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Japan's 'lost generation' facing bleak future

10 Comments

The number of the year, if there is such a thing – or at least the number of the current news cycle – is  20 million. Twenty million yen, the Financial Services Agency seemed to say in a report issued in June, is what an average elderly couple will need to fund a 30-year retirement. Finance Minister Taro Aso rejected the report, deeming it misleadingly pessimistic – which did nothing to calm the anxiety it aroused.

Actually,  says Spa! (July 16-23), the report’s message did get a big simplified in transmission. “Nowhere in the report is it written that you can’t survive if you don’t have 20 million yen,” explains Meiji University professor Yoshiyuki Iida. It bases its calculations on the assumption of a household of retirees receiving pension benefits and possibly other income worth 210,000 yen a month – and spending 260,000 yen a month. The 50,000-yen-a-month deficit, extended to the end of a lifetime that can now easily span 100 years, can swell to 20 million yen. The report’s intention, says Iida, was not to cause panic but to encourage investment in private pension funds and safe stocks.

How reassuring is that? Spa! notes the plight of the “lost generation” – the roughly 900,000 people who graduated from high school or college during and after the mid-1990s, when Japan’s economic bubble burst. Full-time hiring froze, forcing legions of graduates to settle for part-time work that led nowhere and paid minimally. This “lost generation” now faces old age. Twenty million yen? Many of them have no savings at all. They struggle to make ends meet even now, still in their working prime.

Let’s be optimistic, Spa! seems to be saying, in the face of many reasons not to be. “Lost generation” is a label like any other – a useful guide to how things are generally. There’s no need to be chained and bound by it.

“If you’re afraid of taking risks, you can’t do anything,” says Kensuke Miyazaki, expressing the spirit needed to overcome lost generationhood and survive the long retirement the times increasingly demand. Does Miyazaki’s name ring a bell? He was a rising political star, a Liberal Democratic Party rep first elected to the Lower House in 2012. He was 31. In 2015, age 34, he became the first lawmaker ever to request paternity leave.

Suddenly he crash-landed. An extra-marital affair he’d been having while his wife was pregnant surfaced, soiling his father-of-the-future image. He resigned his Diet seat in 2016.

Now what?

“I had no income. I had just bought a new home; there was the baby…”

He rallied. “I never gave in to despair.” With political experience and connections as his prime assets, he opened a consultancy. Then he took to currency trading. It’s chancy – “but the biggest risk,” he says, “is doing nothing.”

Then there’s lightweight kickboxer Yuta Kubo. He’s 31 – still young, but he knows how short an athlete’s career is. He has a sideline – a highly profitable one, as he tells it – as a day trader. Up at 5 a.m. to check the New York stock market, he’s at it off and on throughout the day. Why, he says, “any salaryman can do what I do on the train to and from work!” Really? He claims to have earned 500 million yen trading. You have to be good to do that – or very lucky.

Spa!’s point is that there’s some skill or knowledge or connection or something that you can exploit for profit – some corner of some market or other that you can ease into and make pay, against the day when the pension system caves in and leaves you high and dry in your old age.

The bleak alternative is represented by the pseudonymous “Kenji Omoto,” 70. He used to run a coffee shop, retiring five years ago on a pension of 65,000 yen a month. He’s alone, having divorced his wife 15 years ago. He began retirement with 3 million yen in the bank. He now has 1.8 million.

Rent is 27,000 yen a month. It’s not much of a place – shared toilet, no bath. Two spartan meals a day are all he’ll allow himself. He’d work if he could, but his back and legs are giving out. He never sees a doctor, though he feels he should. Letting things take their course is all he can afford to do. His biggest fear is falling seriously ill. What will he do then?

He  has no idea.

© Japan Today

©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.

10 Comments
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The advice here is actually probably worse than doing nothing as the last guy is doing. Currency speculation? day trading??

Essentially, this article is telling people they should gamble what little money they have in the hopes of getting rich. The vast majority of people who attempt day trading and currency trading lose their shirts. Something like 98% of them. It's not easy, it takes smarts and intense emotional control. And no small amount of luck either. And the guy who made 500 million this year could easily lose it all back next year. Happens all the time.

Maybe better examples would have been people who do something useful to make ends meet. Like making something people can use, for example. Is that too old fashioned?

Telling them to put their last bit of money into speculation is like telling them to go to Vegas and shoot double or nothing until they are rich or busted.

5 ( +5 / -0 )

Rent is 27,000 yen a month.

Japanese youth can count themselves lucky in that respect, In Canada, young people have the choice of over $1,000 a month or sleeping the park. Even middle class people there need subsidized housing now...if they can get it.

Nearly all the Western countries have a "lost generation." Japan isn't unique. Wage stagnation, unaffordable cost of living, no job security, etc. And for that, we can thank globalization, "free markets" and other neo-liberal trends brought to us by Reagan-Thatcher revolution.

2 ( +3 / -1 )

For the 70yo... at 70, he would only pay 20% of medical bills,  And with no income other than pension - his out of pocket medical expenses would be capped at about yen 24,000.  So not that dreadful if he falls ill.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

And yet the poor sods will still vote for the ldp regime.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

If yo own a mansion, and have no outstanding loans, two can live on ¥180,000 a month easily.

0 ( +2 / -2 )

Japanese who are really kind and good in the heart always suffers because they are honest and do not know , what it means to live like standard normal people outside Japan.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

If you graduated in the mid 90's you are not near retirement age today.

But thinking on that number, 20 million yen. In most first world countries, that would not be considered anywhere near a decent amount to have saved during a lifetime and then head into retirement.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

It bases its calculations on the assumption of a household of retirees receiving pension benefits and possibly other income worth 210,000 yen a month – and spending 260,000 yen a month. The 50,000-yen-a-month deficit, extended to the end of a lifetime that can now easily span 100 years, can swell to 20 million yen.

I understand the attention the pension issue has received. It's a huge problem. What I don't understand is the lack of attention on the "assume every retiree household has a pension/income of 210,000 a month to start with" part. That applies to only a minority.

The gentleman in the story has 65,000 a month, probably off nearly 40 years of paying into kokumin nenkin. Kokumin nenkin is clearly an insufficient pension, its contributions are nowhere near the level needed to be a sufficient one in any first world country, but do people fully understand that? Are there big flashing letters somewhere warning people? This recent furore has proved people think saving even 20 million yen is a huge ask. People on kokumin nenkin will need much more than that.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

Dear LORD!! I see the writings on the walls! Best get reading and anticipate rather than react. The worse is yet to come...

0 ( +0 / -0 )

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