Japan’s freeters and the value of an education

Japanese Yen

Hiroki Iwabuchi lives in an apartment the size of a pool table. Within its four walls, he eats and sleeps, recording the misfortune of his life on a cheap Sony camcorder. Some would think he is a freeter  — a term often used in Japan to refer to young slackers who live off of temporary service jobs — because he likes it, but he was once a college graduate.

Before landing his current full-time job at a nursing home, he worked as a manual labor assistant at a temp agency, as repairer at a Canon factory and many other odd jobs, earning only the minimum to get by. He paid a $10 fee to sleep in a chair at an Internet café and saved some change to pay the train fare for the next day. Eating McDonald’s was paradise.

But Iwabuchi is not the only one. The lack of opportunity for young Japanese is evident. Today, more than 20 years after Japan’s real-estate crisis, “only half of working 15-to-24-year-olds have regular jobs,” Ethan Devine, expert in Asian affairs and partner at Indus Capital Partners, writes for The Atlantic. Another 10 percent remain unemployed.

Since Devine says the U.S. workforce “will grow more slowly over the next 20 years than it has grown at any time in the past century,” Iwabuchi’s story becomes a relevant business lesson: economic fluctuations and crisis force young college graduates to scavenge for jobs, not by choice, but because they need to survive.

THE ‘REAL’ SHOCK

In 1990, Japan’s real-estate bubble burst gave birth to freeters and funemployment. In response to the economic hardship and the lack of full-time employment, Devine writes “young people rejected conformist Japanese culture and its 15-hour workdays.” Instead, they turned to unconventional jobs for some change and decided to hang out.

Yet, the word funemployment quickly lost the fun.

Today, nobody knows why Japan has not recovered from the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. Some, such as Devine, believe the different freeter generations to be the answer.

Most ’90s freeters never recovered from their generational slump and still live with their parents. Aging freeters file six of every 10 mental health insurance claims, Devine says.

Others have started to become herbivores, a term popularized by freelance writer Maki Fukasawa, which alludes to those men who reject the old image of Japanese masculinity and embrace a culture of uncompetitiveness, spend a lot of money on cosmetics and refuse to work. Some even wear bras for emotional support.

Megumi Ushikubo, president of Tokyo marketing firm Infinity and author of the bestseller “The Herbivorous Ladylike Men,” said for The Independent:

People who grew up in the bubble era (of the 1980s) really feel like they were let down. They worked so hard and it all came to nothing, so the men who came after them have changed.

A COMMON CHRONIC DISEASE

Japan’s economy suffers from a chronic disease, and companies have stopped to hire regular employers, but why?

Companies’ move to recur to sub-employment because of low profits has led young Japanese to choose between a temporary job and no job at all.

Some, such Naoki Shinada and David Autor, two prominent economists, relate the slow recovery and the current job insecurity to the freeters of the 1990s, Devine writes.

Devine explains Japan’s chronic job instability has had serious consequences and could have more. In 1992, 80 percent of Japanese workers had regular jobs. But this has changed over the years. Only half of those workers had regular jobs in 2006. Today, only 2 percent of nonregular workers aspire to have a regular work each year.

Shinada, an economist at the Development Bank of Japan, says companies use temporary and part-time workers to control costs and maintain flexibility at times of financial crisis.

However, if this becomes the standard hiring practice, it makes “it more difficult for firms to maintain some skills embodied in their labor force.” Unemployment and a less skilled workforce result on the long run because of this hiring practice.

Describing the standard as a lumpy adjustment, Autor, an MIT economist, further notes for Devine:

(Corporations) don’t make lots of little reorganizations each time things get slightly out of tune … (they) wait until things are way off, then make one big adjustment.

Deep recessions like the one Japan experienced force corporations to make adjustments, which cause major job reorganizations.

In the United States, youth unemployment is twice the national average, despite America’s recovery after the financial crash. Part-time employment went from 23 percent from ages 20 to 24 in 2008 to 30 percent in 2012, Devine says.

Ultimately, if companies in the United States, Japan or any other country do not invest in human capital (the knowledge and skills of its workforce), having a college degree won’t matter.

Even state intervention in the economy, as far as job training goes — which actually helped Iwabuchi secure his job after seven years of nonregular work — could help the problem, providing a path towards a stable job for freeters and non-degree holding individuals.

