Meet Japan’s millennials – they’re ‘sober’, trapped in dead-end jobs and never want children

About one-fifth of Japan’s population are millennials. They’ve spent their entire lives in an economic slump and are mostly just happy to stay afloat

Successive disasters and the havoc wrought shaped their world view, making them ‘more realistic’ than the free-spending generation that came before

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People cross a street in a Tokyo shopping district on Saturday. Roughly 27 million people in Japan are millennials, defined as those born between 1981 to 1996. Photo: Bloomberg

Business Insider

Published: 11:32am, 20 Jun 2023Updated: 2:34pm, 23 Jun 2023

At 36, Makoto Isechi finally feels like he can start living life.

The freelance software engineer and his wife, an aspiring chef, are several months away from being debt free.

A high-school graduate who grew up in Kagoshima, on Japan’s southern coast, Isechi started his career selling musical instruments at a retail store, then played guitar in a small band before founding an IT company with a fellow musician.

When the firm went bankrupt in 2019, he found himself saddled with US$35,000 in debt, while his wife took out loans to pay for culinary school.

Smoke rises from the 1,117-metre Sakurajima volcano, as seen from Kagoshima city in 2013. Successive disasters and the economic havoc the events wrought have shaped Japanese millennials and their world view. Photo: Japan Meteorological Agency Handout / AFP

Isechi closed his company and decided to be a freelance website designer, teaching himself how to code and use Photoshop by watching YouTube videos and taking online courses. Over the past three years, he’s slowly built a client base and now earns US$7,500 a month.

“Now we can start our future,” Isechi said.