![]() The only thing is that life isn't as easy in the big city as he had imagined. Iwabuchi, a University graduate from Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture moved to Saitama to be closer to the city of his boyhood and teenage dreams - Tokyo. The idea of putting a face to those 1.6 million individuals would seem nearly impossible, but 25-year-old Hiroki Iwabuchi did just that by picking up a digital camcorder and chronicling his life in the documentary "Freeter's Distress". If you're Japanese and below the age of 24 the situation is even more bleak: 1 out of 2 are forced into these jobs and have become the working poor of today's Japan. Of course this phenomena has gone global in the past decade or so, but the number of workers categorized as freeters in Japan is astounding: 1.6 million, or 1 out of 5 of Japan's able-bodied workforce, are forced to take jobs without benefits, sick leave, consistent pay raises, and hourly wages that are just above the poverty line. While the economy did end up rebounding for a time (only to take another beating during the recent global economic downturn) deregulation of labour laws by the Koizumi government led to more and more employers saving money by hiring temp and contract staff instead of full-time employees. ![]() ![]() At first those dubbed freeters were people who freely chose to avoid the regular 9 to 5 day jobs of so many Japanese in order to focus on personal pursuits, but once the Bubble Economy burst in the early 90's the low-paying part-time jobs favoured by these young men and women became less a matter of choice than of necessity and freeter became the blanket term for a whole generation of young people who could no longer share in the Japan's Economic Miracle of the previous decades. The term freeter started up in Japan in the late 80's as a combination of "free" or "freelance" and the German word for "worker", or arbeiter. ![]()
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