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Don't let your child become a NEET! Thestrategic foundations of a Japanese youthscareTuukka Toivonen aa University of OxfordPublished online: 04 Oct 2011.

To cite this article: Tuukka Toivonen (2011) Don't let your child become a NEET! The strategic foundationsof a Japanese youth scare, Japan Forum, 23:3, 407-429, DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2011.597055

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Dont let your child become aNEET! The strategic foundations

of a Japanese youth scare

TUUKKA TOIVONEN

Abstract: This article contributes to the growing body of literature on Japaneseyouth problems by tracing and unpacking a recentmoral panic surrounding youngpeople identified as NEETs for being not in education, employment or train-ing. While sharing many key features with other mainstream youth problemsin Japan, the case of NEETs illuminates particularly well the strategic inter-play of social labels and more technical policy categories. To this end, a cleardistinction is made between the social category nto and the policy target groupNEET. Close attention is paid to how these were re-defined in the Japanesecontext, including how the latter came apply to a remarkably expansive age group(1534-year-olds). Most importantly however, the account highlights the centralactors and interrogates their respective interests, providing strong support for theargument that the NEET problem amounted ultimately to a strategic campaigndesigned to clear the way for new youth policies. The findings explicated will con-tribute to our understanding of high-profile youth scares as well as other socialproblems in Japan that operate through the media but are intimately linked topolicy-making.

Keywords: Youth problems, youth policy, NEET, social categories, targetgroups, hikikomori

Introduction

When the private think-tank Nomura Research Institute conducted an onlinesurvey regarding non-employed youth (jyakunen mugyosha) in the autumn of2004, a mere 17 per cent of the respondents claimed to be familiar with thecurious acronym NEET (Nomura Sogo Kenkyujo 2004).1 Strikingly, however,when carrying out fieldwork in Japan just a few years later, I had a hard timeencountering a single soul either young or old who had not heard this wordbefore or who did not have their own opinion regarding the predilection of joblessNEETs. A walk into any book store would yield a preliminary explanation as

Japan Forum 23(3) 2011: 407429 ISSN: 09555803 print/1469932X onlineCopyright C 2011 BAJS http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2011.597055

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to why: the term adorned the covers of dozens of popular books and magazines,some of which comprised parenting guides tapping into families deep anxietiesover their offspring (how to ensure your child does not turn into a NEET,what to do if your child becomes a NEET) while others offered general expla-nations (who NEETs really are and who we should blame). At the same time,provocative magazine articles posed this newly uncovered demographic not onlyas a moral outrage but as an outright threat to the nation.2 The virtual worldhad, if anything, heated up yet more: typing the word NEET (in its indigenizedkatakana form as nto) on Google Japan yielded well over seven million hits inMarch 2009, exposing the extent of the debate and diffusion that had taken placeup to that point in time.3

How could a seemingly dry, technical policy category of Not in Education,Employment or Training originating in the UK have become the object of somuch attention and fierce debate in Japan towards the middle of the 2000s? Whywas this category introduced in the first place and what, if any, strategic intentionswere at play?This article sets out to address precisely these puzzles by tracing the process by

which NEET was socially constructed in the Japanese context from 2003. With-out endorsing any of the derogatory usages of NEET or wishing to downplaythe importance of socio-economic changes (see Toivonen forthcoming), the primeconcern lies here with policy-related, strategic dimensions of youth problem con-struction. This article argues accordingly that the NEET scare was constructedin the first place to open the door for new youth policies and hence is a categorythat embodied a well-defined purpose as well as certain interests from its veryinception.This account draws on a year of fieldwork in Japanese youth policy circles (April

2007March 2008) but is based more directly on interviews with central partic-ipants and an analysis of prominent NEET publications as well as newspaperarticles. I was able to identify and access the majority of important participants,from influential researchers such as Kosugi Reiko to hands-on bureaucrats. Theseactors were interviewed about key policy issues for at least one hour, though Imet with all informants several times during my fieldwork, making it possible toverify and further contextualize the elicited information. The general orientationto data and theory, meanwhile, is closely influenced by Goodmans approach tothe study of youth problems (see, e.g., Goodman 1990, 2000, 2002, Toivonenand Imoto 2011). This approach was first developed through an analysis of theso-called returnee children (kikokushijo) the offspring of expatriate families whohad received some part of their education abroad who came to be problematisedas culturally inadequate upon returning to Japan and therefore as needing specialeducational attention (Goodman 1990, 2002). In his accounts, Goodman has notonly deconstructed the precise meanings assigned to the label kikokushijo but hasilluminated how a cast of interested actors mobilized around this new problem;how the advantageous class position of the parents of kikokushijo resulted in a

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positive re-framing of returnee children as the representatives of an internation-alising Japan; and how the latter were consequently made into targets of positivediscrimination in educational policy.4

Though the substance and historical backdrop of the NEET problem differgreatly from those of the kikokushijo, this article deconstructs in a similar fashionthe symbolic meanings assigned to NEET as well as the way in which this cat-egory has led to tangible policy outputs through the efforts of interested actors.In doing so, it not only extends Goodmans work but adds to an emerging bodyof research on Japanese youth problems that follows a constructionist approach(e.g. Kinsella 1998, 2000, Kaneko 2006, see also Leheny 2006, Allison 2009,Horiguchi 2011). By the same token, the present account provides a counter-point to analyses that take the existence of a particular youth issue as a given andproceed to offer explanations regarding its causes (for recent examples that are inmany respects insightful, see Borovoy 2008, Furlong 2008). I argue that when-ever an investigation ignores the claims-making processes and interests behind aputative youth phenomenon, it stands to do as much to construct and obscurethat phenomenon as to explain it.

