Job worries for Japan's grads

At first it's just a trickle, the occasional fresh-faced young man or woman in a charcoal-gray suit. But by March, the streets of Tokyo are teeming with anxious university seniors rushing off to interviews at the few companies that haven't yet hired their fill of new graduates.

Japan's long economic decline has made the recruiting ritual - performed in plain dark suits bought for the purpose and often discarded once a job is landed - a more brutal rite of passage for each successive graduating class over the last decade.

A recent government survey showed that a record low of 73.5 percent of university students graduating this spring have managed to find jobs. The figure is down several percentage points from last year, and is at its lowest point since the survey was first taken in 1996.

Earlier this month, some 3,000 students still in search of a job held a pep rally in downtown Tokyo to bolster their spirits. The same day, Japan's largest jobs fair opened to help coach interview skills and application writing.

And yet this year's graduates may actually have more reason for hope than their predecessors over the past decade. After years of downsizing, a few Japanese firms have recently announced plans to increase their intake of new graduates as the economy showed annualized growth of 6.4 percent between October and December.

Despite the recent upturn, however, many Japanese students continue to feel confused. Their sense of their country's place in the world economy - and often their own personal notions of the purpose of employment - remain unclear and rather unsettled.

Young Japanese are keenly aware that their country's economy no longer has the status it once enjoyed as a red-hot global superstar.

"It's difficult to inspire them to persevere - many students just wither, say they can't manage, and become pessimistic," says Yoshihisa Ohmura, a professor of sociology at Musashi University in Tokyo.

"We keep hearing that the economy is in poor shape," says politic science major Kana Aoyagi, sitting under a cherry tree on the campus of prestigious Rikkyo University in Tokyo.

But because students haven't yet experienced life in the ranks of regular working society, "we don't really know how best to

contribute," she says.

Students these days don't have the luxury of having a clear game plan, says Professor Ohmura. The generation born after the war that built Japan up from smoking ashes to a world-beating economy "had some kind of goal - they possessed the will to compete to win, and they just gritted their teeth and persevered."

The lack of a sense of purpose is cited as one of the reasons an increasing number of graduates are opting out of the recruitment merry-go-round and choosing instead to spend a few years in low-skill, low-security, part-time jobs while they continue to seek out their true vocations.

Government figures show the percentage of part-time workers in Japan's work force has doubled since 1987 to one quarter in 2002.

About half of all students who work part time after leaving school do so either because they either remain undecided as to what career suits them or because working part time appears to be a more attractive lifestyle, according to research by the Japan Institute for Labor Policy and Training.

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