Youth Employment Problems, After The Collapse Of The Bubble Economy In Japan

Up to early 1990s, the labor market of Japan can still guarantee the direct employment of those young graduates. After the breakdown of the economic bubble in the late 1990s, the employment situation of the youth worsened dramatically as the sharp drop in the recruitment from the Japanese corporates. Because of that, the young people who was called Freeters increased rapidly. The abundant amount of the Freeters and the the problems caused aroused the attention of the public.This paper is studied upon the materials about Freeters by Japanese scholars and relevant departments of Japanese government,examining on correlation theories and all sorts of investigation data, as well as questionnaire,during one year when the author studied abroad in Japan.The first chapter of this paper retrospects the development from the emergence of Freeters to it becoming the social problem of much attention. Based on the representive research on Freeters by the Japanese experts and the related Japanese official department, the paper analyzes the characteristics of Freeters in different periods. The paper also points out that the vast emerging Freeters after the breakdown of the economic bubble have lost the early characteristic of pursuing free life and not willing to be tied by the fixed working place; being Freeters is the unwilling choice of those low degree and unskilled youth facing the change in social industrial srtructure and employment policy of the corporates.The second chapter of this paper begins with cleaning up the connection between Freeters and untypical employment and then focuses on the social problem caused by the rapid increse of the Freeters and points out the close relation between the appearance of Freeters and the system of Japanese corporates. Because of the closeness of the former Japanese corporate system, the young men who can not take posts after graduation from schools directly are hard to get the opportunity to work in the company since then. That Freeters becoming the labor form between school students and formal corporate employees is the social progress and has positive meaning. However, the problem is that the soil of the Japanese society does not provide such an opportunity for the youth and we can say the form does not match the Japanese corporate system. When the percentage of informal employment becomes higher and higher in the employmentstructure, and this situation has become the trend, the Japanese society should build up a new mechanism to adjust this change.The third chapter researches on the employment situation of the senior students in the department of sociology of a university in Kyoto and analyzes on the measures taken by the Japanese government to solve the employment problem of the youth. The research reveals: being full-time employees is still preferred by most graduates. The increasing growth of part-time employment shows that the reason why Freeters grow lies majorly in the change of the employment conduct but not in the idea change of the youth themselves. When the government takes actions to reduce the number of Freeters, its focus lies largely in the build-up of the youth's employment consciousness, not in the revolution of the corporates' former unreasonable system. The Japanese youth's employment problem after the breakdown of the economic bubble reflects the closeness of the old Japanese corporate system. The problem of Freeters is the epitome that centrally reflects the disadvantage of this closeness. If we want the Freeters really become a new perfect form of work, it requires the change in the social environment and the series fundamental change of people's living style. And that would be a long term process.