Distinguishing between social and policy categories

Because considerable conceptual confusion prevails both in Japan and abroadover how best to approach the NEET category, this account first recognizes itsdualistic nature: though initially introduced in technical policy reports as a newsocial policy target group, it very soon took on a second life as a widely dissem-inated social category with strong moral connotations.5 The two dimensions areinextricably linked and have interacted in important ways, but it is highly usefulto position them as analytically distinct at first.By social policy target group category I refer to technical definitions and labels

that delineate, and therefore construct, a particular group based on certain sharedcharacteristics be it youth who are unemployed, elderly atom bomb victims, ormothers who are unmarried as a target for policy measures and/or for officialmonitoring. These definitions are often devised by prominent policy analystsand/or government officials. Together with statistics the collection of which theydirectly inform target group categories offer a fundamental technology for thegoverning of populations in modern societies (see, e.g., Best 2001): they facilitatethe states efforts to monitor social change and justify its policies. As with allcategories, however, target group formulations are open to manipulation and byno means offer an objective basis for policy.By social categories I point to the more explicitly symbolic labels circulated

widely in the general public arena denoting groups of people who are, again,claimed to share certain characteristics of interest.6 This is clearly a broadernotion than that of target group category as anything from permanent worker(seishain) or a once-divorced person (batsu-ichi) to those around 30 (arasa) can

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be considered a social category. Nevertheless, how these categories come to beconstructed and filled with various meanings that are often in conflict shapehow the objects of categorisation are treated in society. As amply documented bythe body of existing research on youth problems in Japan, Japanese mainstreamsociety tends to generate new social categories at machine-gun pace, many though not all of which flag deviance. These have tremendous power as theyact as the lenses through which individuals as well as groups are depicted in themedia and made sense of in everyday speech.It is thus hardly surprising that social categories regularly interact with, and are

sometimes adopted as, target group categories, though the reverse also takes place.Advancing a relevant stream of policy analysis, Schneider and Ingram (1993,2005) have gone furthest in conceptualizing the interrelationship between howspecific groups are constructed and the policies they receive. At the core of theirschema is the negotiation of deservingness: whether a given group is representedpositively or negatively has implications for whether they are viewed by the publicand policy-makers (who can ill ignore the former) as deserving or undeservingof beneficial policy, with systematic consequences for policy-making.7 This doesnot suggest that the relative generosity of social policies targeted at a given groupis entirely predetermined by that groups moral status in society it would be un-warranted to ignore complex policy-making dynamics, not to mention nuancedvariations between different welfare systems but Schneider and Ingrams worknevertheless calls us to pay more attention to how the representation of partic-ular groups structures policy-making. This is a welcome contribution, not leastbecause exchanges between public policy analysts who now tend to be less con-structionist and anthropologists who excel at discerning symbolic meaningsbut pay perhaps less attention to policy-making has been all too infrequent.8

Having digested this brief theoretical preamble, the reader will by now anticipatethat the official definition of NEET in Japan unmarried 1534-year-olds whoare not in education, employment, or training at the time of surveying tellsus very little about the strategic and symbolic significance of this category in theJapanese context. To seek a deeper understanding, I shall, in what follows, firsttrace the emergence of NEET as a legitimate target group and then examineits transformation into a distinctive social category with contested meanings. Tokeep the reader on track, I strive to make clear the chronological ordering of keyevents throughout. In the latter third of the article I move to consider the role ofinterests and connected policy outputs before providing a brief conclusion.

The emergence of the target group category NEET

Bridging the gap: new opportunities for 1618 year olds not in education, employment ortraining was the definitive report that all early Japanese articles on NEETs citedin 20032005 as they sought to ground their arguments regarding this puzzling

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new phenomenon. The interesting point to note is, of course, that this docu-ment was issued by the Cabinet Office of the United Kingdom with absolutelyno reference to Japan in the early years of the Blair era, amid growing fearsover the social exclusion of 1618-year-olds and the UKs relatively low edu-cational participation rates in the context of the EU. Roughly a tenth of Britishyouth in this age group were found to be inactive at any one time due to factorssuch as educational underachievement and educational disaffection as well asfamily disadvantage and poverty (Social Exclusion Unit 1999); not surprisingly,inactivity was found to be disproportionately concentrated among those fromworking-class and ethnic minority backgrounds.Japanese writers in the early 2000s usually omitted the fact that the roots of

NEET in fact stretch back much further. In the mid-1990s, some British re-searchers employed the term Status Zer0 based on the technical, residualstatistical category status 0 to denote essentially the same demographic, but,since this was deemed too derogatory by some, Status A came to be used inits stead (see, for instance, the report on Young people not in education, trainingor employment in South Glamorgan by Istance, Rees and Williamson, 1994). Theconcept then continued to transform amid the interaction of researchers andpoliticians, mutating from EET to NETE and then finally, to NEET. Al-though criticised as excessively sanitised or otherwise misleading by prominentyouth scholars, NEET became popular in high levels of the government due toits catchiness and marketability (Williamson 1997, p. 82).9

It was hence this evolved but contested version of the British status 0 categorythat came to be picked up by leading Japanese labour scholars in 2003. Despiteappearances to the contrary, this was not an entirely random incident: NEETfound its way to Japan through two pivotal policy reports officially commissionedby the Occupational Skill Development Bureau of the Ministry of Health, Labourand Welfare (hereafter, MHLW) with the purpose of generating ideas and knowl-edge to bolster fresh policy initiatives. This took place in a context where, joltedby the discovery of two million freeters in 2002, labour bureaucrats within theMHLW began to turn their attention from retraining measures for restructuredmiddle-aged workers to youth employment problems (interview, the former chiefof the Career Development Office, 4 July 2007).The first of the above reports, both compiled by the government-affiliated think-

tank Japan Institute of Labour Policy and Training (JILPT), investigated activelabour market policies for young people in Western countries (Kosugi 2003); thesecond focused on existing institutions in Japan that supported youth in theirschool-to-work transitions (Kosugi and Hori 2003). It was the latter of the twothat first applied the NEET concept explicitly to Japan. In hindsight, it was thisseemingly innocuous move that produced the first sparks in what would later flareup into a full-blown NEET scare.Not unpredictably, authors Kosugi and Hori found that the NEET layer

within the Japanese youth population had indeed grown drastically in size in the

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preceding years. Drawing on the National Census (Kokusei chosa), they calculatedthat in the year 2000 there had been as many as 760,000 15- to 34-year-oldswho expressed no will to work, leading the authors to argue that appropriatecountermeasures were badly needed. By excluding those non-employed youthwhowere reportedly engaged in housework (kaji), Kosugi andHori had effectivelyproduced a formulation of Japanese-styleNEETs that would become entrenchedas more or less the standard definition over the subsequent years.Curiously enough, however, no full explanation was given by the authors as to

why the NEET category should include youth up to the age of 34 as opposedto 24 or 25 as in most other OECD countries (it was remarked only that therehad recently been an increase in inactive 3034-year-old young people in Japan).I thus resolved to inquire further into this issue through interviews with severalkey actors.First, the research director in charge of the above reports, Kosugi Reiko of the

