The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations currently taking place in New York continue to garner more and more attention from the American media, which mostly ignored the movement when it began several weeks ago. Now everybody in America who reads a newspaper or watches TV news understands that the protesters demand accountability from large corporations for the country's ever-growing income gap.
Even the Japanese media is finally covering the demonstrations, and one of the things I learned from the local papers is that most of the original occupiers were people who couldn't repay their student loans. That may explain why the U.S. press treated the movement with condescension in the beginning. The protesters seemed to them like spoiled children blaming their parents for their own lack of ambition. Now a great many others have joined the protests, and it's become too large, varied and significant to ignore.
The grievances of poor people are taken less seriously if they are young, especially in Japan. Callow youths living in 4.5-tatami mat rooms with no toilet or bath have always been a potently romantic pop-culture cliché, and like all clichés, they're fair game for ridicule.