Lifetime employment has an outsized impact on salarymen and on Western perceptions of Japanese employment, but it is -- and always has been -- a minority of the Japanese employment market. Perhaps a third of private sector laborers were covered by it at the peak of the practice a few decades ago.

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...")