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The story
An article describing today’s young people — who quit the moment they’re called out for a mistake at a part-time job, and get irritated at being corrected even when they’re clearly at fault — sparked a wave of reaction on 5ch. Behind it lies a generation raised with almost no experience of being scolded, and the question of whether “praise-based parenting and education” has actually done anything to boost their self-esteem. In the thread, posters from the brutal Employment Ice Age generation called it plain self-indulgence, while others firmly defended those who quit, arguing the real problem lies with companies’ treatment of workers and their management style — turning it into a conflict that resists any simple generational explanation.
Published 9/6 (Sun), 7:31 AM
with online
“I got yelled at for a mistake at my part-time job, so I’m quitting.” “Even when I’m the one in the wrong, being called out on it just annoys me.” These days, more young people are growing up at school and at home with almost no experience of being scolded. To raise the self-esteem of Japanese youth — said to be lower than that of their Western counterparts — many have championed “praise-based parenting and education.” But does it actually raise self-esteem at all? This piece is excerpted and edited from the book “Does Self-Esteem Have to Be High?” (Chikuma Shobo), digging into why praise alone doesn’t necessarily build self-esteem.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
Anyone who gets angry at someone who's doing them a favor by working for them is an idiot.
Just let a guy like that quit.
What are you even working for?
Isn't it to get paid?
That logic would fly if this were volunteer work, but if you're working for a paycheck, that attitude is straight-up kindergarten stuff!
This is exactly what today's youth are like.
It's not "let them quit" — it's "you quit, dumbass."
You messed up and got scolded for it, so why are you the one trying to stick around?
True…
If anything, maybe they learned by watching the generation above them.
The Ice Age generation is the sacrificed generation.
They'll probably even get blamed for today's shrinking youth population — told it's because that generation didn't have kids.
Today's kids are the children of the people who survived that era, so they'll be fine.
They just need to build up resilience little by little.
The ones who died by suicide were middle-aged and older people at the time.
How about actually remembering the news correctly?
The people who died by suicide during the Ice Age weren't the Ice Age generation itself.
Life itself was actually harsher in the postwar years or during the era of rapid economic growth, yet somehow people talk as if this were the most hard-done-by generation in Japanese history. Why is that?
Didn't you finish compulsory education?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DegMTktHLY
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UTjduC0F7Yw/sddefault.jpg
Everyone uses this as their reference.
"There are plenty more where you came from — don't bother coming in tomorrow." That was actually true back then because there were just so many kids being born.
Even top-tier career-track full-time employees could be swapped out in an instant if the company didn't like them, and for part-timers or factory workers the supply was basically endless.
In the Showa era there were a lot of people, but demand for labor was also high.
Companies fought over high school graduates, calling them "golden eggs."
My old man said that's why finding a job was easy back then.
It was different back when full-time, lifetime employment was the default, though.
The problem started once that employment system got wrecked.
These days there are foreign workers to fill that role.
Sorry.
Seriously, this exactly.
With Gen Z, whenever they're corrected or given guidance, an excuse is always the first thing out of their mouth.
"I'm sorry," "thank you" — those words just never come out.
Most of the time, this stuff happens in the first place because of how the company does things.
Blaming everything on frontline workers and never fixing anything is on management — the ones who quit are the ones in the right.
The workplace needs to change its ways first.
They're stuck in blame-everyone-else mode and never once think they might be at fault, so the idea of apologizing just doesn't occur to them.
They'll blame the company for everything, quit, quit, quit, trash their own work history, and once they can't get hired anywhere, they'll probably start whining that society is the problem.
In a way, it's almost sociopathic.
And if you're not at fault?
No, that's not right. It's precisely because people put up with terrible ("black," i.e. exploitative) workplaces for so long — scolding subordinates while ignoring how bad the company's own methods are is itself blame-everyone-else thinking.
If the company's ways never change, people will keep quitting one after another and only the low-quality ones will be left.
Sounds like you've been pretty thoroughly brainwashed by the older generation's way of doing things.
I actually think it's the opposite — it's just a job, not a prison sentence for some crime, and it's not like you've been sold off to work as collateral for a debt.
As long as you're getting paid for it, you're just expected to do what you're supposed to do.
You know, it's funny — like with taxes, it's always the people who barely pay anything who talk the loudest about it. And the cheapest companies, with the worst pay and conditions, always seem to have more bosses like that.
No idea why.
Still, just complaining about the company's or society's rules without ever actually doing anything about it is pretty questionable too.
At the government-affiliated financial institution where I work, there's a rank-and-file Ice Age generation employee who shows up, sits down and goofs off all day, screams at customers, screams at his boss, and then once quitting time hits, files for three hours of overtime pay and goes right back to goofing off — and he's pulling in 11 million yen a year (roughly $75,000) doing that. If I showed people that reality, a lot of folks in this thread would probably lose their minds.
This isn't a generational issue.
I think it comes down to individual character.
So judging people by labels like Ice Age, Baby Boomer, Yutori (the "relaxed education" generation), or Gen Z is idiotic.
The reporter writing this article is an idiot too.
Back in the bubble era, there was a real problem with people collecting all the job-offer perks and then bailing without ever showing up. Honestly, the Bubble generation had the worst work ethic of all.
"Right now, I feel like I'm winning." — September 2004
https://images.clubt.jp/thumbs/10947/230248/1.jpg?v=1685383876.893816
The Ice Age generation is the one that got exploited the hardest, after all.
Giving up days off and pulling unpaid "service overtime" was just normal, using paid leave was obviously out of the question, and this was the generation where the "manager in title only" scandal (staff labeled as managers just to dodge overtime pay) became a real issue.
Staffing agencies tacked on fees under all kinds of pretexts (remember Goodwill, which later went bankrupt after that became a scandal?), and bosses didn't give reasonable guidance — they just screamed and browbeat people.
The labor people put in was clearly not matched by what they got paid.
No, that's not right.
Of course nobody's going to try hard at a minimum-wage job.
Background and key points of this discussion
When people talk about young Japanese lacking experience of being scolded, “praise-based education” often comes up as the culprit — an approach that spread as a countermeasure to Japanese children’s self-esteem being seen as low by international comparison. Meanwhile, in the thread, a post claiming “30,000 people a year died by suicide” during the Ice Age generation era was corrected by other posters, who pointed out that this figure referred to middle-aged and older people at the time, not the Ice Age generation itself — a distinction worth keeping straight, since it’s easy to conflate when discussing generational arguments. The debate largely split into two camps: those who see the lack of tolerance for being scolded as simple self-indulgence, and those who see the real problem in working conditions and how workplaces handle guidance, making quitting a legitimate response — a picture that goes beyond a simple generational divide. Among Ice Age generation posters, there were also notable reactions drawing parallels to their own experience of enduring hardship without ever landing full-time employment.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “uƒoƒCƒg‚Å’ˆÓ‚³‚ꂽ‚¾‚¯‚ÅŽ«‚ß‚écv‹}‘‚·‚ég“{‚ç‚ꊵ‚ê‚Ä‚¢‚È‚¢hŽáŽÒ‚½‚¿Bu‚Ù‚ß‚éˆçŽ™v‚ª— –Ú‚Éo‚éŽc“‚È——R š7 [‚®‚êš].”
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