JILPT, conceded that the 1534 age range was chosen partly because, as of 2003,it was already being applied to part-time-working freeters; using the same rangefor NEETs would facilitate comparisons and more integrated analyses of thesetwo issues. Another contributing factor was that, since Japan had no pre-existingpolicy measures for inactive youth, there was no need for more finely distinguishedgradations just yet and a catch-all approach seemed most appropriate (interview,Kosugi Reiko, 17 May 2007). This meant, among other things, that university-educated youth who failed to enter employment upon graduation could also beincluded among the potential targets of any new measures (Kosugi interview,Asahi Shimbun 2004a). This choice reflects not only Japans high educationalparticipation rates but also the fact that the NEET debate was, at least in itsinitial years, preoccupied with middle-class youth rather than with the offspringof relatively deprived families.10

Offering a more historical perspective, a key labour bureaucrat at the MHLWposited that the 1534 age bracket followed from the gradual expansion of thestates general definition of youth in the postwar era: whereas the so-calledworking youths (kinro seishonen) of the 1960s and 1970s fell between ages 15and 19, the upper age ceiling had thence crept up in small leaps, first to 24,then to 29, and finally to 34. Paralleling this quiet shift, the words used bythe labour administration to denote youth had also changed, morphing fromseishonen (youngsters and juveniles) to seinen (youngsters) to wakamono andjyakunen (youth; jyakunen is used mainly in formal contexts). This shift serves asa good reminder of how the meanings of even basic, taken-for-granted categoriessuch as child, youth, and adult sometimes undergo substantial redefinition ina short span of time.When I put the same question regarding the expansive NEET age range to

Kudo Sadatsugu, the most influential independent youth work veteran in Japan,he started by highlighting cultural factors that led Japanese parents to feel intenseresponsibility over their offsprings education and careers while simultaneously

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allowing the latter to indulgence themselves (interview, 22 April 2007). Kudoalso recalled, however, that he and a small group of scholars (including KosugiReiko and Miyamoto Michiko) had in fact made explicit demands to the MHLWin the early 2000s to extend the Ministrys upper limit for youth to 34 (from29), following from the realisation that there were a substantial number of over-30-year-olds requiring support on their way towards adulthood. Another keyjustification given by key bureaucrats (including the former head of the MHLW,Administrative Vice Minister Togari Toshikazu) as I interviewed them was thatusing the 1534 range was necessary in order for statistics and hence for policy to grasp those young people who had failed to enter the labour markets duringthe 1990s employment ice age (koyo hyogaki) (see Rebick 2005), i.e. the youthwho subsequently came to symbolise the Lost Generation.What is especially interesting about these explanations is that, despite covering

issues of tremendous importance in their own right, they all but omit one obviousfactor: by employing an extraordinarily wide, although culturally plausible, agerange, claims-makers could produce a higher total number of NEETs than wouldhave been possible had they focused on a narrower demography such as 1519-year-olds or even 1524-year-olds. Being able to prove with ostensibly objectivedata that there were hundreds of thousands of apparently idle jobless youths gavekey advocates a powerful symbolic means to stir alarm and a sense of moral panicthrough the media.It is, of course, nothing new to note that actors manipulate statistics to support

their own agendas, but it is worth briefly tracing how this numbers game wasplayed in the particular case of NEETs. Table 1 lists different numbers put forthby central researchers and think-tanks between 2003 and 2006.What this table tells us, first of all, is that a striking range of figures from

400,000 to 2.5 million were cited in the first years of the NEET debate. Thatthese numbers drew on at least seven different surveys partly accounts for thisdiversity, but equally consequential were the intricate definitional battles foughtin the background.One pivotal conflict revolved around the issue of gender roles: were unmarried,

formally non-employed women who reportedly engaged in housework (kaji) tobe counted as NEETs or not?11 The answer of Genda Yuji, a central claims-maker (see below), was yes, based on the contention that many female surveyrespondents preferred to say they were engaged in housework when they reallywere out of work (Genda 2007). The MHLW, however, disagreed, preferring totake the housework category at face value and thus keeping to Kosugis originaldefinition.12 Since the Cabinet Office nevertheless adopted Gendas definition,this meant that an intra-government conflict emerged over who should be consid-ered a NEET. Eventually though, it was the MHLW that appeared to have wonthe feud as its figures producing an annual number of 640,000 NEETs be-tween 2002 and 2006 became the most widely cited ones since the mid-2000s

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Table 1 The reported numbers of NEETs in 20032006 and respective sources of sta-tistical data

Number Explanations and data sources

760,000 1534-year-olds who were NEET (excluding those who didhousework) in 2000 (Kosugi and Hori 2003). Datasource: National Census (Ministry of General Affairs)

2.5 million 1534-year-olds who were NEET (including women whodid housework or cared for children) in 2002 (Genda2004). Data source: Special Labour Force Survey andBasic School Survey.

400,000 1524-year-olds who were NEET and expressed no desireto work or study in 2003 (Genda and Maganuma 2004).Data source: Labour Force Survey detailed results.

640,000 1534-year-olds who were non-employed and not ineducation (excluding those who did housework) in 2003(Kosugi Reiko interviewed, Asahi Shimbun 2004a). Datasource: White Paper on the Labour Markets 2004 (MHLW2004).

