Japan's Economic Stagnation Is Creating a Nation of Lost Youths
dailyfinance.com
dailyfinance.com
It is difficult to say with certainty, because lifetime employment is generally an understanding, not a contractual term. The lines in my employment contract which my employers and I understood meant lifetime employment reads, literally, "This employment contract shall last for three years and be renewable upon mutual agreement."
草食系男子 (grasseating men) is, like metrosexual, a term which sells many books and means rather little. It has about as much relevance to Japanese employment as Twilight does to American unemployment. ("American teenage girls, facing a reality where 50% of prospective suitors are unemployed, have increasingly escaped into a fantasy where fantastically rich hundred year old vampiric pedophiles cater to their every material and romantic need. We go to Keiko Tanaka with the story...")
What I've gathered is that Japan was divided into a low risk/high gain segment (the 1/3 or so who were salarymen or above) and a high risk/low gain segment (pretty much the rest).
If that picture of some decades ago is true, what has and does it mean as that path to the future (for those who could make it) got and continues to get increasingly closed off?
Great economic catastrophes tend to result in changes of social contracts and resulting secondary effects. Surely some, perhaps a lot of that has been happening in the last couple of decades?
(I do like your Twilight analogy. :-)