Quote:
Originally Posted by yuriandrade
Again, the average Japanese pay 99.9% of their bills with Yens, not Dollars. The fact is: Japanese didn't get poorer over this period and the purchase power shows exactly this. The only thing that happened was there's no longer a bubble.
That's why, vis-à-vis to Americans and western Europeans, Japanese standard of life had any decrease all over this period.
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Let me jump in. Japanese have absolutely gotten poorer over this time period. There has been a systemic shift in employment patterns coupled with a major change in marriage behavior. The massive rise in haken contracts (moving from permanent employment and all the benefits this brings to non permanent staff with no benefits) and the sharp decline in marriage rates means many more single person incomes derived from low-wage, unprotected jobs. Forget “no more lifetime employment” - which was still the standard in the early 2000s Koizumi era - we are now at non-salaried, hourly-wage contract workers who need to live with their parents well into their 30s. Because when you make 160,000 yen a month working your max 40 hours a week (no legal OT opportunities for haken contract workers), and 18 sq meter apartments cost 80,000 yen a month minimum sans utilities, it’s hard.