1 million A projection of the number of NEETs in 2010 (Dai-ichiSeimei Research Centre, quoted in Asahi Shimbun2004b).

520,000 1534-year-old NEETs in 2003 (excluding those who didhousework; MHLW, quoted in Asahi Shimbun 2005b).Data source: White paper on the labour markets 2004(MHLW 2004).

847,000 1534-year-olds who were NEET (including those who didhousework) in 2002 (Cabinet Office, cited in AsahiShimbun 2005a). Source: Employment Structure BasicSurvey.

640,000 1534-year-olds who were NEET (excluding those who didhousework) in 20022006 (MHLW, numerous articlesand publications in 20042006). The most widely acceptedand cited figure since 2005. Source: Labour Force Survey.

(see Figure 1). This was significant as the MHLW was the government organdirectly in charge of developing new social programmes for non-employed youth.These battles over definitions and aggregate NEET statistics were coupled

with a yet more subtle strategy of omission: in contrast to the debate in the UK,the percentage shares of non-employed youth were consistently de-emphasizedin Japanese policy discussions and were almost never mentioned in the public

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Figure 1 The number of NEETs in each age group between 1993 and 2006. Source: LabourForce Survey (as cited in MHLW 2007).

debate. This was understandable as no more than a mere 1.9 per cent of 1534-year-olds (2.5 per cent of 1819-year-olds) were found to be outside education,employment and training as of 2003 (Kosugi 2005, pp. 79). Although referringto the same phenomenon, it is clear that foregrounding the figure 640,000 inacademic and general publications was far more effective a way to raise alarmover NEETs. Also conspicuously absent from the debate was any informationregarding the length of time youth generally spent in the NEET category whichwould have made it easier to grasp the nature of the issue.13

What we learn from the above is, first of all, that it was a select group ofpolicy actors who initially introduced NEET to Japan and then went on tocall for new measures to tackle this problem. However, we also saw that theprocess of defining and counting NEETs was not only messy but characterisedby substantial contestation and conflict between actors who were in the position in other words, who had the power to participate in the definitional process.

The social category nto

NEETs do not have confidence in themselves. One out of two NEETs feelthat they are inferior in terms of sociability, initiative and communication skillscompared to other people of their age.

(Genda 2004, p. 165)

Nto are ravaging the wealth and pensions of the state and parents.(Asai and Morimoto 2005, p. 15)

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As it transformed from a dry, mundane policy term into an almost universallyknown, even fashionable social category, NEET took on provocative symbolicmeanings with significant social and policy consequences. While the definitionalprocess of the policy category was all but monopolized by labour researchers, itscolloquial mirror image was crafted through a less centralised process in the massmedia between 2004 and 2006.The beginnings of this process can be traced back to the efforts of Genda

Yuji of Tokyo University, the author of the widely acclaimed A nagging sense ofinsecurity about work (2005) (Shigoto no naka no aimai na fuan, 2001) and oneof Japans most prominent labour economists. He first engaged with the issue ofnon-employed youth in the February 2004 issue of Chuo Koron, drawing attentionto a layer of young people who were not fortunate enough to even become freetersor shitsugyosha (i.e. formally unemployed) and who hence fell into the curiouscategory of NEET (Genda 2004). The trend-setting scholar argued it was hightime to consider support measures for this group, hitherto all but ignored bysociety and policy.Citing the results of a small Internet survey, Genda first constructed NEETs as

lacking in communication skills and confidence, which soon became a dominanttheme in the youth discourse of sympathetic academics and practitioners. Theseassumptions regarding the characteristics of NEETs were adopted in numerousarticles as well as in official government publications (see, e.g., the MHLWWhitePapers for 2005 and 2006). By spelling the name of this category not in theroman alphabet but in Japanese katakana script as nto, Genda facilitated theindigenization of this category as he lifted it from the narrow realm of labourmarket policy to that of public debate.14

Although JILPTs Kosugi Reiko also helped popularize NEET through in-terpreting the issue for the mass media,15 the defining publication of the debatewas without doubt Nto: neither furta nor unemployed (Nto: furta demo naku, shit-sugyosha demo naku) by Genda and the freelance writer Maganuma, publishedin July 2004. Intended as a general-interest book rather than an academic vol-ume, it explored the vexing puzzle of NEETs by drawing on a mix of statisticaldata and journalistic interviews. Although it did employ statistics to argue therehad been a dramatic increase in youth who were essentially inactive (Genda andMaganuma 2004, pp. 2022), the main contributions of this best-selling bookwere conceptual and moral. First, by drawing a strict line between the new cat-egory of NEETs and the existing category of the officially unemployed,16 andby portraying the youth whom Maganuma had interviewed as adult children, itaroused outrage over (intrinsically) lazy youth who were violating established worknorms. This had clear elements of a moral underclass discourse. Second, in anapparent contradiction of the first point, Genda emphasised that it was not thatNEETs did not want to work; they simply could not, for one reason or another.The book therefore sent a highly mixed message striving to stir controversy whileattempting to temper criticisms regarding the personal failings of unmotivated

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youth. In a media environment where the disparagement of problem youth was atradition, this would soon prove an impossible balancing act.This volume by Genda and Maganuma was followed by a flurry of publica-

tions and public forums on the topic of youth (non-)employment.17 Interestingly,alongside professional researchers, youth support practitioners mostly formerfutoko and hikikomori supporters who now framed themselves as NEET experts also began to put out their own books. Futagami Nokis The nto of hope (Kibo nonto, 2005) was an early exemplar of this genre.18 Based on experiences with hun-dreds of youth and parents Futagami had met during his career as a private youthworker and manager, his book bitterly criticised not just the Japanese family butalso social structural factors that he said were producing youth marginalisation.Others, including the young social entrepreneur Kudo Kei soon followed suitby releasing books that explained their personal perspectives on young peopleand support practices (see, e.g., Kudo 2005, 2006). The tone of such expert-authored books was generally more down-to-earth than that of scholars, but inother respects they supplemented rather than challenged the assertions of Gendaand Kosugi. They did, however, take serious issue with dominant mass mediarepresentations and public perceptions of non-employed youth that had, at thispoint, already coagulated. Table 2 summarizes the basic positions of key scholarsand experts vis-a`-vis NEETs.How, then, did the Japanese mass media construct nto?Most major media were

indeed more than happy to sensationalise NEETs and play up the controversyof rapidly proliferating workless youth, all the way from respectable broadsheetssuch as Sankei Shimbun to perhaps less respectable weekly magazines. For a large

Table 2 How key scholars and experts constructed nto in 2004 and 2005

Genda Yuji Nto are youth who do want to work but are simply unableto do so; they typically lack confidence andcommunication skills; many have low educationalqualifications and/or are drop-outs.

