Japan’s Working Poor
Posted by John Malloy on 10/27/2008
In one of the world’s wealthiest nations, Junpei Murasawa is a poor man.
He skips meals to make ends meet. A bachelor, he lives in a tiny apartment in Tokyo, sharing a kitchen, toilet and shower with nine neighbors. He doesn’t have health insurance because he can’t afford the premiums.
The 29-year-old laborer is one of a burgeoning class in Japan — the working poor. The number of Japanese earning less than $19,610 a year surged 40 percent from 2002 to 2006, the latest data available, the government says. They now number more than 10 million.
In a country that boasts the world’s longest-living population, where young women with Louis Vuitton bags crowd the sidewalks, Murasawa’s is a voice of hopelessness and despair — a voice increasingly heard in Japan.
“Everyday I live in deep anxiety,” said the soft-spoken temporary worker, currently making $882 a month by bagging purchases at a home improvement center. “When I think about my future, I get sleepless at night.”
The plight of such workers is likely to worsen as the current global financial crisis ripples through the Japanese economy. At the bottom of the economic food chain, Murasawa and his cohorts will be the first to suffer.
The growth of the working poor — not seen in such numbers since Japan surged to wealth in the 1980s — has been a shock to a country that once prided itself on being a bastion of economic equality.
“It is unprecedented to see such a widening income gap in Japan,” said Yoshio Sasajima, economist at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo. “Our society is definitely becoming a class society.”
The seeds of changes now wrenching Japanese society were planted in the burst of the so-called “bubble economy” in the early 1990s.
As the Tokyo stock market tumbled, evaporating vast stores of wealth, corporations restructured by laying off workers. In the 2000s, that was followed by a round of free market reforms that widened the disparity between haves and have-nots.
A key to the growth of the working poor has been the explosion in temporary employment agencies, which allow corporations to take on labor without having to pay benefits — and then unload workers at will.
As part of market reforms, the government made it easier in 2004 for manufacturers to hire such laborers, whose number has since increased 40 percent, hitting 1.33 million in 2007. About 40 percent of temps are aged 25 to 34.
“Instead of hiring costly, full-time employees, companies are bringing in cheaper, part-time workers as part of their cost-cutting efforts,” said Yasuyuki Iida, an economist at Komazawa University in Tokyo.
Another factor feeding the trend is the emergence of so-called “freeters” — 20- and 30-somethings who have opted for low-paying jobs in services such as convenience stores rather than chasing the material benefits of corporate work.
The spike in the number of the working poor is already taking a toll on Japanese society.
More people are putting off marriage because of tight finances, exacerbating a declining fertility rate. Part-time workers unable to afford rent sleep in 24-hour Internet cafes to escape the streets. Some have stopped going to the doctor because they can’t afford it…
www.sfgate.com
Posted by
John Malloy
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