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Why_Living_in_Japan_is_Actually_Awful.....
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00:00Around the western world, no other country is idolized more than Japan, but for the people
00:04actually living there, the picture looks very different. In 2025, a global survey on well-being
00:10revealed just 13% of Japanese respondents were happy with their life, the lowest on record.
00:16This has given rise to a phenomenon known as johatsu, literally evaporated people,
00:22where tens of thousands of people just disappear from their families and jobs,
00:26often driven by debt, family pressures, or even overwhelming work culture.
00:31Beyond just making people unhappy, these trends are at the heart of a phenomenon which is quietly
00:36hollowing out the country. 2025 marked a record, with the number of deaths exceeding the number
00:42of births, a first since the 1800s, and Japan is set to lose nearly 30% of its population by
00:492070.
00:50The government has desperately tried to fix this, from offering baby bonuses to childcare subsidies,
00:55but at least as of yet, none of this seems to be working. The truth is that this collapse is
01:00the
01:01result of a pressure buried much deeper. A society that places intense need on individuals to succeed,
01:07all with an economy that has remained largely stagnant for over three decades,
01:12leaving fewer and fewer people able to meet those expectations. So increasingly,
01:17people are choosing to opt out of life altogether. This is how living in Japan became awful.
01:23Looking at Japan today, and you wouldn't be mistaken for assuming that it was one of the
01:27most advanced societies in the world, at least on the surface. It's a country of hyper-efficient
01:33cities, world-leading rail infrastructure, and robots that now quietly handle work that humans once
01:38did. At the same time, it's a society which was remarkably disjointed. Over 38% of households
01:44are made up of just a single person, making Japan one of the most isolated countries in the world.
01:50Things have become so severe that in 2021, the government went as far as creating an entire
01:55ministry dedicated to tackling loneliness and social isolation. Many Western observers put this
02:01simply down to the philosophy of Confucianism, a philosophy that places heavy emphasis on respecting
02:07authority and maintaining harmony, often at the expense of emotional openness. Over time,
02:13that can create strong pressure to conform and keep personal struggles private,
02:16leading to an increasingly isolated society. But while it would be easy to point to deep-rooted
02:22cultural values alone, the truth is that there's actually a lot more going on here.
02:26Over the past 80 years, the country has changed more than you might expect,
02:31going from one of the poorest nations in the world to one of the richest. But what began as a
02:35purely
02:36economic fix ended up reshaping nearly every part of Japanese life, creating enormous prosperity on
02:42paper, but quietly transforming Japanese society in the process. At the start of the 1950s, the country
02:48was in a dire strait. After the Second World War, average incomes collapsed by nearly 50% to the
02:55equivalent of just $2,000 a year today, less than the average incomes in Syria. But rather than locking
03:01the country into permanent decline, this collapse ended up setting the stage for one of the most remarkable
03:07economic transformations in history. Between the early 1950s and the early 1990s, average incomes
03:13exploded, growing by more than 10 times. That came hand in hand with a radical political transformation.
03:20In the space of a single generation, Japan moved away from an authoritarian wartime state,
03:25where people were frequently arrested for simply criticizing the government, to effectively a modern
03:30liberal democracy. On paper, it had almost everything needed to match or even outperform the world's
03:36most successful countries. And in a lot of ways, it was. By the start of the 1990s, Japan actually
03:42had a higher life expectancy than the US and the UK, and some of the highest levels of education
03:47attainment in the developed world. But while on most metrics, Japan was starting to look like a fully
03:52developed, rich country, there was one area where it clearly wasn't. Working hours. Despite what you
03:58might expect, typically as countries get richer, people end up gradually working less and less.
04:03As economies shift from farms to factories to offices, it takes less time to produce the same
04:08amount of economic value. That means workers can earn roughly the same income as before,
04:13while spending fewer hours at work, a pattern we've seen play out across most developed countries over
04:18the past century. But in Japan, this simply never happened, at least not to the same extent.