Kosugi Reiko Nto are not only a private issue but also a social problemthat largely results from labour market change; fourdistinct categories of nto exist, one of which is universaland three of which are Japan-specific.

Futagami Noki It is a misunderstanding that nto have simply no interest inwork; they are victims of rigid social values, conservativeparents, abusive workplaces and dire job markets.

Kudo Kei Nto are not lazy but in fact desperate to work and becomefinancially independent; in Japan it is vastly more stressfulto remain jobless than it is to work.

Sources: Genda (2004); Genda and Maganuma (2004); Kosugi (2005); Futagami (2005); Kudo (2005, 2006).

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part, this served the interests of those wishing to popularise the problem of youthnon-employment. What was less useful to the original claims-makers, however,was the aggressively asserted view that non-working youth were not only lazyand unmotivated, but essentially worthless and by implication undeserving of anypublic support. It was this strongly negative reaction to nto most unabashedlyexpressed in variety shows on TV as glaringly deviant that the youth workersI met while conducting fieldwork invariably resented and challenged.19

Yet taking the most disparaging reporting as fully representative of all publicopinion would be misleading: in reality there was and still is at least a modestspectrum of positions on NEETs. As a bureaucrat in charge of the MHLWsyouth support policies so diplomatically put it, it is not that all Japanese peoplelean towards the same direction, calling for more [youth support] measures, orcalling for existing measures to be abolished; there is indeed a variety of opinionon this issue (interview, 30 May 2007, three bureaucrats in charge of youthmeasures, Career Development Support Office, MHLW).There are several ways to make sense of this diversity of opinion. One is to

study and compare different sources, including ethnographic evidence as wellas newspaper reporting. What I did in a previous study (Toivonen 2009) wasto analyse the views of practitioners as well as of dozens of supported youth(at fifteen youth support stations and youth independence camps altogether) af-ter which I conducted a content analysis of relevant Asahi Shimbun articles.20

A striking finding that emerged was that, contrasting with the negative, damn-ing social images of NEETs that youth workers thought were predominant inJapan, reporting in the Asahi in fact took a relatively constructive, even positiveattitude to non-employed youth. Although a third of the articles I surveyed didassociate NEETs with a lack of motivation for work or study, the broadsheetalso called on society to provide more support to youth on their way to inde-pendence (Asahi Shimbun 2005c). Moreover, the voices of central claims-makerssuch as Genda, Kosugi, and Kudo featured very frequently, positioning the Asahiessentially as an ally of these actors (Campbell 1996), helping to build sup-port for the latters policy agenda. Table 3 summarises dominant constructionsof NEET based on newspaper reporting, ethnographic evidence, and everydaydiscussions.Notwithstanding such variation across parts of themedia and distinctive interest

groups, it is safe to say however that from 2004 the category of nto came tobe constructed in predominantly negative terms in the public consciousness asreferring to youth who were lazy, uninterested in work, and generally low inmotivation. At its most basic, this is consistent with a deficit model of youththat places blame on the moral shortcomings of individual young people and de-emphasizes social structural issues. This is in many ways highly unfortunate, forrecent empirical research makes evident the central role of institutional changes inthe production and patterning of youth inactivity in Japan (Brinton 2011). In anycase, since earlier youth problems, such as the parasite singles, part-time working

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Table 3 Tracing the dominant constructions of nto as a social category

Source Content

Newspaper articles (theAsahi Shimbun,September2004September2005)

Those who do not commute to school, engage in work orreceive occupational training (gakko ni mo kayowazu,shigoto mo shiteorazu, shokugyo kunren mo uketeinaiwakamono); associated with a lack of motivation; in needof support.

Youth support staff andsupported youth (April2007March 2008)

NEETs are seen by mainstream society as lazy sluggards(namakemono), as disgraceful (mittomonai), worthless(kudaranai), spoilt and dependent (amaeteiru), and ashaving no work motivation (hataraku iyoku ga nai); yetNEET is less negative in its connotations thanhikikomori.

General everyday contexts(April 2007March2008)

NEETs are often seen as lazy and irresponsible, but anyyoung person who is even temporarily out of work cancasually and sometimes jokingly be called a NEET.

freeters and the socially withdrawn hikikomori, had been debated in broadly similarterms in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, one notes considerable thematiccontinuity between NEET and such predecessors.There is one crucial discontinuity in the way that NEET was constructed

that needs to be pointed out to in order to understand its full significance. Thisconcerns the reframing of youth inactivity as primarily a matter of employment ratherthan of mental welfare. As confirmed inHoriguchis (2011) authoritative account,the hikikomori debate that directly preceded NEETs produced a medicalised,stigmatising public discourse that suggested formally inactive youth were oftenviolent and by implication mentally ill (or at least unstable). The consequencewas that, despite its successful construction as a social problem by key actorssuch as Saito Tamaki as well as the mainstream media, the hikikomori came tobe understood largely as a psychological concern and a family issue. While theMHLW did designate public health centres as the main institutions responsiblefor responding to hikikomori and supplied themwith a set of guidelines, it was verydifficult to justify substantial new national-level policy measures for this group.NEET was different in this respect: with the intervention of labour economists,youth inactivity was swiftly repositioned as an employment problem, and thereforeit could be claimed to have direct, measurable consequences to the economy aswell as to the stability of the social security system.Key claims-makers indeed drewa direct link between the increase in NEETs and the (presumably unsustainable)social security system which might suffer additional burdens were non-employedyouth allowed to become welfare claimants.21 This argument was, importantly,

