Japanese high schools’ stable ties with employers thrived during the 1960s-1980s when Japan experienced economic growth rates that were the envy of other industrial nations, a period when the manufacturing sector and the demand for high school graduates were booming. Then the economy slipped, and Japanese employers embarked on the most significant employment restructuring they had undertaken in half a century. Most employers anxiously tried to preserve employment stability for the corps of middle-aged men to whom they had implicitly guaranteed permanent employment two to three decades ago. Meanwhile, rates of unemployment and part-time employment shot up for Japanese youth. Of even greater concern to the Japanese government, the rate of youth idleness increased. By the middle of the present decade, nearly one-fifth of all fifteen- to nineteen-year-old Japanese were idle – neither employed, in school, nor unemployed (officially defined as actively searching for a job).

The high rates of unemployment, part-time employment, and idleness (not searching for work) among young men show that a large number of them failed to embark on a stable work trajectory in the 1990s and in the first part of the present decade. The magnitude of their numbers sent shock waves through Japanese policy circles, with vigorous debate over whether the labor demand side (economic recession and employment restructuring) was primarily responsible or whether the labor supply side was to blame (young people’s “fickleness” regarding the type of work they want, or their lack of a strong work ethic).