Print

Mail

wiki links

Japanese save like crazy and hurt their economy

Before Shinji Iwamasa heads to work every morning, he prepares the day's rations: a little rice, some marinated vegetables and a piece of fried fish.

"We save where we can, even on food," said the 35-year-old university lecturer.

The result is that he and his wife never go out to eat in restaurants, not even the cheap ones -- some of which just offer bowls of soup. Instead, the young couple buy what they need at discount stores. Swamasa are not alone in being so thrifty and precisely because so many people are buying so little in Japan, the country is threatening to drift anew into economic recession.

The couple know that their strict saving regime only serves to weaken Japan's economy, but Shinji says he lives in constant fear of losing his job. After having studied English literature at Tokyo's elite Sophia University, he is paid by the hour to teach English at four universities.

"My contracts at the universities are always just for a year. They could throw me out anytime," he said. "Besides that, classes are sometimes cancelled altogether. The universities are also getting smaller and smaller because there are fewer and fewer kids."

Shinji is not the only one who fears for his job in Japan. The government in Tokyo just slashed its growth projections and announced that a further 200,000 jobs would be threatened during the course of planned economic reforms.

"I think he follows America's example too much," he said, adding that Japan has a different social structure.

"The tradition is that a company protects its employees, even when the boss has to take a cut in his pay," he said, but American companies don't make the boss take a pay cut "even when 50,000 employees have to be fired."
This story has been viewed 1778 times.