Since the early 1990s, Japan, as in many industrialized countries, has seen an erosion of job security, expansion of part-time work, and increasingly frequent wage cuts. These changes have hit the younger generations particularly hard. It is often claimed that the Japanese youth are compensating for their growing frustrations in the labor market by taking increasingly aggressive positions towards the outside world.
To what extent is this claim valid? There exists a longstanding debate over whether economic hardships cause lower-class strata to become intolerant of immigrants and/or militaristic abroad. Scholars continue to disagree over whether the middle class or the more economically strained lower class was primarily responsible for the rise of the Nazi regime in the 1930s. More recently, a lively debate has emerged over whether increased economic insecurity has contributed to anti-immigrant sentiment and the rise of the far right in Europe.
The proposition that growing economic insecurity has spawned the growth of nationalism among Japanese youth has rarely been systematically tested. This study analyzes the Japanese General Social Survey (2006) and finds that nationalistic sentiments are in fact much more concentrated among older generations than the young. It also finds little evidence that economic insecurity, as measured by engagement in part-time work, unemployment, low incomes, or poor economic prospects, shifts respondents’ political orientations to the right.
The findings from this paper call into question the conventional "economic distress = nationalism" equation, which has come under fire from recent scholarship on other cases as well. The study also suggests that individuals continue to learn and evolve throughout the course of their lifetimes. This evidence of learning and value change undermines existing views of socialization that individuals’ worldviews and outlooks are forged during their “formative years” and that little change in their political outlooks occurs beyond the middle ages.
