Losers

Yay for poverty. Yay for inequality.

Never thought you'd hear me say those words? Well it turns out I'm only half kidding.

Check out this article in the New York Times, about rising income inequality in Japan. The article chronicles how Japan went from being an egalitarian nation to an increasingly unequal one:

[Prime Minister] Koizumi's Reaganesque policies of deregulation, privatization, spending cuts and tax breaks for the rich helped lift the national economy, but at a social cost that Japan's more 127 million residents are just beginning to grasp..."Until the mid-1990's, the government used its power to contain the widening of social disparities," said Masahiro Yamada, a sociologist at Tokyo Gakugei University...Even after the so-called bubble economy collapsed, the government kept spending liberally on public works that sustained companies, which, in turn, continued to take care of their employees. Eventually, Mr. Yamada said, Japan just did not have the means to practice this form of paternalistic capitalism.

The article relates a sad vignette of the Terauchi family, a middle-class family sinking into poverty:

Mayumi Terauchi, 38,...frets that [her son's] place and that of her 1-year-old daughter, Natsumi, are already fixed in the new Japan of winners and losers...[S]he and her husband cannot afford the private schools, or even the cram schools — for-profit supplemental programs — that would raise their children's chances of getting into good colleges and securing their future...Her husband works at a small company that makes time recording equipment, leaving the house at 8 a.m. and returning after midnight on the last train. He has not received a raise in the last decade, and most of the overtime he works goes unpaid.

Wow, how Dickensian. It almost brought a tear to my eye. Until I read the next sentence:

Ms. Terauchi, who used to work at the same company, is now a homemaker.

Whoosh, there goes all my sympathy for the poor, struggling Terauchi family. Struggling to make ends meet, and the mom doesn't work. Well, I cry no tears for you, Ms. Terauchi. Eat Reaganomics, biatch.

It's a well-known fact that women in Japan are an underclass unto themselves. Not only do they work far less than their counterparts in Europe and North America (and even China), but the work they do is far more likely to be temporary, low-paid, and in bad conditions. Women in companies receive lower pay, are subject to regular sexual harrassment, are overlooked for promotions, etc. During my stay in Japan, I heard many men - even men of the younger generation - say that women are unqualified for work entirely.

Ad the worst thing is that women have let this happen. Instead of fighting for a place at the table, Japanese women have been far more eager to simply sit back and let their husbands work long hours of unpaid overtime, spending their days cleaning and re-cleaning the kitchen, wasting family money on English lessons that don't work, and in general neglecting the kids. Many see no reason to work, clinging to a dying "Ozzie and Harriet" ideal and focusing their lives exclusively on marriage and child-rearing.

The smaller number of Japanese women who are smart, entrepreneurial, and hard-working, and who want to have real careers and a non-housewife future, are hurt immeasurably by the failure of the femals populace as a whole to stand up and demand social equality. They are treated as outcasts, subjected to insults, and shunned by men. Without a feminist movement to back them up, these women find their entire lives to be an uphill battle.

Well, thanks to income inequality, the party may be over. Women like Ms. Terauchi are just going to have to get a job. When they work at a convenience store for a couple years, they'll realize that the world would be a lot better if women were able to get actually good jobs. Then, perhaps, Japanese women will finally have a good reason to rise up and demand what every other female population in the developed world seems to already have - equality and respect.

I just wish there was a better way to do that than to crush millions of families into grinding poverty.