As Devine writes,

Modern economies rest upon the skills of their workforces, and so, although it is expensive and time-consuming to train young workers, wasting their potential will prove more expensive.

While earning a college degree does not secure graduates a job in today’s market, planning the reorganization of job vacancies and investing in training programs could save the economy. By doing so, the private sector and the government aim for stability and a cohesive future between employers and students.

Image credit: Rodrigo Nieves.

The mindful Millenial generation

CHOMSKY

Most college graduates and undergraduates shudder at the words loan and debt. After all, once the hype and happiness of graduation is over, and graduates enter the workforce, pursuing a check that will decrease debt becomes a priority. You come to realize that, even though girlfriends may go and job locations may change, that big, fat six figure sum you owe sticks to you like a leech.

It is going nowhere.

Amid this uncertainty, what happens if we add into the $1 trillion loan-debt concoct the most recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which suggest students have slowed the economy’s recovery?

The study reveals the two main motors for the economy’s recovery —the car and real estate industries—  have significantly lowered their sales to students since 2008, specifically those sales to student borrowers in their twenties and thirties. As seen in the charts below, even though the median age for first time home buyers has remained stable at 30 years of age since 2008, according to the National Association of Realtors, young people are not borrowing money to buy cars and houses.

Those young individuals with student loans represent an important shift for the economy. They have swapped, as Derek Thompson, senior editor at The Atlantic, describes in one of his articles, the possibility to buy a brand new Prius and college-grad home for a shot at higher education.

What’s really changed is what kind of debt they have. Young people have swapped student loans for mortgage and auto loans. They’ve traded cars for college and homes for homework.

Are students responsible for the slug-moving recovery of the economy? Not quite. As far as higher education in the United States goes, young students are trading their material assets for more skills, more knowledge and better preparation.

In no other era had the United States had more students in its colleges and universities than now. As Thompson points out, average debt among students ranging the age of twenty years hadn’t been this low since 1995.

And, as he suggests, college students weren’t going to buy homes, anyway, whether the car and real estate industries agree with it.

With youth unemployment kissing 18 percent through 2010, more young American realized that the opportunity cost of leaving the labor force to go to school had never been lower. They wouldn’t have bought homes, anyway. They wouldn’t have bought cars, anyway. The economy was too rotten. So for many of them, the choice wasn’t been a four-bedroom house and four more years of school. It was between school and underemployment. They chose wisely.

However great in his vantage point, Thompson failed to recognize marketability creates a job distinction between trades, which require technical education or apprenticeship, and specialized jobs, which require an undergraduate or advanced college degree (see astrophysics and medicine).

Aside from mentioning the college premium or degree bonus, he does not provide information about how some segments of society have erroneously bought into the idea that a college degree instantly turns university graduates into more successful job prospects. That’s a neat idea for an article on comparative perspectives, right there.

Despite most journalist professors deem as unorthodox those cases where students begin their copy with a question, Thompson’s greatest hook lies in his title — “Are student loans destroying the economy?” He asks his readers.

I think we know the answer.

Photo credit: vortexanomaly.

The Plastic Capitalism of Fiji Water

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Mohammed Altaff, owner of Aqua Pacific water, said:

It’s just like branding a water ‘America Water’ and denying anyone else the right to use the name ‘America.’

When Fiji Water decided to seize the word “Fiji” for its brand, the word became off bounds for everyone else.

Anna Lenzer’s article about Fiji Water unveils the corruption, ruthless business practices and ironies behind the brand.

Beginning with a delayed lead that captures police and governmental corruption in her article, Lenzer gives a first person account to authorities’ behavior in Fiji.

Local authorities took her to a police station without a valid reason —she had been sending emails about foreign journalists being kicked off the island— and asked her to disclose her findings.

As one of the policemen threatened,

I’d hate to see a young lady like you go into a jail full of men,” he averred, smiling grimly. “You know what happened to women during the 2000 coup, don’t you?

AN UPSIDE DOWN WORLD

From Paris Hilton to President Barack Obama, celebrities drink Fiji Water. Launched in 1995 by David Gilmour, the brand dominates today’s water market.

