Up through the 1990s, you could meet hundreds of Japanese
people and they would all be middle class. According to
Roger Pulvers, this sense of belonging to the middle class
came into vogue with the economic boom of the 1970s and
80s. Japanese all understood each other using what Japanese
called ishindenshin, a Japanese phrase meaning that
Japanese could understand each other without talking. Then
came the recession of the 1990s, the recession that has
been continuing on and off since then, but mostly on.
Japanese today no longer all say they belong to the middle
class. While Japanese may not have been all middle class,
the chasm between the rich and poor was nowhere near as
wide as it is today. The Japanese underclass is growing as
the recession continues and single mother families increase.
A July 2006 report from the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) stated that Japan
suffered from one of the highest rates of relative poverty
among OECD countries. Relative poverty is the percentage of
the population living on one-half or less of the median
income. One OECD report stated that relative poverty in
Japan in the mid-2000s was approximately 15 percent, second
only to the United States. The United States had an abysmal
rate of 17 percent.
A labor and welfare ministry report in August 2007 showed
that the Gini coefficient in Japan was a record high 0.5263
in 2005. The Gini coefficient, developed by Italian
statistician Corrado Gini, measures the inequality of
income or wealth. The closer the Gini coefficient is to
one, the worse the inequality. The Gini coefficient was
over 0.5 for the first time in Japan.
One out of every three workers in Japan now has an
irregular job. While some of these workers do not want
permanent jobs, many of them do. Facing their own problems
due to the recession, many businesses have let go many
irregular workers. Many people in their 20s and 30s cannot
find permanent work.
The numbers from 2007 tell a frightening story among
millions of the 45.43 million people who worked for the
entire year. At the bottom, 3.66 million people earned 1
million yen or less. Moving up to between 1 and 2 million
yen, there were 6.66 million people. A total of 10.32
million people earned under 2 million yen for the year, a
very small sum in Japan. As the economy has continued to
decline, the number is probably much greater now.
Many children from low-income families, especially single
mother families, have been deprived of the opportunity for
higher education. When government aid for single parents
was terminated in April 2009, the situation grew even
worse. In Tokyo, the aid was approximately 23,000 yen per
month. Many single parents are now unable to send their
children to high school.
According to Naomi Yuzawa, a professor of family policy at
Rikkyo University, half of single mothers have only
graduated from junior high school. They have difficulty
earning enough money to enable their children to obtain
higher education. Researcher Aya Abe explains that the
relative poverty rate of single-mother households in 2004
was 66 percent. For households with both parents, it was
only 11. Without significant change, poverty and lack of
education will continue.
Japan seems to have embarked down the same sad path that
the United States has gone down. Children of single mothers
face a high chance of living in poverty and being unable to
take advantage of education to improve their lives. The
odds are high that they will be poor as children, remain
poor as adults, and that their children, if they have them,
will face the same problems. Japan and America, two of the
world's richest countries are abandoning responsibility for
many of their children. The question is how can this be.
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