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also adopted by the MHLW. We may thus contend that, in a conservative publicpolicy context where welfare (fukushi) and mental welfare especially wasassociated with the private sphere of the family but where the economy (keizai)was placed at the very centre of the public realm, shifting the issue of youthinactivity (whatever its empirically detected causes or solutions) towards the latter,more legitimate, frame made plenty of strategic sense.22

Discussion

So far this account has traced the winding path of NEET from its birth country,the UK, through the reports of certain policy analysts into the general Japanesemass media arena, where it took on a distinctive identity as a popular social cate-gory. This section will take the present account further by discussing the role of in-terests in shaping the NEET campaign as well as some of its immediate outputs.

Interests

While the central claims-makers of the NEET campaign scholars such asGenda and Kosugi, practitioners such as the two Kudos (father Sadatsugu andson Kei), as well as several MHLW officials have already been identified, theissue of interests is yet to be addressed. What were the driving motivations of theseactors and which other groups might have hoped to benefit from the NEETdebate in one way or another?At the risk of over-simplification, one can identify three particular organisations

and one distinctive industry that clearly had a vital interest in the problem ofjobless young people. First, the Career Development Support Office (CDSO) ofthe MHLWs Occupational Skill Development Bureau (that had commissionedthe critical JILPT reports on youth labour market measures) had an institutionalmission that it was struggling to continue. The old Working Youths Homes the CDSOs classic youth programme that had at one time comprised over500 activity centres across Japan had by the early 2000s descended to virtualirrelevance, so there was strong interest within the Office in enacting newer, up-to-date programmes. Beyond such an institutional state of affairs, the CDSO hada particularly enterprising chief in the first half of the 2000s who was keen toapply his personal youth policy vision to novel programmes.The Japan Institute of Labour Policy and Training faced, if anything, much

greater pressures as it was pressed to produce new research that could capturethe publics interest and be seen as socially useful. This was partly because, asof the early 2000s, the JILPT became widely seen as one of Japans many corruptand wasteful semi-governmental organisations where high-ranking bureaucratsfound cushy post-retirement jobs as amakudari (this criticism resurfaced in 2009following the historic election victory of the Democratic Party of Japan). Whilenot necessarily a fair appraisal of the organisations contributions the institute

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continues to be highly regarded by many domestic and international researchers the JILPT has had to fight for its survival in the past decade and therefore it hashad much to benefit from the creation of new topics and social problems overwhich it can claim expertise. The predicament of the Institute of Social Scienceof the University of Tokyo (where Genda is a faculty member) was somewhatless acute than that of the JILPT, but not altogether dissimilar: it, too, was undergrowing pressure to produce research that was not only of high quality, but thatwas socially appealing and marketable and that could thus attract funding as wellas continued government approval.At the same time, though less visible and influential, Japans youth support in-

dustry also had a critical interest in the debate on NEETs. While not necessarilyan sector-wide campaign, some of the most well-situated youth work veteranshad been in regular contact with officials within theMHLW since the early 2000s,with Adachi (2006) documenting that a channel (paipu) had opened betweenKudo Sadatsugu and the MHLW around this time. Kudo consistently demandedthat youth support institutions be recognised as providing a public service thatbenefited not just individual support-seekers but the wider society and economyas well. Though there is little evidence that actors such as Kudo had played adirect role in devising the NEET category itself, they certainly helped raiseawareness regarding youth issues within the MHLW, encouraging the latter totake official action. Once a new category did materialise, the former immediatelybegan to discuss it in publications and reframed their own activities as NEETsupport measures (as opposed to hikikomori and/or futoko measures), partly inorder to qualify for government subsidies. These observations confirm the notionthat private institutions indeed actively shape and are shaped by dynamic youthproblem discourses (Goodman 1990).23

It is puzzling that two other potential beneficiaries of youth policies parentsand young people themselves appear to have played no marked role in lobbyingfor new youth measures through the NEET debate. The youth workers whomI met during fieldwork in 2007 and 2008 argued that parents with offspring whowere formally inactive and/or socially withdrawn typically felt ashamed and thusgrew rather isolated in their respective communities, making it difficult for themcollectively to make demands for new social support measures. This, of course,is not the whole story as Japan is replete with various small parent-led self-helpgroups, some of which have become influential within youth support debates.Nevertheless, parents arguably did not contribute to the NEET campaign as acoherent, well-organised group.With the exception of the aforementioned Kudo Kei who took part in the

planning of new support programmes, the voices of youth also remained largelyabsent.24 Once again, we witnessed a youth problem debate where the centralobjects of intervention were relegated to the status of a muted group. It is, ofcourse, possible to view influential youth support institutions and scholars suchas Genda as acting as the de facto representatives of parents and youth: they rallied

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for new policies on behalf of these two groups that were assumed to be in need ofnew support measures.

Outputs

What were some of the salient outputs of the Japanese NEET debate? In otherwords, if we accept that it was a campaign with certain strategic objectives, whatdid it produce beyond new categories and discourses? The answer is: Japansvery first tangible support programmes to socially include young people en-gaged in neither study nor employment and who could not be reached via moreconventional employment services such as Hello Work or the Job Cafe. Thesefresh programmes comprised the Youth Independence Camp (2005), a residen-tial work and life skills training programme, and the Youth Support Station(2006), a drop-in counselling centre with diverse career and psychological coun-selling functions (Toivonen 2008).25 NEETs were positioned as the foremosttarget group for these two unprecedented measures, although in actuality theyhave come to serve a much slimmer demographic that faces certain ambiguous,stigmatising, conditions (Toivonen forthcoming).From the point of view of the present account, it is imperative to note just

how closely interlinked the youth problem discourse and corresponding policymeasures were in the case of NEETs: once the issue of non-employed youthhad been catapulted onto the public and government radars in 2004, new policiesappeared with only a minimal delay in 2005 and 2006. Incidentally, it was in thesesame two years that the medias interest in NEETs appeared to reach its apex(see Figure 2).

