ABSTRACT
The dramatic economic downturn following the rupture of Japan’s bubble economy in the 1990s intensified the polarization of Japanese society into a so-called kakusa shakai, or gap-widening society. The ensuing ‘two lost decades’ of social disenfranchisement that still continues today led to the adoption of increasingly neoliberal socio-political discourses, which further heightened social precarity in an already vulnerable and increasingly isolationist society. This compounded sense of precarity also reflected the sharp increase in social malaise experienced as a generational zeitgeist of angst. Increasing external pressure over territorial disputes and an inability to accomplish historical reconciliation were amplified domestically by the egression of a variety of disadvantaged social strata and ‘people who felt insecure’, such as the ‘freeter’, the homeless and the unemployed. These social malaises engendered Japan’s bullying (ijime) and truancy (futōkō) problems and in addition to the falling birth rate also triggered an increase in child abuse, juvenile crime and other negative social phenomena like acute social withdrawal (hikikomori), depression and the rise in suicides. This chapter explores the linkage between existing socio-economic structures and the discourses surrounding social malaise following the timeline from the dynamics of the lost decade to the cataclysm of 3/11 and beyond. Japanese social malaises provide a lens to unravel a diverse range of interrelated issues at play in contemporary Japanese society and manifest an important bellwether for the global community.
