Posted on 10/10/2014 4:58:11 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Dressing up like Wolverine or Cersei Lannister is probably more fun than scouring the classifieds for menial jobs.
Imagine you're a college graduate stuck in a perpetually lousy economy. That's a problem Japanese twenty-somethings have faced for more than 20 years. Two decades of stagnation after the collapse of the 1980s real-estate and stock bubbles — combined with labor laws making it tough to fire older workers — have relegated vast numbers of Japanese young adults to low-paying, temporary contract jobs. Many find themselves living with their parents well into their twenties and beyond, unmarried and childless.
Then again, they do have plenty of time to dress up like wand-wielding sailor girls and cybernetic alchemist soldiers from the colorful world of anime cartoons and manga comics. Indeed, Japan's Lost Decades have coincided with a major spike in "people escaping to virtual worlds of games, animation, and costume play," Masahiro Yamada, a sociology professor at Chuo University in Tokyo, recently told the Financial Times. "Here, even the young and poor can feel as though they are a hero."
It's hard to blame them. After all, it's not that these young adults in Japan are resisting becoming productive members of the economy — it's that there just aren't enough opportunities for them....
(Excerpt) Read more at theweek.com ...
?? In Asian culture it is traditional to live with your parents, 3 generation households are or were at least normal.
That’s because housing is so expensive in Japan that multi-generational mortgages must be taken out to buy a house.
Basically, whomever wants the house is going to have to take the parents.
Also in Korea (everyone wants to live in Seoul) and Hong Kong (really crowded), Tapei might be too.
Even going back to ancient times it was common for the patriarch to keep his thumb on the kids and grandkids. Today many live together but mostly in K-drama’s do they control the lives of their adult kids.
That is still accurate as far as I have seen.
Young people keep voting for it.
So what do you want me to say?
Probably one of the reasons Seoul has so many high-rise apartment buildings. They could paint them blue and write SPAM on those things. lol.
Kidding of course.
I’ve know a few people who do costume things and this article describes them to a T.
A vast majority of them are losers who fail at life and most of them are useful idiot liberals, every once in a while you will find one or two who are actually land owners and responsible, but they are as rare as teeth in a hens beak.
” It’s hard to blame them. After all, it’s not that these young adults in Japan are resisting becoming productive members of the economy — it’s that there just aren’t enough opportunities for them.... “
In a LOT of cases you have school councilors saying they can have any job they want like a middle management job and they are too good for the grunt work... Of course the grunt work is no longer for Americans but for illegals and the chamber of commerce and the democrats are more than willing to oblige them...
bump
Wendy Davis?
However, the importance of family and the considerable de-emphasis on diversity strengthens their society and encourages high performance in education, as in many Asian cultures.
She's delightfully retro, and delightful in real life.
Works at Crystal Dynamics, and is highly productive.
Responsible conservative adult here. Respectable grandmother.
Also is a Trekkie who likes to go Klingon every once in awhile. (I was going to get a very nice 3D chess set until I realized that I didn’t have anyone to play with.)
My kids got me a T’Pol action figure that sat on top of my computer for years until my daughter’s puppy chewed it up.
Some of us are just giant nerds.
Absolutely agree here. Having attended a few cons myself, I have seen both the good and the bad. In the realm of cosplay, I have seen amazing and fantastic costumes done by people who are smart, talented...and very much employed.
Not all cosplayers are losers with too much time on their hands living in Mommy and Daddy's basement.
*** Japan’s Lost Decades have coincided with a major spike in “people escaping to virtual worlds of games, animation, and costume play,”***
Look at the number here of people in awe of the Marvel Comics movies, superheroes and other nonsense.
These people have never heard of a ‘hobby’. My great aunt is a comic book fanatic. (She’s almost 70.)
(I’m also into Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, and SG1. Friday nights were sacred in our house ten years ago.)
And as a society we're doing our level-best to devalue male contributions in addition to (governmentally-speaking) impose more obstructions to opportunities as well as disincentivizing employment w/ our confiscatory tax rates.
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