment, says: “Even if the two parties wanted to marry, and both were in an unstable job, the parents would most likely be opposed to this marriage, because the man’s getting Having a stable and permanent job is one of the most important pillars of Japanese culture, and if one graduates and does not find a permanent job, one is quickly stigmatized as a failure.”

According to Kingston, only 30% of married couples are in their early thirties in precarious jobs, while only 56% of married couples work full-time in a stable job at a company.

Even women are not spared from these crises, as they often end up with temporary jobs;

This negatively affects the family and raising children, because the working hours in temporary jobs are not specified, in addition to the low wages.

Statistics show that 70% of Japanese women leave work after childbirth in order to raise children, relying on their husbands' salaries;

What puts them in a real crisis if the husband does not have a stable job with a good salary.

Complaints by women in major Japanese cities were frequent due to the difficulty of finding partners with the intention of marriage, so Zwei, a Japanese company for arranged dates, decided to offer women in major cities cooking lessons and preparing meals from other prefectures such as Miyazaki Prefecture. in southern Japan.

The company's primary goal was to try to foster a favorable sense of life outside Tokyo, and to try to reconcile women in major Japanese cities with men in other parts of the country, because the men there had good and stable jobs, and were seen as viable marriage partners.

These types of companies provide a sense of support for women, and assuage their sense of shame about the tortuous conditions in which men have fallen victim and are the reason for their reluctance to marry.

"Men in this city don't have many masculine desires that would motivate them to get married, so you find most of them easily give up the whole idea of ​​marriage," says Kota Takada, an employee of Zoe.

A recent survey of unmarried women and men in Japan between the ages of 18 and 34 found that nearly 70 percent of men and 60 percent of women had never dated.

Other institutions in Japan are making efforts to track this crisis, including POSSE, a small organization formed by university graduates who wanted to create a youth trade union.

About this, Haruki Kono, head of the foundation, says: “It is most regrettable that some young people who occupy temporary jobs are called (internet cafe refugees), considering that these cafes are the places available for rent all night, while others live in with their parents or in a social care home.

unjust companies

The foundation estimates that the average income of people with irregular jobs in Japan is $1,800 per month.

It may sound like a good amount, but there isn't much left of it after paying rent, college fees, and insurance.

And only about a quarter of Japan's college graduates - the proportion of graduates from prestigious universities - get good, stable, lifelong jobs, while others struggle with temporary jobs.

Commenting on this, Makoto Iwahashi, a member of the Foundation says: “In an economy that is unrelenting in its fierceness, the idea of ​​marriage and building a family never crosses the minds of young people in their twenties, to the extent that most of them view marriage as a dreamy and far What is the reality?

The rise in temporary jobs in Japan has not only taken a toll on those who hold these jobs, but has also amplified companies’ sense that they have the right to clamp down on their employees whenever they want to, and they have achieved this goal by feeding their employees’ ideas that they should be very grateful for a stable job. Others look forward to it as a distant dream.

Therefore, Haruki Kono believes that companies know very well that young people in their twenties and thirties desperately need stable jobs, so they take advantage of this situation to employ many of them and then force them to work long hours for low wages, considering that most of them will have to accept this situation due to the difficulty of having Other opportunities before them through which they can secure their livelihood.

There is even a Japanese term called "karoshi", which means death from overwork.

Kono believes that this crisis has worsened since the Great Depression, when companies realized how difficult it was for people to find good jobs in Japan, and decided to put a lot of burden on employees.

With the passage of time, we can observe the extent to which these jobs drain their psychological energy, and they take bitterness until their souls suffocate.

In 2012, Kono published a book titled "Evil Corporations: The Monsters Eating Up Japan", and came out in Japanese under the title "Burakku Kigyo," which translates to "black corporations," "prejudicial," or "corporations." evil", to describe companies that exploit workers in this way.

Since then the term has become very popular in Japan.

"It's hard to find these jobs with a regular salary, so companies take advantage of this point as much as possible," Kono says, leaving employees' sense of job security in the grip of their policies.

Even “good” jobs in Japan are brutalized by a labor system in which one’s performance has become the norm in a relentless economy.

It is true that employees with good jobs are paid enough to support their families, but the dark side of the story is that there is no time to date, pay attention to love life, or do anything other than work, sleep and eat.

This imbalance between what a normal human needs and the work system in Japan is the main reason that feeds employees a constant feeling of stress and psychological pressure.

Joe Matsubara, a working-class graduate of Japan's most prestigious private universities, thought he had fulfilled the Japanese dream when he graduated and landed a job at Daiwa House, a home design and construction company.

The company advertised itself as an excellent work environment, but Matsubara was hit by the dire reality that revealed the real work environment, which was far from what the company had previously promoted.

Although the official time for employees to leave is 7pm, the company has forced them to work late into the night almost every day.

The company usually requires employees to check out by 7 pm even if their work is still going on, as well as iPads that employees receive so that they can continue to work even if they are in meetings outside the office.

