Education and Starting Opportunities of Japanese Youth

Abstract

Over the first post-war decades, the education system has become an important tool for equalizing the social landscape of Japanese society and transforming it into a “middle-class society”. Of course, the division of society into classes and layers did not disappear, but the degree of social inequality and the rigidity of horizontal partitions softened significantly. Comparing the situation of the 1960-1980s with the current one, many Japanese experts conclude that the educational system is increasingly losing its function of ensuring social mobility, and that current youth have much fewer chances to achieve life success through persistence in study than previous generations. At the same time, the thesis about the transformation of Japanese society into a “divided” one (kakusa shakai, or “gap society”) became commonplace. In this article, the author attempts to analyze the changes taking place both in the education system and in the labor market in order to answer the questions of how radical these changes are, and have they really undermined the function of the education system of equalizing the starting opportunities of young people. Using the statistics and the materials of various surveys, the author shows that, in terms of both access to education and employment opportunities for young people, current situation is even more favorable than in the period of the formation of the “middle class society”, and that there is no reason to characterize current Japanese society as “divided”, with deepening inequalities in education, and therefore in terms of starting opportunities for young Japanese. At the same time, the author emphasizes that the current system of education and employment of Japanese youth reproduces social inequality. As before, so now, its main feature is the hierarchical structure where the chances of obtaining a good education, and hence a good job, are distributed not so much according to the abilities of young people as to the financial capabilities and social position of their families.