Figure 2 The annual number of articles that feature NEET (Asahi Shimbun and the Nihon KeizaiShimbun, 20022008). Note: The articles included here contain either the acronym NEET or the

word nto, or both. Sources: Kikuzo II Visual for Library 2009, Nikkei Telecom 21 2009.

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These observations reveal a basic anatomy common to most Japanese youthproblems: a new category is established; statistics are exploited to show a rise inincidence; attendant ideas about problems and solutions get specified; publicawareness is raised through amedia debate; and, finally, newmeasures are enactedwhen (or if) sufficient momentum emerges to carry policy changes.26 In termsof such a general sociological progression, we find that the NEET campaignwas in fact quite successful as it managed to bring about concrete policy change.That claims-makers and bureaucrats managed to reconstruct youth inactivity as amatter of employment rather than mental health and welfare, thereby providing anindispensable catalyst to a policy shift, seems to have been a crucial factor here.Viewing the NEET campaign as a success does nevertheless come with a

significant caveat that brings us back to considering the relationship betweentarget groups and social categories. A closer analysis of the policy-making processleading to the abovementioned programmes reveals that, while NEET did in factenable new youth measures, it also heavily constrained their designs. This is to saythat, while the high visibility of this particular youth problem campaign createda crucial opening for new policies, the essentially undeserving social image oflazy jobless young people that quickly proliferated from 2004 onwards andthat critical scholars such as Honda Yuki (Honda et al. 2006) later so cogentlydebunked made it extremely hard for key policy-makers to gain wide approval fortheir plans and acquire substantial budgets (Toivonen forthcoming). Key youthpolicy bureaucrats were able to employ certain argumentative tactics to supporttheir case and thus prevailed, but the scope and potential of the new programmeswere substantially reduced in the process. This presents a prime example of howthe symbolic meanings of a media-driven social category can feed back into policycategories, ultimately exerting a powerful influence on actual social programmes.

Conclusion

This article has attempted to explain the emergence of NEET, one of Japansmany recent youth scares, from a constructionist perspective. After exploring thesubtle definitional battles that NEET became subjected to, the numbers gamewhere statistics were manipulated to raise alarm, and the medias treatment of thiscategory, it was argued that the (re-)construction of NEET amounted essentially toa strategic campaign, the aim of which was to enact novel youth policies targetedat a certain layer of young people. These policies were the key outputs of thiscampaign that was driven by a handful of influential actors such as top youthresearchers, sections within the MHLW and the Japan Institute of Labour Policyand Training. During the three main years of the social debate around NEETs(20042006), youth themselves remained a muted group, exhibiting a centraldynamic that, I would argue, has characterized all mainstream youth problems inJapan in the postwar era.27

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This account has benefited from making a clear analytical distinction betweenthe target group category NEET and the social category nto. This distinctioncan, and indeed should, be applied also to the analysis of other problem youthcategories in Japan that are linked in some way to state policies. Doing so willsensitize the investigator to the various strategies that are pursued through the con-struction and symbolic contestation of youth categories, contributing to a morerobust and holistic understanding of specific moral panics and media discoursessurrounding young people.I should stress that adopting this type of critical approach does not at all deny the

potential existence of problematic, even painful, conditions among youth and theirfamilies, but it does require us to re-examine the core assumptions based on whichwe strive to grasp the nature and magnitude of such conditions, whether throughpredominantly qualitative or predominantly quantitative methodologies. Insofaras many English-language academic analyses still fail to unpack the strategicfoundations and basic premises of categories such as futoko, hikikomori, freeter,and NEET, it is safe to say that, within the interdisciplinary field of Japanesestudies at least, the study of youth problems remains a relatively undeveloped area.Though the examination of such strategic foundations or premises can hardlyamount to a full exposition of the dynamics of youth issues (in the Japanesecontext or elsewhere), it is hoped that this article will have illuminated severalhitherto neglected but crucial phenomena and that it will accordingly promotemore reflexive as well as multi-dimensional youth research in the future.

Acknowledgements

The research leading to this publication was made possible by generous financialsupport from the Emil Aaltonen Foundation (Finland), the Japan FoundationEndowment Committee, the Sasakawa Foundation, the Matsushita InternationalFoundation and KELA. I would also like to sincerely thank K2 International,YokohamaYouth Support Station and the twelve other youth work centres I visitedin Japan in 20072008. I moreover remain indebted to the following individualsfor their close support and encouragement: Handa Arimichi, Miyamoto Michiko,Genda Yuji, Kosugi Reiko and Kudo Kei.

Notes

1. This report nevertheless found that 90 per cent of the respondents were concerned over theincrease in NEETs (non-employed youth).

2. See, for instance, Will nto destroy this country?, a special feature section in the April 2006issue of Seiron.

3. This included 2,300 Google Japan Videos video clips.4. Goodmans approach is, in turn, inspired by the classic constructionist work of Kitsuse and

Spector (1977) but aligns more with contextual constructionism as it takes closely into ac-count socio-economic developments, wider discourses, and interests, whereas the orientationof Spector and Kitsuse is more radically constructionist.

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5. Lunsing (2008), for instance, misses this important distinction; the OECD (2008) pays scarceattention to the domestic processes that produced the social category nto and the implicationsthis has had for policy-making.

6. This conception of social categories is influenced by Cohens (1972) idea of youth types andgalleries of folk devils.

7. Power resources are also an integral, although problematic, component of Schneider and In-grams conceptualisation. The author holds to the view that (target group) constructions can,to a remarkable degree, be independent from such power resources.

8. Recent research in the anthropology of public policy is helping to bridge this divide (see, e.g.,Shore and Wright 1997, Wedel et al. 2005). Goodmans (1990) account of the kikokushijoremains the definitive example of anthropological research that examines the interaction ofsymbolic meanings and particular youth policies in Japan.