04:24By the 1990s, people were still working around double the amount in the US, despite the fact that by this
04:29point, it was already one of the most advanced and productive economies in the world. Because firms
04:34demanded near loyalty, with workers often staying at one company for their entire life, staying in the
04:39office until 8 or 9pm was routine, even when there wasn't actually any work to do. That culture gave rise
04:46to a phenomenon known as kuroshi, literally death from overwork. By the late 80s and 1990s, the Japanese
04:53government was officially recognising cases of fatal heart attacks, strokes and suicides caused by
04:59excessive working hours, with thousands of compensation claims being filed each year. But more than just
05:05creating a few tragic edge cases, such an intense work culture ended up fundamentally reshaping how
05:11Japanese society functioned. So much time was required to be spent at work that people increasingly
05:16began to sacrifice friendships and even relationships for it. Since the start of the country's economic boom,
05:22marriage rates have rapidly declined, falling by over 50% in just a couple of generations.
05:28Today, over 38% of households now consist of a single person, and surveys consistently find Japan
05:34ranking near the top for reported social isolation. As early as the 1980s, the government demographic
05:41surveys and population white papers were already warning about falling marriage rates and a growing
05:46share of people delaying or avoiding marriage altogether. But the thing is, at the time,
05:52most people thought that these problems were just transitional. As the country grew richer and
05:56wages rose, people would eventually start working less, leaving more time for life outside of work.
06:02But then, in another twist that nobody really could have predicted, the opportunity for that
06:07adjustment vanished almost overnight. On October 20th, 1987, in the wake of the global Black Monday crash,
06:15Japan's stock market fell by nearly 15% in a single day, the largest one-day decline in history.
06:21Over the next few days, the Nikkei would continue to slide, eventually losing around 60% of its value
06:28from its peak, a collapse more than twice as severe as the US stock market's loss after the 2008 financial
06:34crash. It was the worst economic shock Japan had seen in generations, and one the government
06:40quickly discovered it had little ability to reverse. The boom of the previous decade had pulled in huge
06:46volumes of foreign capital, pushing asset prices to extreme levels. By the late 1980s, the land beneath
06:53Tokyo's Imperial Palace was famously estimated to be worth more than all the real estate in California
06:59combined. Asset prices were no longer tied to rents or profits, but to the assumption that someone else
07:05would always pay more. Realising the danger, the central bank finally stepped in, raising interest
07:10rates in an attempt to slow borrowing and cool the markets. But by that point, the economy was
07:15extremely dependent on cheap credit, and when that disappeared, the system quickly fell apart.
07:21Within a few years of the interest rate hike, commercial land prices fell by more than 80%, dragging
07:27the wider economy down with them. Of course, a financial crisis driven by investors getting over-excited
07:33about asset prices isn't exactly new. But in the Japanese case, this crash was so disastrous
07:39that the country has never really recovered. What followed became known as Japan's lost decades,
07:45a period in which the economy was basically stagnant for entire generations. In the decades leading up to
07:50the crisis, wages were rising by more than 10% every year. But since then, that rate has slowed closer
07:57to
07:572%. That might not sound like the worst thing in the world. The country by this point was still
08:02one of the richest in the world, even if it wasn't experiencing as much economic growth by that
08:07point. People still had access to modern healthcare, safe cities, high-quality infrastructure, and living
08:13standards that seemed unimaginable just a few generations earlier. But the thing is, the fact that
08:18people are better off in absolute terms can be almost irrelevant. What matters just as much, if not more,
08:24is whether life feels like it's getting better. Here is a list of countries ranked by how much they
08:29expect their life quality to have improved in 5 years' time. Unsurprisingly, the countries with
08:34the fastest rates of economic growth ā India, Mexico, and Indonesia ā all have the highest rates.
