I know a few people in my generation who "opted out" of The Offer (+) who eventually found themselves doing web freelancing. There are social difficulties involved in doing it, but they're successful and MUCH happier with it than they were in their brief forays to salarymandom.
We'll be getting together for our college club annual reunion in September and once more trying to tell kids "Hey guys, if the salaryman thing doesn't pan out, we'll take you out to coffee and tell you about some other options." Many middle class Japanese kids have literally never heard that once in their entire lives.
+ Roughly 30% of Japanese society, mostly middle class and male, has this life plan in place from birth: You will study extraordinarily hard and test into a good high school. You will then study extraordinarily hard and test into a good university. You will be hired by a large Japanese megacorp along with 200 people from your university. You will then be a salaryman, owned body and soul by your company, and worked in conditions which resemble indentured servitude for roughly your first 20 to 25 years. In return, you will be promoted in lockstep with the rest of your entering class, you will never be fired, and you will be awarded social status and security with the guarantee of neither of them ever being imperiled by virtually anything.
There are also people who accept The Offer because they feel they have no other option. And they are not so happy about their job, but they feel they cannot quit for various social reasons ("But everyone would love to have my job at MegaCorp", "If I quit, what if I fail?"). My gentle prodding to test their comfort zone sometimes works, sometimes doesn't.
Indeed. I taught English to a mid-30s lady who worked for a subsidiary of JR. Every lesson, it was the same complaining about her job, her boss.. I suggested that she find a new job and her reaction was complete terror. "I can only imagine it will be worse than what I have now".
We'll be getting together for our college club annual reunion in September and once more trying to tell kids "Hey guys, if the salaryman thing doesn't pan out, we'll take you out to coffee and tell you about some other options." Many middle class Japanese kids have literally never heard that once in their entire lives.
+ Roughly 30% of Japanese society, mostly middle class and male, has this life plan in place from birth: You will study extraordinarily hard and test into a good high school. You will then study extraordinarily hard and test into a good university. You will be hired by a large Japanese megacorp along with 200 people from your university. You will then be a salaryman, owned body and soul by your company, and worked in conditions which resemble indentured servitude for roughly your first 20 to 25 years. In return, you will be promoted in lockstep with the rest of your entering class, you will never be fired, and you will be awarded social status and security with the guarantee of neither of them ever being imperiled by virtually anything.