> do you mean lifetime employment or something else?

Lifetime employment was certainly part of it.

In the late 80s and (especially) the 90s, there were some changes that Japan made. Many of these changes were encouraged or pushed by western countries. Here is a list of a few that I think were important that changed the social contract:

- Decreased obligation of large corporations to hire “lifetime employees”, especially salarymen. These days, many of the spots that would have been salarymen jobs (permanent positions) are now much less stable contract positions. Folks in the less stable contract positions seem to be less confident in making life-long choices like marriage and kids. In this case, the system of employment made a huge change, almost overnight, but the world around them (e.g., housing, banking, dating, job market, etc.) did not adjust with it.

- Deregulation of distribution (maybe some other things). There were many, many jobs in Japan that were basically make-work jobs. The example that I’m most familiar with is alcohol distribution, because my buddy was a distributor. Pre-change, a case of beer from the factory would touch something like 7-9 hands, with each taking a small cut, before reaching the consumer. After deregulation, it was more like 3-4. All of those middlemen basically just vanished and/or consolidated over a short period of time. Part of this was good, since the population was decreasing. But the number of jobs lost seemed to rapidly outpace the decrease of eligible workers. Many western countries considered the pre-deregulation to be “unfair trade practices” and “economically inefficient”. They were not wrong, but I think that these makework layers in the distribution system functioned as a kind of baked-in welfare system in the Japanese economy. People were doing something, they were making money, and they were spending it (especially with affiliated orgs, like their customers). All of this kept the velocity of money at a healthy level, which matters a lot for supporting parts of the economy. After deregulation, jobs were lost and the velocity of money dropped, and nothing in the market or in government policy was changed to address this.

- Women’s working rights. Prior to the 90s, most women were restricted to admin or service jobs like OL, bank teller, elevator girls, etc. Two things happened. First, women were not allowed to be excluded from salaryman jobs, so that applicant pool grew while the number of jobs decreased. Second, women in these jobs were often expected (to be very generous here) to leave their jobs once they got married, had a kid, etc. This is no longer the case. What has happened is that a lot of the women in the teller, OL, stewardess type of positions simply haven’t left their jobs (totally ok), but that leaves their juniors with far far fewer jobs (at least of similar quality/status) to go into. Basically the number of “good jobs” decreased substantially and started to have less turnover all at the same time. What were/are young people to do? Again, nothing in the market or in policy was done to address this.

To summarize these points, the labor market of jobs changed drastically during the 90s, but cultural attitudes did not. The ratio of jobs that were considered highly stable to the jobs that are unstable started to skew heavily towards the unsteady variety. The economy was deregulated to some extent, and prices fell quite a bit (perhaps too much), but at the cost of a built-in social safety net that was not replaced by very much in the market (e.g., competition for quality labor via wages or QoL) or in government policy (e.g., unemployment, housing assistance, job training, etc.).

Imho, the government bureaucrats in the 90s totally dropped the ball. They caved to western pressure to deregulate, they did it quickly, and they were completely blind or indifferent to what it did to the social fabric.

Note that I lean heavily towards preferring efficient markets over inefficient markets, but this transition by Japan as a country and as a government was just irresponsibly done. Either they should have left some of the things as is (like the regulated layers of distribution), or they should have implemented them more gradually.

This was typed on my phone, so I apologize if it’s not coherent. I’m happy to expand on any of these ideas if anyone is interested and has a question.

Edit: A great example of the failure of Japanese society to adapt is patio11 when he quit his salaryman job to work full time on BCC. He was living in a modestly-priced place in a provincial area as a salaryman. His employer was his housing guarantor. When BCC made as much (iirc, it was more) than his salaryman job, he quit. He asked his landlord about what changes needed to be made to the housing contract. His landlord said “none… you need to move out”. So despite having a better ability to pay his rent, and I assume having never missed his rent, he was unceremoniously asked to leave his apartment despite being better able to pay his rent. Laws/policy could have been made to make housing more friendly for entrepreneurs and contract workers. The government could have done a much better job at educating the general population and various sectors of the economy about what sorts of reasonable changes they could expect in the marketplace and (perhaps) what acceptable behavior would be moving forward. The best I can tell, the government just shrugged their shoulders and did little to nothing.