Recession and High School Gals

In the entry on Nov 21 I wrote about how the Japanese women were until the bubble economy in the early 90s, but hadn’t gone further yet. Sorry for the delay. I’m continuing with the topic today.

After the bubble burst, the tide of huge economic recession hit the entire country, which is also known as The Lost Decade. The number of suicides increased remarkably never dropping down, and no one was assured of his or her job the next day. University graduates – whom until then, didn’t even have to hunt for jobs – were left jobless and the entire country was just feeling miserable. According to our theory here, women should have lost their energy and social status, and should have chosen to depend on men rather than becoming active themselves –- supposedly.

But the people who were strong during this decade were not men. And they weren’t exactly women, too.

The rulers of The Lost Decade were high school gals.

Certainly, they are women but that is only to say gender-wise, but they were many times viewed as a completely different species when they were most active. That’s how... “interesting” they were.

The teenage years for girls especially, is said to be the phase of life when they become the most sensitive about everything about and around them, so in general high school gals are quite sensitive and self-assertive regardless the social background.
So then, why did these girls during the 90s so powerful as compared to the other generations?
This is only my observation, but I believe that the rapid development in communication means play a huge role in the rise of “joshikosei”.

Experiencing its social debut and fast spread in mid-1990s were the pagers which in Japanese is called pocket bells. It was a HUGE fad among the high school gals since the keenest and assertive beings on earth could communicate with someone some distance away without having their conversations overheard by their family members.

The pager fad played a huge role in spreading information extremely fast. Even without pagers, the speed of information spread among teenage girls is extraordinarily fast in almost any culture. The system of teenage word of mouth information transmission was thus quickly established. This was the beginning of the age where what went big among the teenage girls went big in the society.

With overwhelming energy only the teenage girls could have, the gal generation quickly out-powered the elder females and dominated the Japanese recession as if there was nothing for them to worry about. Of course, many things have gone wrong and there were many negative impact these new social rulers brought to the society, and these points become conspicuous as the cell phones develop and spread even more than the pagers. I also think that the weakened power of grown-ups had to do with the positive and negative sides of this phenomenon.

So this was until about 2002. From then, the economy starts to pick up power again and the mirage-like economy boost comes again, but I will stop here for today.