Apr 19, 2020 (Nikkei) - The economic upheaval caused by the coronavirus pandemic risks creating another lost generation of young Japanese job seekers graduating into a deeply scarred economy.
The survivors of Japan's employment "ice age" of the 1990s and early 2000s, many of them still frozen out of the regular job market, demonstrate how long the damage can last.
Naoaki Kimura, who began working in January at the social services department of the city of Takarazuka, knows all too well how it feels to have one's life derailed by a bad economy.
More than 20 years of drifting through an unwelcoming job market now help him empathize with furious residents and consider the lives and family circumstances that have brought them to this point.
"I listen closely to what each and every person has to say while hoping to help them see things a little more positively," the 45-year-old said.
Kimura entered the job market in 1998, amid drastic cutbacks in corporate hiring that followed the bursting of the economic bubble of the '80s. The country was filled with students who had left school without a single job offer -- a grim fate in a market still heavily reliant on hiring of fresh college graduates.
Kimura tried applying to 50 or so companies, including in manufacturing and finance, hoping for a bite from a big employer. He received just one job offer -- from a company that he could not imagine himself working for.
The next year, Kimura sent out the same number of applications and did not end up with a single offer. After two years of searching, he was hired as a full-time employee at a convenience store and felt ready to begin working at last.
But he was not prepared for how it would affect his life. Kimura's phone rang early in the morning and late into the night with calls to rush over to his store. He even had to buy large numbers of Christmas cakes and seasonal summer gifts to meet sales quotas.
Unable to cope, Kimura quit and hopped between jobs as a contract employee. While searching for positions, he once had an interviewer take a call mid-interview. Naturally, he was not hired for that job.
Kimura began to resent the job shortage he had been thrust into, feeling that no one would listen to him.
He eventually found employment as a nonregular government worker, which came with constant worry about whether he would still have a job the following year. Ashamed of his inability to get his life off the ground, Kimura fell out of touch with friends from high school and college who had snagged full-time positions.