In today’s sea of water bottle choices, trendsetters, prominent public figures and media outlets —The Huffington Post, for instance— hail the company as trendy and environmentally friendly. Starting in 2008, the company said they would plan to go carbon negative by offsetting 120 percent of production emissions via conservation and energy projects.

Yet, how do they plan to accomplish this, if their production seldom stops?

The company labels, blows, shrink-wraps and fills water bottles 24 hours a day, five days a week. Having a 99-year lease on land atop a 17-mile long aquifer in Vita Levu, an island located in the north coast of Fiji, Fiji Water has enough water resources to reach the world’s four corners with no difficulty.

Their motto to save the environment is the ultimate irony. As Lenzer writes,

‘Fiji Green’ urges consumers to drink imported water to fight climate change.

If production increases every day, how can imported water fight climate change? The reach of Fiji’s geometrically appealing plastic wonders seems endless.  The company exports and makes millions by selling the water of Fiji’s aquifers while native populations in the island suffer from a lack of potable water. Shouldn’t the people of Fiji have a legitimate claim over their own territory and resources?

Ultimately, Fiji Water has established a symbiotic coexistence with Fiji’s government, yet the asymmetrical relationship affects Fijians, since the company does not go all-in when it comes to securing the welfare of local community members.

Overall, this piece brings light to the obscure practices of Fiji Water, which dictates whichever terms they want and has the upper hand when negotiating with the government.

Incarnating the spirit of muckrakers of old, Lenzer managed to hit Fiji Water’s only frail point: their public image.

Now, who wants to say, “I want to be ‘in.’ Bring me a bottle of those cheerful bottles, please?”

Photo credit: Hurtiing.

How to chase a story

Hunter S. Thompson

Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up. Joan Didion slept in the same room as her manuscripts. Jack Kerouac stood on his head and balanced himself to touch his toe tips to get his mind going. For Ray Bradbury, time would dissociate from reality when typewriting.

These writers, along with many others, share a common addiction: they loved to write and had obsessive writing rituals.

Pulling information out of journals, interviews and other primary sources, Maria Popova’s article about the daily routines of famous writers provides a close look into several writers’ minds.

She lists memorable quotes that suggest the writing process does not have a definite path, but an intricate and unusual tangle of roads: each mind is a world of its own.

Maya Angelou, for example, shares her writing disillusions in her fascinating analysis about the editing process.

She says she would start her routine early in the day, writing eight to nine pages. Then, she would go for a walk, buy groceries and cook a nice meal, pretending to be normal for a few hours.

Yet, everything would crumble apart after reading her work once again, and she would end up discarding 70 to 80 percent of it most of the time.

As she says,

That’s the cruelest time you know, to really admit that it doesn’t work…But the editing, one’s own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important.

The article also contains valuable anecdotes for journalists, such Benjamin Franklin’s retrospection about the good in society, Don DeLillo’s musings about Borges’ photograph and Kerouac’s sense of humor.

Ultimately, I think the article’s initial quote is the most important. Popova carefully chose her hook, emphasizing good writing is not a mistake.

E.B. White argues in the beginning of the article,

A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.

As journalists, ideal conditions to work will seldom exist. Every day, editors will expect us to crunch deadlines, pursue an ambiguous degree of objectivity and navigate our copies’ sea of clutter to find that sentence that does the job.

For instance, war correspondents travel to far away places and expose themselves to great dangers. Sports writers miss their families when the hockey, football and baseball seasons — just to mention a few — start. And if you love your family, living out a suitcase is not fun.

Writers, especially journalists, owe integrity to their readers. Yet, who says we can’t have fun too? We can choose how to prepare and chase the stories we write. So, indulge each step as if it were the last. Become a superstitious writer and find your ritual.

Photo credit: Mynameisrumpelstiltzchen.

Slow night, so long

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As babies and toddlers, rays of sun seeping through a window wake us up in a matter of seconds. In high school, some of us are zombie-like teenagers that drag our feet to class. Later in life, our options narrow down to two: either you are an owl or a lark.

Ever had trouble sleeping? I do. Sleep always escapes my mind. But why?

Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer for The New Yorker, answered my two initial questions in “Up All Night,” an article about the science of sleeplessness.

Kolbert begins the article by developing a narrative about Nathaniel Kleitman, the father of modern sleep research. Details about his life as an errant child and experimentation connect readers to Kleitman.

