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Onuki, a 31-year-old salesman, is headed to the train station to catch the 12:24 a.m. train, the last one of the night, back to his home in Yokohama. The train will quickly fill up with other professional working men.
At about 1:30 a.m., after having made a pit stop at a convenience store to grab a sandwich, Onuki arrives home. When he opens the bedroom door, he accidentally wakes his wife, Yoshiko, who just recently fell asleep after working an 11-hour day. She chides him for making too much noise and he apologizes.
Then, with his food still digesting and his alarm set for 7 a.m., he creeps into bed, ready to do it all again tomorrow.
Over the past two decades, stories like the Onukis' have become commonplace in Japan. Young couples are fighting to make relationships work amid a traditional work culture that expects men to be breadwinners and women to be homemakers. It's a losing battle. Many newlyweds are forced to watch their free time disappear, surrendering everything from the occasional date night to starting a family.
The daily constraints have made for a worrisome trend. Japan has entered a vicious cycle of low fertility and low spending that has led to trillions in lost GDP and a population decline of 1 million people, all within just the past five years. If left unabated, experts forecast severe economic downturn and a breakdown in the fabric of social life.
"Adult diapers have outsold baby diapers in Japan for the last six years."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @01:40AM
It's good to hear that Japanese kids get exposed to the real world. But it isn't enough. 7-8 years ago I was working with a Japanese college student, he wanted to send me an international postal money order for something available in USA. I emailed him my postal address and then he emailed back to confirm because the letter had been returned to him.
After a couple of cycles of this I asked him to send me a scan/photo of his envelope. Turned out that he swapped the addressee and the return address, so he was mailing to himself. No one in his family or grade schooling had shown him how to address an envelope.