Last week, during an NHK discussion about the future prospects of people who are presently 35 years old, an announcer casually dropped a statistic that said 82 percent of all 35-year-olds in Japan make ¥2 million or less a year. These are the people who are now supposed to be the core purchasers of first homes, but if we apply the prevailing if outdated wisdom that says the price you pay for a property should be no more than five times your annual salary, then most of the members of this generation can't afford anything more than ¥10 million, which perhaps would pay for a shack on the side of a mountain in Fukushima Prefecture.
The only thing they can do is marry someone else with a job and combine their incomes (¥20 million will get you a shack a little closer to Tokyo). That, in fact, was the main thrust of the discussion — marriage, and the difficulties this demographic is experiencing to get hitched. The program covered the blurring of traditional gender roles characterized by the buzz word "herbivores" (soshoku-kei), meaning men who are passive about dating and sex, as well as the increasing number of failed marriages, a development that itself has a damping effect on coupling."I don't want to get married because I'm afraid of getting divorced," said one tremulous young man.
Whatever the reason for this anxiety it has produced its own buzz word, konkatsu, which is derived from kekkon katsudo (marriage activities), which refers to the search for a partner in the same way shushoku katsudo (employment activities) refers to the search for a job. The word became popular after the publication of "Konkatsu Jidai" ("The Age of Looking for a Partner") by Masahiro Yamada, the sociologist already famous for popularizing the terms "parasite singles" (meaning, aging kids who still live with their parents) and "kibo kakusa" (gap of hope). As Yamada implied in a recent interview in Aera, he doesn't set out to write best sellers. His books are dry academic studies, which may explain why so many people misunderstand him.