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The story
A thread titled “Japan is genuinely becoming impoverished” on 5ch’s Newsoku VIP board kicked off with everyday observations: convenience store rice balls now come with less seaweed (nori), and McDonald’s has rolled out a bargain 500-yen combo set. From there the discussion expanded into a clash over whether poverty is a matter of personal responsibility or political failure, a gap between reported wage growth and what people actually feel in their wallets, and even the observation that “it’s always the vulnerable who attack the vulnerable hardest.”
What people said
・Nori is vanishing from convenience store rice balls (too expensive)
・McDonald's rolls out a cut-rate 500-yen set for the broke
support even people who don't even try?
Oh? So you're against welfare (seikatsu hogo)?
Wait, what even counts as "support" here?
The state "supporting" people?
Welfare is for people who did everything they could
but still ran into hard circumstances
It's not a system for people who barely try to lean on
What about people who couldn't try because of a mental illness?
There's no such thing as "a sick heart"
There are diagnosed mental illnesses, sure
If it's not "claim it and you win" or "become it and you win,"
a real mental illness can't be helped
are often vulnerable themselves
The weird thing about this era is that the vulnerable don't even want the vulnerable saved
Yeah, you notice that a lot browsing the internet
Both online and in real life, it's always the vulnerable who attack the vulnerable hardest
The strong tend to be generous
This thread title conveniently ignores the poster's own responsibility to Japanese society
It's basically "you all fix this,"
not "so I'll try harder too"
To me it just reads as stating a fact
If you want to say "so I'll try harder!" why not just say it yourself?
I don't get any sense of you trying harder from your post either
So why don't YOU say "I'll try harder"?
Why would I need to declare that to you specifically?
Creepy
Then what was your post at Re: #84 about?
Whatever, I'll just post however I want
and lots of kids couldn't afford a Famicom
It's kind of like that
I don't know about that era, but by my time there wasn't a family that couldn't afford a PS1 or PS2
Everyone who wanted one just had one, no question
I always thought it was weird in Doraemon when everyone crowds around Suneo just because he bought a new game
Even so, back then there probably wasn't this kind of trend
of complaining about Japanese society as a whole like there is now
Right now it's only held together by sacrificing the small and mid-sized firms that can't keep up with the spring wage talks (shunto)
Even big corporations don't have the strength to keep handing out full pay-raise responses year after year going forward
The last few years have had base pay hikes of like 6%, though
South Korea's economy is doing well, so just move there and naturalize
Abandon a Japan like this
But once even middle-class households end up stuck at that bare-minimum line as the norm
businesses selling stuff people buy just for show won't survive anymore
Articles about Japan's impoverishment or the economy usually argue that both the rich and the poor are growing, i.e., polarization is advancing
That's probably why businesses targeting the wealthy are expanding
High-rise condos, luxury watches, foreign cars — they're all selling like crazy, right?
Businesses selling status-symbol stuff exist even in not-so-rich countries, so no need to worry!
Even if that kind of business vanished, it wouldn't really matter
South Korea seems pretty harsh toward Japanese people though
Why is this even functioning as a conversation
It's kind of scary
"If all you can do is blue-collar work, it's because you didn't study hard enough, and that's on you — tough luck if life is hard or you can't afford kids"
Realistically, unless even blue-collar workers can afford to have kids, the country can't sustain itself, lol
Well, lately there's actually a reversal happening where blue-collar work is becoming more livable
But if the industrial structure is set up so certain jobs simply can't support a living, that's a failure of politics, not the individual's fault
It's scary that we're now in an era where saying "it's the government's fault"
gets you dogpiled
Oh, that comment makes it sound like blue-collar pay is garbage
This is exactly right
But that segment keeps losing jobs to dumping-priced labor like the foreign technical intern trainee program
There are plenty of structural changes in society that can't be chalked up to "personal effort"
→"The economy's improving! My income went up! If you don't feel it, you're just not trying hard enough!"
That kind of logic doesn't hold together
"My income went up!" — you only ever see that line on the internet, honestly
Mine's actually risen three years straight
The only people whose pay isn't rising now work at small or mid-size companies
Looking at real wage growth rates is probably the realistic approach
That, or how starting salaries for new grads have risen, since that tends to make the news
Just citing raw annual income figures — "it went up," "it went down" — isn't great either
but unless someone says something like "it doubled in five years," these internet types never actually specify what point in time they're comparing to or by how much it rose
That sounds like it could end with human rights getting suspended
Who's even saying that?
That looks kind of gross
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Reports of wage increases in recent years have mostly referred to the results of major corporations’ spring wage negotiations (shunto), with base pay hikes of around 5-6% reported one after another since 2024. At the same time, real wages — factoring in small and mid-sized businesses and non-regular employment — struggle to keep pace with rising prices, creating a structure prone to a gap between the numbers and how life actually feels. The thread shows exactly this: the sense that “we’re becoming impoverished” surfaces right alongside observations that “high-rise condos and luxury watches are selling like crazy,” which likely reflects a polarization where spending grows at both the low and high ends while the middle shrinks. The debate over whether this is personal responsibility or political failure is also hard to reduce to a simple either/or, given that structural factors behind the wage gap — such as low-wage labor tied to the Foreign Technical Intern Training Program — can’t be explained by individual effort alone.
※This article is compiled as an excerpt and summary from the 5ch (Newsoku VIP) thread “[Sad News] Japan Is Genuinely, Seriously, No Joke, Becoming ‘Impoverished’…….”
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