Do young Japanese people dream big?

Do young Japanese people dream big? This was the question posed by Steven Kim recently on LinkedIn's "InStyle Tokyo Premier Networking" group.

When I taught at a Japanese women's college in the late 1990s and early 2000s, one of the entrance exam questions was, "What is your dream?" Students answered anything from "To become a fluent English speaker" and "To own a flower shop" to "My dream is to become just like my mother." Every now and then you'd get something different, such as "To become a truck driver" (a real example), but for the most part, none of the prospective young women entering our college were dreaming big, unless you consider that, proportionate to a young Japanese coed, a semi-truck would have to be pretty big.

I don't teach anymore, so I have no idea if students these days have big dreams, but I do know what their parents and grandparents are thinking. The older people are so down on the economy and the state of things in Japan that if the young people are listening, these negative thoughts may have a profound impact on them.