Pity the poor boss in these insubordinate times. “If you let
that sort of thing bother you,” sighs one mid-level company
manager, “it’ll undermine your health.”
What she’s talking about is the cavalier attitude new college
graduates are bringing to their first jobs. Of course, young people
baffling their elders is nothing new. But two forces are clashing
here—leisure and zeal—and zeal isn’t winning.
You’d think the precarious state of the economy would energize
anyone lucky enough to land a job into struggling to keep it. On
the other hand, as Shukan Gendai (June 20) points out, last year’s
crop of college-educated corporate recruits is the first to have
been schooled exclusively under the system of “yutori kyoiku”
(relaxed education) introduced in 1992.
They are, the magazine finds, “relaxed” to a fault, their blasé
unconcern apparently resistant to any self-defense mechanism which
might suggest the need to be productive or else.
It starts with the job interview. “I don’t even get surprised
any more when a candidate cancels an interview at the last minute,”
says one personnel manager. Says another, “We’re a restaurant
chain, so at interviews I’ll ask the candidate, ‘Which of our
restaurants do you like?’ To which the reply might be something
like, ‘I haven’t been to any of them, I saw on the Net that you
were recruiting, so I thought I’d drop by…”
“Why do you want to work for us?” a personnel manager at a
clothing retailer asked a candidate—who replied, “I love theater,
and your office is near the theater district.” Unfortunately, the
manager doesn’t tell us whether he admired the honesty or deplored
the failure to invent a more ingratiating reason.
“Yutori kyoiku” was the Education Ministry’s response to a
growing perception that crushingly heavy school course loads were
deforming children’s personalities. Problems ranged from bullying
to social withdrawal to an inability to think beyond the
regurgitation of memorized facts. The lightening of the curriculum
began in 1992 with the elimination in public schools of Saturday
morning classes.
Have things now gone too far in the other direction?
“‘Yutori kyoiku’ emphasized individuality,” Shukan Gendai hears
from Tadashi Ikegaya, author of a book on how to deal with “yutori
employees.”
“Children of the ‘yutori’ generation are motivated not by pride
but by what interests them. They insist on doing what they want to
do as opposed to what they’re told to do. Furthermore, having grown
up for the most part in prosperous households, they’re not
motivated by money. They seek self-fulfillment. So if it’s not work
they really want to do, they won’t put much effort into it.”
That can be thoroughly exasperating to company superiors steeped
in the virtue of self-sacrifice.
“We were short-handed, so we asked staff from another department
to do some overtime for us,” says a 40-year-old IT company
executive. “One of them was a freshman employee, and the first
thing he does is show me his appointment book: ‘Look, I’m booked up
for two months, I can’t work overtime on such short notice.’ But
what was he ‘booked up’ with? Not company business but parties,
drinking sessions, ‘idol’ concerts!”
That’s relaxed education for you. It teaches you there’s life
outside the workplace. No wonder the idea is currently being
reconsidered.