08:41Intuitively, that makes a lot of sense. When economic growth has been strong in the past,
08:45people likely expect it to continue into the future, so they'll expect their lives to continue
08:50to improve. But what is a lot more surprising is that the fact that the countries which people expect
08:55their lives to improve also tend to be the ones who rate their current life quality the highest.
09:00Indian, Indonesia, and Mexico all come out on top again. That's all despite the fact that average
09:06income in all of these countries are less than half of that in Japan or France. The point is,
09:11when it comes to how happy people are, whether they believe their lives are going to improve in
09:15the future often matters far more than how rich they are today. And for Japan, that's a serious
09:21problem. For nearly three decades, living standards have been basically flat. So it's not exactly
09:26surprising that people don't expect their lives to suddenly start getting better. In some ways,
09:31the country may be suffering from its earlier success. After decades of extraordinarily rapid
09:36growth, it industrialized, urbanized, and caught up with the world's richest economies so quickly
09:41that there was very little obvious room left to keep expanding at the same pace. And that slowdown in
09:47economic growth has left people increasingly dissatisfied with their lives. This is all
09:52only made worse by the fact that Japan remained locked into societal norms built for a high growth
09:57era. Extremely long working hours, rigid career paths, and delayed personal lives, even after the
10:04economic growth needed to justify those sacrifices has disappeared. Given this, it might be tempting to
10:09conclude that lower reported happiness in Japan is simply a product of a failing economic model. And while
10:15all of this certainly has played a role, it misses a key detail, that a huge chunk of Japan's population
10:21isn't even in the workforce at all. The over 55 age group now makes up over a third of the
10:27country's
10:27population. And despite what you might expect, they also happen to be one of the least happy age groups
10:32in the country, with self-reported life satisfaction declining steadily from teenage years through to late
10:38middle age. This is the complete opposite of what we see happening in the United States, where people
10:44tend to become more satisfied with their lives as they get older. At first glance, this seems like
10:49a strange contradiction. Japan has one of the best healthcare systems in the world, a relatively
10:53generous pension framework, and of course, old people are largely insulated from the country's
10:59intense work culture. On paper, there doesn't seem much to be unhappy about. And to be fair, for about
11:05half the population, this picture just about holds true. When looking at happiness ratings of Japanese men
11:11over time, we find a similar effect to that in the US. As they get older, they tend to get
11:15happier.
11:16But when looking at women, the exact opposite happens. As they get older, they tend to become
11:21a lot more unsatisfied with their lives, which is why older people on average seem less happy.
11:27The reason for this isn't exactly surprising. It has one of the highest gender pay gaps in the developed
11:32world, nearly double that of the UK. At the same time, the country consistently ranks near the bottom of
11:37rich economies for female representation at the top of companies and political leadership roles.
11:43What that means is that in practice, as people move later into their careers, the gap between men
11:48and women only grows wider. On top of that, societal expectations around family roles remain heavily
11:54gendered. Women are far more likely to take on unpaid caregiving responsibilities, first for children
11:59and later for elderly parents or spouses, often stepping back from work entirely as a result.
12:05So while it's relatively common for men to continue working into their 60s and even 70s,
12:10for many women, that option simply isn't available. All of this creates a society in which aging as a
12:15woman is particularly difficult, and this is only becoming more important as the number of older
12:21women in Japan continues to rise rapidly. Its average age has risen by nearly a decade since the year
12:262000, a trend which is only set to continue, and this creates a serious challenge. Sustained economic
12:33growth is typically justified on the grounds that it improves living standards. But in Japan's case,
12:38rising wealth hasn't done that at all, and despite being one of the most advanced societies in the
12:42world, nobody really knows what to do to fix it. What seems to matter far more than economics are the
12:47social structures that determine how people experience that prosperity. Rigid work norms,
12:52long-standing gender inequality, and heavily prescribed life roles place uneven burdens on different
12:58groups, particularly women and the elderly, in ways that compound over time. It's a crucial reminder
13:03that becoming rich doesn't automatically translate into a society where people feel their lives are
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