That japanese father ghost
I read a quite disturbing article in a business magazine. It was one of those 豆知識 “pea + knowledge” short pieces : an attention grabber title, a dense explication with lots of numbers but no conclusion let alone a discussion. Well, for an article written on a 豆 “pea” you really can’t expect anything more than that, don’t you think ?
The article was about a survey commandited by 内閣府 “the Cabinet office” in march 2006 on a population of 3600 children (from the 4th grade of elementary school to the 3rd grade of the junior high school) and 4140 parents. Among a lot of interesting data, the most intriguing one was certainly the fact that 23.3% of the japanese fathers and 3.8% of the japanese mothers have almost no contact with their children during the weekdays. This is a sharp increase from the respective numbers of 14.1% and 2.0% from the previous survey done in 2000.
What could be the main cause of this rise ? I think this has to do with the succesive burst of the economic bubble (1986-1990) and the IT bubble circa 2000. These sudden economic changes resulted in large restructuration plans directly questionning the validity of the 終身雇用 “life-employment” policy in most major japanese companies. The 年功賃金制度 “wage system based on seniority” was progressively replaced with 成果主義 “a wage system based on one’s merits”. Even the few japanese companies that maintained life-employment could not do so without the addition of a performance notion. These sudden changes probably explain the degradation put in light by this survey. What do you think ?
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