読んでいて、日本の新聞より詳しく書いてあるような気がしてならない。日本の新聞のタイトルだけで売ろうとする姿勢と比べると好感が持てる。
日本の現状を記事の一番最後に”トンネルの先に光明を見出せない”という実例で結んでいます。日本をこんな状態にしたのは一体誰なのだろうか。
記事には、一党支配の政治が行なわれた国の実情や小泉郵政選挙以降の問題点にも触れられています。
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Economy Spells Trouble for Leading Party in Japan
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/world/asia/19japan.html?ref=asia
TOKYO — With his graying hair and his corporate-standard dark blue suit, which he dutifully wears in Tokyo’s sweltering summer heat, Saburo Toyoda appears an unlikely proponent of change.
But since losing his lifetime job seven years ago, and going through several other jobs that paid less than half his former salary, Mr. Toyoda, a 54-year-old salesman, says he is fed up with Japan’s long malaise. Like many Japanese, he now wants what amounts to a revolution in this politically risk-averse nation: the ousting of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed Japan for more than a half-century.
“Things have gotten so bad that you have to ask, ‘Can’t someone else do a better job?’ ” said Mr. Toyoda, one of thousands of middle-aged salarymen who have struggled to adapt to a harsh new era of job insecurity and declining living standards. “It is time for new ideas, and new faces.”
Japan has seen a broad upwelling of such frustration in recent years, and particularly since the beginning of the financial crisis last fall, which brought the unfamiliar sight here of mass layoffs and the unemployed tossed onto the streets. Now, the growing disillusion here seems to have reached a critical but long-elusive threshold: when Japanese voters go to the polls on Aug. 30 to vote in parliamentary elections, they appear almost certain to oust the Liberal Democrats from power for only the second time since 1955.
“Voters are finally being pushed into action because their livelihoods are starting to crumble,” said Masaru Kaneko, an economics professor at Keio University in Tokyo. “Until now, Japanese were politically apathetic because they could still live comfortably despite the weak economy.”
With the Liberal Democrats looking unresponsive or downright incompetent, more voters now seem willing to give Japan’s untested opposition a shot at finding a way out of the nation’s stubborn economic morass. A poll published Wednesday by Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper, showed 30 percent of 1,047 respondents backing the opposition Democratic Party, versus 25 percent for the Liberal Democrats. No information on the margin of error was available.
The Liberal Democratic Party has struggled before, such as when voters gave it a second chance under reformist Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in the early 2000s. But Mr. Koizumi’s efforts to shrink government are now seen as having worsened growing social inequalities without reviving growth, and a string of short-lived subsequent governments took the party back to its old pork barrel ways.
“There is a feeling now that Japan is at a dead end and has to change,” said Kazuhisa Kawakami, a political scientist who is vice president of Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo. “The Liberal Democratic Party has shown itself to be tired and spent out.”
Behind this brewing voter revolt is a grim new pessimism that has gripped this former industrial juggernaut. Japan’s economic situation has grown increasingly severe in recent years: the nation’s per capita gross domestic product — a measure of economic prosperity — declined from third highest in the world in 1991 to 18th last year, according to the World Bank. Average household income has also fallen from its peak in 1994 to a 19-year low of 5.56 million yen, or about $58,000, in 2007, the Labor Ministry said.
A public opinion survey released Thursday by the government-financed Institute of Statistical Mathematics showed that 57 percent of 3,302 respondents said they expected their lives to get worse, with only 11 percent saying they would get better — almost the mirror opposite of replies to the same survey 30 years ago.
But it was the current global slowdown, threatening the livelihoods of Japanese young and old, that seemed to push people past the breaking point. Japan’s export-dependent economy fell more precipitously than those of other developed countries, contracting at an annualized rate of 15.2 percent in the first quarter of this year, its steepest decline on record.
This has brought widespread pain and dislocation, as companies have laid off about 216,000 temporary and short-term workers since October, according to the Labor Ministry. The sight of hundreds of these newly jobless temporary workers protesting in central Tokyo early this year shocked a country unused to mass layoffs, and raised fears of growing social inequalities.
Anxieties are particularly acute about the future for Japan’s youth. In May, the unemployment rate for those aged 15 to 24, not including students, rose to 9 percent, according to the Internal Affairs Ministry, far higher than the 5.2 percent rate for all age groups. And this in a nation that for decades prided itself on having virtually no unemployment.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/world/asia/19japan.html?pagewanted=2&ref=asia
A national media storm was stirred up earlier this year when companies hurt by the downturn began rescinding job offers made to university seniors, the first time that had happened to any significant degree since the bursting of the real estate bubble in the late 1980s. That left thousands of students to graduate in April without jobs waiting for them — a career-threatening predicament in a country where large companies limit most of their hiring to university seniors.
One was Shiho, a 23-year-old resident of the western city of Kobe who asked that her family name not be used for fear of embarrassment. Last year as a senior in business management, she said, she got a job offer to be a white-collar worker at a large construction company. She said she even went to a training seminar at the company in December, only to have the offer withdrawn in January.
In a desperate scramble to find work before graduating in March, the end of the Japanese academic year, she took the only job she could find, as a uniformed receptionist at a golf course. She said she felt so ashamed that she stopped talking to many of her friends, and ignored their cellphone messages, until she found out that they had also settled for jobs they did not like.
“I feel betrayed,” she said. “I studied for university entrance exams, went to a good university, did everything I was supposed to do, and then this happens.”
She and other young Japanese talk in gloomy terms about the prospects for both their own careers and their nation overall. Many express fear of becoming another “lost generation” of youth like those in the late 1990s, condemned for years to part-time or short-term jobs, or forced to live off their parents.
Shiho said she and her friends believed that it was time for a change in Japan, though she admitted that young Japanese tended not to vote. But if she does vote, she said, it will not be for the Liberal Democrats, whom her parents supported. “If the Democratic Party is ready to try something new, then let’s give them a chance,” she said.
Older Japanese like Mr. Toyoda, the laid-off salaryman, also profess a feeling of betrayal, in their case at losing lifetime job guarantees that were once the norm here. Mr. Toyoda says his problems began in 2002, when he lost his lifetime job at a large electronics company. He said he had held four jobs as a salesman since, and was dismissed last month by his most recent employer.
Mr. Toyoda said he no longer went out drinking after work or traveled for vacation, instead saving the money to pay for his two sons’ university tuitions. Some of his sons’ classmates have had to drop out of college because their fathers were recently laid off.
He said he believed that Japan had no future under the Liberal Democrats, who had turned his country into a nation without hope. “I feel a sense of suffocation,” he said. “I can work. I want to work. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel anymore.”
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諸外国の方が、日本の政権のあり方を真剣に心配をしているように思える。
by unimaro
まったく、くだらない話