Can education change Japan's 'depressed' generation?

Every lesson at Japanese schools starts with a simultaneous bow. "Let's try that again because your posture wasn't good," says a teacher to a room full of six and seven-year-olds.

She then reminds the children to have their pencil boxes, notepads and textbooks on top of each other and placed at the left corner of their desks. The students obey without a single word of objection. A few hours later, they queue quietly before being served their lunch.

Towards the end of their education this conformist attitude is still evident. Each year, more than half a million university students start looking for work together.

The first step is to perfect a handwritten resume, or CV, because many in Japan believe that students' characteristics and personalities can be judged by the way they write.

All dressed in a black "recruit suit", they then visit hundreds of companies. Bold hues of black, navy or dark grey are the recommended colours for their job-hunting suits.

Stripes are not encouraged. According to the teachers and career counsellors, it is considered risky to be fashionable.

The job-hunting season is a huge part of Japanese life and has even influenced the nicknames given to different generations.

In Japan, there is no Generation X, Y or Z. Born in 1981, I belong to the "employment ice age" generation when university graduates struggled to find work because of the state of the economy. It is believed to have resulted in the highest number of "withdrawn" or "hikikomori" who refuse to leave their rooms after feeling rejected by the society.

The generation before us was much luckier and is known as the "bubble" generation, because the Japanese economy was at its peak as they entered workforce.

There are stark differences between those who witnessed Japan's booming economy and today's youth.

There are a number of nicknames for them: the "relaxed" generation is most commonly used because they were educated under a revised system aimed at freeing children from cramming, or intensive learning.

The "enlightened" generation is another, and it implies that they had only known Japan in its economic decline and had learned not to expect anything, including wealth or even sex.

Their low self-esteem and unhappiness are obvious in the government's annual survey of the country's youth, aged between 13 and 29. Fewer than half of those surveyed (45.8%) said they were happy with themselves, compared to 86% in the US, 83.1% in the UK, or 71.5% in South Korea.

The government wants to change this mindset. It hopes to double the number of Japanese students who study abroad by 2020.

It has also changed the education curriculum so that all primary school children will learn English from the age of 10 when they're in grade 5. Under the previous system, students in public schools did not learn the English language until they were at a junior high school at the age of 13.

But it takes more than just language skills, and the government is trying to overhaul the education and employment systems as part of its economic policy known as Abenomics, after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 858