In recent years, news reports about Japan’s so-called “employment ice age” (就職氷河期, shushoku hyogaki) generation have become a daily occurrence. The term “employment ice age” refers to people who graduated from school mainly between the mid-1990s and early 2000s—a cohort largely made up of the children of Japan’s postwar baby boomers. As a result, this group is remarkably large, accounting for an estimated 17 million people, or roughly 13% of Japan’s total population according to government and private sector estimates.
The emergence of this “ice age” generation can be traced to a profound structural shift in the Japanese economy. After the collapse of the economic bubble in the early 1990s, corporate earnings plummeted, and companies sharply reduced new graduate hiring. In this prolonged period of economic stagnation and job insecurity, the competition for available positions became fiercer than ever. “Stress interviews” (圧迫面接, appaku mensetsu) and other high-pressure, borderline abusive screening techniques became the norm. There were even notorious cases where candidates were told, “If you’re hot, please take off your jacket,” only to be summarily dismissed with, “Those who removed their jackets may leave,” before the interview even began. Such senseless cruelty was not uncommon.
Even for those who managed to land a job, the working conditions were often brutal: low wages, excessively long hours from early morning to late at night, and a workplace culture rife with sexual and power harassment. Many young people suffered serious physical and mental health issues as a result. Some might suggest simply changing jobs, but in Japan, there has long been a strong “new graduate supremacy” (新卒至上主義, shinsotsu shijoshugi) ethos, where companies prioritize hiring students fresh out of school over other applicants. Once someone fell off the “regular track,” it became extremely difficult to be hired as a full-time employee again. Thus, this entire generation was condemned to chronic disadvantage simply for having graduated in an era of economic malaise.
At the time, the social climate was saturated with the rhetoric of “personal responsibility” (自己責任, jiko sekinin). Although the employment ice age was the product of a systemic failure rather than a lack of personal merit or effort, society at large shifted the blame onto individuals, insisting that if people were struggling, it was the result of their own poor choices.
As of 2025, members of the employment ice age generation are now between 41 and 55 years old. Many still work in non-regular jobs, and even those who have secured regular employment often earn less than other generations. Economic hardship is widespread, and a significant number have never married or started families—another stark legacy of this era.
Today, Japan’s severe demographic crisis, marked by a rapidly shrinking working-age population struggling to support a swelling elderly cohort, can be seen as the delayed consequence of how this generation was abandoned under the banner of “self-responsibility.” Had more effective policy interventions been made twenty years ago, the worsening population crisis might have been at least partially mitigated.
Looking at this situation, one is reminded of the insights of 18th-century economist Adam Smith, who wrote in The Wealth of Nations:
“It deserves to be remarked, perhaps, that it is in the progressive state, while the society is advancing to the further acquisition, rather than when it has acquired its full complement of riches, that the condition of the labouring poor, of the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest and the most comfortable. It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state. The progressive state is, in reality, the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different orders of the society; the stationary is dull; the declining melancholy.”
These words, written over 250 years ago, strikingly capture the plight of Japan’s employment ice age generation. From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, Japan’s economy grew at a breakneck pace, to the point where Western nations disparaged the Japanese as “economic animals.” But after the bubble burst, workers found themselves treated as disposable, bought cheap and regarded as almost worthless. The true consequences of this systemic failure are only now coming to the surface, and Japan is entering an era in which it will have no choice but to face the cost of these long-ignored social distortions.
