“The crisis of youth” (wakamono kiki). Proclaimed in boldface type, this is the phrase that ran across the cover of Japan’s weekly magazine Tōyō Keizai in early 2009. The cover story was accompanied by a photo of a grim-faced young Japanese man in a business suit. Other phrases on the magazine cover amplified the gloomy message: “Average monthly overtime hours are 150. The percentage of young people in their early twenties who are in irregular work is 43. More than 50 percent of workers are dissatisfied with their workplace.” The list goes on. Inside the magazine, statistics and stories of Japanese young people’s uneasy job situation fill the pages in discouraging detail. Comparative statistics for other OECD countries appear in colored graphs but do little to brighten the depiction of Japan.

In this book I have used numbers to illustrate the employment situation of the lost generation and have added the voices of Japanese high school teachers, officials at public employment security offices, employers, and young men themselves to articulate what is happening “on the ground.” These varied viewpoints collectively demonstrate how young people’s employment has been closely linked to the existence of a strongly segmented Japanese labor market that demarcates the boundary between jobs designated for new graduates and jobs designated for everyone else. Young graduates have alternatively benefited and chafed against the restrictions of having an entry-level labor market of their own, just as they have benefited and chafed against schools’ and employers’ assumption that they are naïve about the world of work and must be shepherded into it by watchful adults.