9. The Home Office did not like Status Zer0 as it was seen to lack these qualities (HowardWilliamson, phone interview, 23 April 2009). NEET was criticised again in the 2000s aspromoting a deficiency model of youth and for biasing policies towards simply getting youthto exit this category without concern for their long-term careers or well-being (see, e.g., Yatesand Payne 2006).

10. Genda (2004) did strive to bring attention to the poor employment opportunities enjoyed bythose youth who did not enter or graduate high school, but this never became more than afootnote in the mainstream NEET debate.

11. In contrast to Britain, for instance, it is vital to note that housework in this context was notassumed to include child-rearing, owing to the fact that only married women are expected tohave children in Japan (see, e.g., Hertog 2008). There is, moreover, a separate policy categoryfor single parents, which partly explains why lone carers never featured in the Japanese NEETdebate.

12. There was never any real disagreement over the exclusion of married men and women fromthe NEET category, as marriage tends to be taken as evidence of social inclusion in Japan(Toivonen 2008).

13. The dearth of publicly accessible longitudinal panel data on youth certainly contributed to thislatter omission.

14. Immediately after the publication of his article in Chuo Koron, Genda addressed a combinedstudy council of the ruling and opposition parties at the Japanese Diet, which raised conscious-ness over the issue of non-employed youth among politicians to the point of prompting theopposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) to incorporate NEET counter-measures in itsUpper House election Manifesto (Asahi Shimbun 2004b).

15. She first discussed the issue in an interview that was published in a Sankei Shimbun article on17 May 2004 with the title Non-working youth nto increase 1.6-fold in 10 years, have nowill to work, sponge off parents. Summarising the findings of an interview survey, Kosugi wasone of the first to identify distinctive sub-categories within NEETs in an effort to explain theunderpinnings of this phenomenon that many found perplexing and shocking.

16. Miyamoto (2004, p. 24) stresses the arbitrariness of the decision to separate NEETs con-ceptually from the unemployed in light of the highly narrow definition of unemployment inJapan and the fact that most employment surveys consider only activities in the final week ofthe relevant survey month.

17. The first major forum took place in November 2004 under the title Wakamono Mugyosha noJitsujo to Shiensaku wo Kangaeru (Thinking about the Current Situation of Non-employedYouth and Support Measures). Its proceedings were speedily published by JIL in its academicjournal Rodo Kenkyu in December 2004 that provides a comprehensive synopsis of policydebates on NEETs at the time.

18. This and other NEET books are part of a wider, older body of literature on youth problemsand rehabilitation authored by practitioners such as Kudo Sadatsugu, Wada Shigehiro and theTotsuka Hiroshi (of the Totsuka Yacht School).

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19. I have regrettably not yet heard of any studies that have systematically scrutinized TV repre-sentations of NEETs; if one was conducted, it would undoubtedly make highly fascinatingreading.

20. This study analysed all articles carried by the Tokyo morning edition (chokan) of the AsahiShimbun that directly addressed the issue of NEETs (as opposed to just mentioning the term)between 12 September 2004 the date the first article on NEETs appeared and 9 September2005, amounting to twenty-seven articles in total. The focus was put on the critical first yearof reporting to observe initial claims-making and definitional efforts.

21. There were some efforts to quantify the economic effects of NEETs. Also, NEET was cited inconnection with specific criminal acts even on the pages of Asahi Shimbun. The word poverty(hinkon) was, however, almost never used in connection with NEETs by claim-makers suchas Genda or Kosugi, let alone the conservative government.

22. However, the categorisation of subsequent youth initiatives primarily as employment measureshas led to some problems as employment-related achievement targets have become the soleindicators of programme performance. It is not controversial to point out that the division ofyouth measures into either welfare or employment support is out of sync with marginalisedyoung peoples realities.

23. Interestingly, there had reportedly been a turn towards a greater employment focus withinthe hikikomori support industry immediately prior to the NEET debate, suggesting that theconcerns and ideas of Genda and Kosugi were by and large in line with ongoing developmentsin this sector.

24. Partly spurred by the NEET critique that Honda co-authored with two young writers, from2006 onwards, there was an increase in polemical books by youthful authors, many of whomclaimed to have personally experienced painful problems in the past, the current labour activistAmamiya Karin offering a case in point.

25. Of these two programmes, the Youth Support Station has remained in place since, but theYouth Independence Camp became the victim of another highly visible media campaign: thejigyou shiwake (restructuring of public programmes) conducted by the DPJ in the autumn of2009. Though abolished at this point, it survived in modified form under the titleGasshuku-gataWakamono Jiritsu Jigyo (Camp-Type Youth Independence Programme) and with support fromnew funding sources.

26. This pattern is highly similar to that observed by Goodman (2000, p. 172).27. This is true virtually by definition: if youth were not a muted group and were instead able to

shape the framing of social issues and policy campaigns, they would surely not have wished toproblematise themselves (they would have been more likely to call attention to young peoplesneeds and demands rather than to youth problem labels).

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Japan. PhD thesis. University of Oxford.Toivonen, Tuukka, forthcoming.Getting Japanese youth back to work: negotiating policy in postindustrial

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Yates, Scott and Payne, Malcolm, 2006. Not so NEET? A critique of the use of NEET in settingtargets for interventions with young people. Journal of Youth Studies, 9, 329344.

Tuukka Toivonen recently completed a PhD at the University of Oxford. His thesis investigatedthe emergence of a new kind of youth inclusion policy in Japan. After spending a year as a JSPSPostdoctoral Fellow at Kyoto University, he became a Junior Research Fellow at Green TempletonCollege at Oxford. His present work focuses on the comparative sociological analysis of youngadults, early career choice and motivational processes. He is also the co-editor, together with RogerGoodman and Yuki Imoto, of a forthcoming volume calledA sociology of Japanese youth (Routledge).He can be contacted at: tuukka.t@gmail.com.

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