Life-World of Youth in Japan: Focusing on the Social Attitudes and Social Consciousness

It is often pointed that the transition process has become unstable and the individualization has become one of the dominant key words in modern society. And it is said that the unfairness and inequality among people has become serious issue. With these as a background, this study focuses on social attitudes and social consciousness of young people in Japan, for the purpose of understanding more about their current life situation.

The data we use is Youth Cohort Study of Japan (YCSJ), which monitors the educational and vocational trajectories of young people and surveys their attitudes once a year in autumn. With this date, we analyze sense of self-responsibility, praise of meritocracy, a feeling of dissatisfaction with the government and/or social welfare system, recognition of opportunity and needs for redistribution. And we consider who might be more precarious and difficult situation among the young people.

To analyze the differences among the young people, we focus on some factors, such as gender, educational back ground, job status and trajectory patterns. Then, we get some findings from the analysis, for example, levels of sense of self-responsibility increased during 2008-2011 especially among secondary school graduates and jobless people, who were less satisfied with their current situation. We can see that some young people who experience difficulty might strengthen the consciousness of self-responsibility instead of sense of social welfare and redistribution.