He set himself apart from other researchers by undertaking the sleep enigma — an unexplored research field at that time — while working as a professor at the University of Chicago.

For decades, he experimented with himself and others to such an extent nobody knew why he was attracted so much to the marginal topic of sleep deprivation. The theme was the every-day bread and coffee of his life.

Kleitman’s endeavors truly became a scientific field when one of his students, Eugene Aserinsky, stumbled upon a detail that changed history: rapid eye movement or REM sleep.

From there, the gates to the “dawn of the golden age of golden research” opened.

In the same way Kleitman conducted extreme tests on his body and mind, Kolbert becomes the guinea pig of her own story. She teases readers by writing about her experience at Albany’s Sleep Disorders Centers.

I find this sui generis because journalists often consider an ethical dilemma whenever they might become involved in a story.

As the discourse says,

Journalists should not get caught in a story.

Anyway, Kolbert doesn’t care, and in a Bukowski-like narrative, though less acidic but still empirical, she details her experience:

At around 10 P.M., a technician came to fetch me. She measured my head from various directions—front to back, side to side—and began attaching electrodes: three on the back of my scalp, two on each temple, three more on my chin, two on each leg, and two on my chest.

At one point, I scratched one of them off; the technician, who was monitoring my many data streams, immediately showed up to plug it back in. I decided that, since I was doing this more out of curiosity than clinical need, I could take the tube out of my nose. The technician disagreed.

Empiricism details one’s knowledge comes from experience. Well, this is the style writers of old used, one which made Kerouac, Burroughs and many others famous in the last half-century.

They wrote about what they knew and expanded it through their imagination, demonstrating their talent as storytellers. If something was not known, they went to experience it.

Hopefully, this approach will never die as long as I’m alive.

Ultimately, Kolbert’s experience at the clinic left her with more questions than answers (Does it ring a bell?).

Meanwhile, as researches try to uncover that “strangeness that unnerves” us about sleep, I’ll keep some of the article’s findings in mind.

David K. Randall states that people “sleep better when given their own bed.”

Yet, as Neil Stanley, sleep researcher at the University of Surrey, often likes to say:

There’s only one good reason to share a mattress.

Photo credit: Tore My Heart Out

 

The village where only men lived

The tribe

The name of a publication doesn’t make a story, self-driven journalists do. I learned this after reading “Where the Boys Are,” a Marie Claire article by Abigail Haworth that explores China’s gender imbalance.

Built around the staggering fact that holds unmarried men will outnumber unmarried woman by an estimated 40 million in the next decade, the story analyzes the unprecedented effect the 1980 one-child policy is having on Chinese society today.

Demographic changes take toll on the way people perceive daughters. In China, having a girl translates to being out of luck. Tradition holds girls are “spilt water,” a waste that does not preserve a family’s ancestry line.

Yet, how did Haworth make readers care about this phenomenon? When did runaway bribes and bachelor’s villages become so important?

Haworth does this by looking up faces to enhance the importance of statistics. Following the case of Yiguo Jin, a 33-year-old poor farmer who earns less than 50 cents a day, readers get introduced to the problem in a greater scale. Uncontrolled economic growth, poverty and the one-child policy have created bachelor’s villages where men can’t find wives — and probably will never find them.

Either the dirt-poor farmers living in those villages travel somewhere else to find a wife or they buy one.

The problem is most Chinese farmers living in regions similar to the Hunan Mountains don’t have the acquisitive power to settle somewhere else. They live as peasants, working for ridiculously low salaries, barely getting by with $150 a year. Economic structures define who marries who, where and why.

As the text further describes:

The scarcity of women means they can choose to marry men from the towns, where life is much modern and comfortable.

Families negotiate to sell their daughters. In order to ask for a woman’s hand in marriage, a man in China must pay a “bride price” to the bride’s family. Others opt to buy a kidnapped wife from a criminal organization. Trafficked or non-trafficked, humans become products in rural and urban apparels, awaiting their destination.

Yes, in the 21st century, you can still buy another human being.

The story’s sourcing is worth noting because Haworth was able to get important sources related to kidnapping on the record, such as Xuncheng Lei or Daling Huang. The author debunks social myths that suggest women in China are often pressured into having sons by their husbands.

