Restructuring Youth: Recent Problems of Japanese Youth and its Contextual Origin

Since the mid 1990s, the youth transition from school to work for youth in Japan has been changing radically. Youth unemployment and the number of part-time employees are increasing rapidly, as is the participation rate in higher education. The transition process has been prolonged, and the pattern has become diverse and complicated. It seems that ‘youth’ is being restructured profoundly. The change is similar in many aspects to what occurred in European countries in the 1980s and 1990s. However, it also has some particularities, notably very weak state intervention. This paper will examine the similarity and particularity of the recent change of Japanese youth transition, and examine its contextual origin.