How are young people surviving here?

Question

I'm mid 30s, American, and married to a Japanese, and I still work for my old company in SF and am paid in US dollars (so essentially, I live like a god here due to the currency conversion rate). From what I've gathered from local friends is that young people are having an extremely hard time in Japan.

Minimum wage in Tokyo is 1200 yen, which is about 9 US dollars an hour. Sure, many things are cheaper here compared to the US, but the minimum wage last time I checked in California was $17, nearly double.

They've said that Tokyo's stagnant economy, over such a long period of time, means that there's no real opportunities for average folk anymore. The path of sticking with one company for life, and having the confidence that after decades of service you would be provided with enough financial security to buy a home and start a family seems to be a long forgotten memory. Many young people will be stuck with minimum wage jobs well into their mid 30s or later, it seems.

How are young people coping with this? Seems a bit like a "lost generation".

sannaulmer · Answer

One thing that doesn't get mentioned enough is how much the haken (dispatch/temp) system reshaped expectations. Plenty of people in their 20s and early 30s aren't even on the baito track, they're on rolling 3-month contracts through agencies like Persol or Randstad, doing the same office work as seishain for maybe 60 percent of the pay and zero bonus. The bonus is the killer, since a lot of seishain still pull 4 to 6 months of salary in biannual payments, which is how people actually saved for a down payment in the old days.

There's also a quiet regional split that outsiders miss. Tokyo minimum wage is 1,163 yen as of last October, but if you're in Aomori or Okinawa it's under 900, so the "just move to Tokyo" advice only works if you can stomach sharing a 2DK in Kita-ku with two other people. The people I know who seem least stressed either married someone with a decent job or inherited a family house outside the Yamanote loop and commute an hour each way. It's less a lost generation than one that's been quietly sorted into who has family backing and who doesn't.

susannhaberland · Answer

tbh the thing that never comes up in these threads is how much of the survival is digital. a lot of the 20 somethings I know barely touch the traditional job market at all. they do Vtuber stuff, sell on BOOTH, run small dropshipping or freelance design gigs paid in USD through Wise, and that USD income is the whole trick. earning even 800 bucks a month in dollars while living at your parents place in Saitama beats a 1200 yen baito shift by a mile.

the flip side is it's brutal and unstable. no shakai hoken unless you sort it out yourself, no pension years, and the moment the platform changes its algorithm or the yen moves the wrong way you're back to zero. I know a guy in Koenji doing okay on illustration commissions who still can't get a credit card or rent an apartment without his mom cosigning.

so it's less "lost generation" and more a split between people with a passport to dollar or euro income and everyone else stuck on yen wages. if you've got that US salary you're already on the winning side of the line, which is prob why it looks so strange from where you're standing.

luzia · Answer

What gets left out of this conversation is how much of the squeeze is about time rather than just money. A baito at 1,200 yen is survivable if you can stack 40 hours, but most places cap you around 28 to keep you off shakai hoken, which means your take-home tops out near 130k a month no matter how hard you hustle. So people aren't lazy or unambitious, they're structurally capped, and the only way around it is juggling two or three gigs across town, which then eats the transit money you just earned.

The other thing I'd flag is that Tokyo rewards people who arrived with a network. My wife's cousin got into a mid-size kensetsu company through a university seminar and he's fine, but the friends who came from outside the city with no alumni connections are the ones cycling through haken contracts. It's not purely a wage story, it's a who-you-know story, and that part feels more rigid here than in the US where you can at least cold-apply your way into something.

lioba · Answer

The thing I'd add is that a lot of the coping is geographic and it's been happening for years. People in their 20s leave the 23 wards entirely and settle in places like Kashiwa, Omiya, or even as far as Kofu if they can find remote-ish work, because a 1LDK in Saitama runs maybe 60k a month versus 110k in Nakano. The tradeoff is a 50 minute commute on the Joban or Chuo line and your whole social life becomes whoever lives on your line.

Also worth knowing that takken and the whole real estate thing is basically closed to them. Even if someone saves for a down payment, banks want seishain status and a few years at the same company, so haken and baito folks get auto-rejected for a 35 year mortgage. So the "buy a house" step isn't just expensive, it's structurally blocked unless you marry someone with a proper job or a parent cosigns.

The ones I see actually doing alright are the ones who went into trades or licensed work, like denki kouji or caregiving with the kaigo shikaku. Not glamorous but the pay scales up and you're not stuck at 1200 an hour forever.

evamarialuehr · Answer

honestly the ones I know aren't really "coping" so much as quietly opting out. a lot of my friends in their late 20s still live with their parents in places like Nerima or Adachi, not because they want to but because rent in the 23 wards eats everything. they work baito at conbini or izakaya, maybe 25 to 30 hours a week, and just... don't push for seishain roles anymore because the pay bump isn't worth the hours.

the other thing people miss from outside is that a lot of young folks have basically given up on kekkon and kids entirely. not in a dramatic way, they just do the math and it doesn't work. I know couples who've been together 8 years and never registered because neither can afford the expectation that comes with it.

fwiw the ones doing okay usually have some side thing going, like selling stuff on Mercari or doing night shifts at a warehouse in Kawasaki for the higher hourly. it's not a lost generation exactly, more like a generation that stopped expecting the old script to apply to them.

Neu aus Tokyo