As Hvistendahl describes about coercion in Chinese society,

…often women are just as keen, if not keener, to have boys than their husbands.

Throughout the article there is cohesion between the beginning and end. Despite using more than eight human sources and records, Haworth never lost track or focus. She provided multiple sides of the story without privileging the afflicted over the comfortable.

Ultimately, even though some teachers, activists and government figures try to set the societal record straight, the underlying message remains the same: In China, having a girl is seen as a sign of doom, even though women are the fountain and foundation of life.

Illustration from: http://danmeth.com/

We don’t need no counter-cation

Mexico Too Many Bodies

Latin America is confusing. Whether it is a coke-and-weed feud between Mexican drug lords against Colombian capos to seize drug markets in South America, or the national sentiment that spurts out from each country every time the World Cup qualifiers take place, Latin American countries seem to disagree more than they agree in many ways.

However, an article by NYU Professor Greg Gandin suggests Latin America does unite for one purpose, at least: To undermine United States’ path towards the abuse of international law, and stop the world leader from bringing blatant torture to their homes.

Using a methodical approach that walks the reader through important moments in Latin American history, Gandin explains how the United States has repeatedly tried to “re-conquer” its backyard.

The purpose? To enforce its counterterrorism measures — blatant torture and prisoner transfers included — and black sites (secret prisons, mainly) in the lower portion of the continent.

Gandin’s angle is unique. Basing himself off a map that reveals which countries have participated in CIA’s rendition program to abduct, transport and torture prisoners, he takes an interesting element from another story and develops it into a narrative of his own.

Details about the “herculean tasks” Latin American countries undertake nowadays to dismantle intelligent operatives, secret prisons and torture techniques the U.S. enforced during the Cold War, 9/11 hypocrisy and the transfer of prisoners in other places of the world are entertaining.

The segment about former U.S. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld is both amusing and maddening.

As the secretary of defense praised Latin America’s return to the rule of law after the dark days of the Cold War, Baheer (an Afghani prisoner) may well have been in the middle of one of his torture sessions, ‘hung naked for hours on end.’

As the United States raised its veil of praise for democracy, due processes for people accused on false pretenses were ignored.

Yeah, being a world leader has its benefits.

Anyway, powerful quotes about torture describe the way interrogators took information out of prisoners. Subjects were abducted. Then, waterboarded, beaten, and some even mock executed. If an interrogator threatened to bring my mother and sexually abuse her in front of me, I’d probably wish for the full gunblast.

Overall, the article is well-sourced, providing the links to the studies it uses. Structure ensures a transparent writing by separating information in topical subjects. Five subheads break the motions and there is consistency with the use of attributions and tildes (except when the author confuses Nelson Jobim’s name and writes Jobin, or when he alternates Chavez for Chávez, lacking consistency).

Toward the article’s ending, the author makes an unnecessary statement about the Brazilian government. He writes:

One can imagine that if Brazil and the rest of Latin America had signed up to participate in Washington’s rendition program, Open Society would have a lot more Middle Eastern-sounding names to add to its list.

No, I cannot imagine Brazil would support the U.S. State Department’s measures, especially after Brazil complained about the expansive definition the United States has given to the word “terrorism.” No conspiracy theories and suppositions, please.

Though I’m an Orwell fan, I do not agree with Gandin’s idea of perpetual war. He writes the Bush administration attempted to build a “perfect machine of perpetual war in a corridor running from Colombia through Central America to Mexico,” and, though it is true the United States is partly responsible for the war on drugs — and is also a major actor in it — the foundations of the war on drugs are much more deeper. At least from the Mexican part, they date back to the 19th century, when Chinese settlers began opium trading in several regions of Mexico (Gandin probably knows this, given that he is Pulitzer Prize finalist and a successful writer. My guess is he decided to narrow his focus for the story).

If you are going to mention the influence of the United States on the war on drugs, then talk about how consumption is majorly unattended in the United States; how Mexicans, Colombians and other Latin Americans have died to sustain traffic past the Rio Grande. That would be an idea for a chunkier article, covering two great paradoxes: the war on terrorism and the war on drugs.

I do, however, like the ending. “The sun never rose US-choreographed torture” in my hometown… I think.