And if one of the employees does not check out at seven in the evening, he quickly receives a call on his phone, bluntly asking him to sign immediately and continue to work.

However, the staff's protest cry against the existing conditions was not easy.

A person is not humiliated if he fails at some things, but only feels humiliated if he invests his pride and sense of worth in a specific ambition and achievement - such as getting a job - and then disappoints, and this is exactly what employees experience in Japan.

Commenting on this, Matsubara says: “There is absolutely no relationship between the actual amount of time an employee spends at work and the number of hours officially recorded. With this huge gap, employees feel that they are falling daily into a bumpy and misleading quagmire.”

Matsubara, for example, took almost no leave, because even on the days he was supposed to take a vacation, he was ordered by the company to take classes in certain areas to develop his skills and obtain some necessary certifications.

With such a stressful pace of life in Japan, dating is next to impossible.

Only a year later, the severity of the disease began to intensify due to the long hours and intense psychological pressure on Matsubara.

All the routes taken by the company were fraught with danger to the mental and physical health of the employees.

After a while, Matsubara had trouble sleeping, hallucinations and strange sounds began to overwhelm him, and a wave of depression overwhelmed him with the frightening discrepancy between his expectations of the stable job he had been craving and the real experience he was going through.

For the employees, however, the company has become an indifferent place of only geometric proportions, in whose presence any sense of familiarity has been abolished.

All this weighed on Matsubara, and the burden increased so much that he was taken to the hospital several times in an ambulance, because at many moments he had great difficulty catching his breath, and soon ended in a nervous breakdown.

The company did not stop there, but went too far and forced him to resign and return the money he saved from living in the housing provided by the company, which became an entity psychologically linked to the suffering of its employees.

Matsubara currently makes his living from the welfare system. "My life was running smoothly and in an orderly fashion until the [Daiwa House] company came and ruined my whole life because of the pressures that weighed on us and were increasing day by day," he says.

It is really ironic that out of the 800 employees who started with Matsubara in this company, about 600 resigned after a short period, and these are the problems left by the work system that instills in its employees a feeling of humiliation and unworthiness.

A culture that sanctifies work and another that crushes employees

It is true that Japan is not the only country whose people are not inclined to publicize their anxiety and stress about social status or the humiliation caused by their employers, nor is it the only country that has witnessed a huge increase in temporary employment, but it nonetheless has more complex situations than Employees may test it in the United States or any other developed country.

The truth is that Japan is a country with a culture that values ​​stable work with regular pay, to the extent that people who cannot find a regular, steady job - regardless of their qualifications - are often subjected to harsh criticism that their peers in other countries may not.

Commenting on this, Ryosuke Nishida, a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, says: “The general tendency or tendency in Japan is not to hesitate to immediately blame people who were unable to get a job.”

Another reason that may complicate matters further in Japan is that Japanese culture places too much emphasis on hard work and long working hours, and it is considered rude to leave your job before your boss.

Even if individuals complain about the stress of long working hours, they do not reap as much sympathy as they may need from friends and family members, let alone the government?!

Besides all this, Japan's trade unions play a weak role, often trying to cooperate with companies, and their goal is to desperately keep the good jobs available, rather than fighting on behalf of all workers.

Therefore, according to Kono, trade unions in Japan serve companies, not workers.” However, these crises also affected the United States after the spread of temporary jobs there, and the role of trade unions began to gradually weaken year after year.

Add to this the downturn in the industrial sector, the opioid epidemic (the phenomenon of addiction to opiates such as morphine and tramadol for non-medical purposes and for long periods without medical supervision);

What negatively affected the country's economic situation, was followed by a decline in the marriage rate, as well as the fertility rate in the United States has already fallen to its lowest historical levels, and the deteriorating economic conditions may exacerbate the crisis.

Shinzo Abe

To solve the crisis in Japan and calm the situation a little, the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe devoted part of its attention to solving the problem of unchecked high proportion of unfair and abusive jobs, but from the point of view of critics, the administration did not do enough to solve the crisis.

On the other hand, a government committee suggested that companies set a maximum number of overtime hours not to exceed 100 hours per month.

For the first time in the country, the Japanese government in 2017 published a list of more than 300 companies that violated labor laws, hoping publicly exposing them would be a way to force them to change their tactics and relieve pressure on their employees. But the real problem is that the Abe administration has been pro-business and sacred to work and the yard. For him, so the government's attempts to fix the crisis - according to Kingston - will not lead to any fundamental change.

Ultimately, the Abe administration has long pledged to tackle the country's low birthrate crisis, and many of those pledges have focused on helping women better balance work and family.

It is true that the suffering of women is part of the problem, but it is not the whole problem.

Although men in Japan enjoy economic and social advantages over women, they still lack a sense of security and stability in an economy that is unrelenting.

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Translation: Somaya Zaher

This report has been translated from The Atlantic and does not necessarily reflect the website of Meydan.