The problem is Japan has been in a deflationary environment for so long that they've forgotten how to bump up a price and turned into a nation of misers.
I've witnessed first hand the collective hysteria when an ice cream company raised their prices by 10 yen[0] and also had to put up with coworkers banging on in excitement whenever 7-11 has an Onigiri sale dropping from 110 to 100 yen. Not to mention the queues stretching around the block when Yoshinoya cuts a buck and a half off their beef bowls.
My anecdotal evidence, based on looking in shop windows, is there's plenty of part time (arubaito) jobs on offer; the problem is young people are too smart to take them up on their pitiful 700 yen per hour offers, which in Tokyo barely cover your transport and lunch costs. And yet the businesses will continue to weep and wail and gnash their teeth because they can't find anyone. It's not rocket science.
It's still pretty silly, considering the absolute value of the savings.
My personal favorite along these lines is the way that a single building might have 2-3 floors of the same kind of restaurant (say, yakitori), but the one place that is 5 yen cheaper per item will have a line out the door, while the others are half-empty.
Is this a cultural thing? I've never been to Japan so I'm kind of flying blind here but I'd assign that 5 yen as a convenience cost and happily pay that price to avoid the long line. I have a hard time thinking the Japanese people place no value on their time whatsoever...
> There's a large population of chinese students in Japan who are very happy to work at such rates.
> which in Tokyo barely cover your transport and lunch costs
Is this another of those things where paying a person an non-livable wage is going to be construed as a Good Thing™? How about we raise the prices so the people serving us the food can, you know, live?
Raising prices destroys demand. It's not immediately clear that 5 well employed people and 5 unemployed people are preferably to 10 poorly employed people.
If the 5 who would be unemployed have some superior alternative, why aren't they doing it already? Or would you say they should be forcibly unemployed to combat their laziness in looking for better work (which you apparently think exists)?
Business that make their money by exploiting people should not exist, because they create the illusion illustrated here: that somehow earning less money than is livable is better than earning none at all. If you don't have enough money to pay your rent and eat, what is the point exactly? You're still screwed, it's just going to take slightly longer.
And from this we then go the side hustles and the app workers and all the rest of the stuff that let us pretend someone working 120 hours a week for pennies is "doing good."
>If you don't have enough money to pay your rent and eat, what is the point exactly? You're still screwed
If this were true, why would people in bad jobs continue to show up for work?
Okay, you've identified that shifting people from precarious existence to outright starvation and homelessness will make others more aware of their plight. How will that help, exactly? Are they going to somehow turn around public opinion on the welfare state? Start a Communist Revolution? Because it seems like they will just be worse off, and we will be more aware, and nothing else will happen.
train is extremely cheap in tokyo and eating is cheap as well. with one hour of this kind of work you can pay for both and you just dont work one hour so the rest is profit.
> The problem is Japan has been in a deflationary environment for so long that they've forgotten how to bump up a price and turned into a nation of misers.
My understanding is that the blame for this lies squarely with the Bank of Japan. The system was much more stable under the Finance Ministry.
I've witnessed first hand the collective hysteria when an ice cream company raised their prices by 10 yen[0] and also had to put up with coworkers banging on in excitement whenever 7-11 has an Onigiri sale dropping from 110 to 100 yen. Not to mention the queues stretching around the block when Yoshinoya cuts a buck and a half off their beef bowls.
My anecdotal evidence, based on looking in shop windows, is there's plenty of part time (arubaito) jobs on offer; the problem is young people are too smart to take them up on their pitiful 700 yen per hour offers, which in Tokyo barely cover your transport and lunch costs. And yet the businesses will continue to weep and wail and gnash their teeth because they can't find anyone. It's not rocket science.
[0] https://qz.com/656080/a-japanese-ice-cream-maker-deeply-apol...