The reported improvement in the ratio of jobs to job seekers is good news for the nation's leaders, and not just because it indicates better economic health.
The youth of Japan suffers from a malaise that is partly blamed on a lack of prospects. Briefly, young people looked up to Takafumi Horie, the disgraced former head of Livedoor, as an example of the independent entrepreneur spirit that was considered desirable in the brave new meritocracy. But now, the media says the old fogeys were right. Horiemon was a sham; a soft-bodied, T-shirt-wearing charlatan who represented everything wrong about post-bubble Japan. With job recruiting up, maybe the kids will again look to the great corporations of Nippon.
Or maybe not. Horie gave voice to an attitude that has been prevalent if unacknowledged during the Liberal Democratic Party era, which is that money really does buy everything, including "people's hearts," as he so famously put it. Horie may be gone, but the truth of his example lives on, nowhere more blatantly than on the Friday night drama series, "Yaoh" (TBS; 10 p.m.).