On Monday, TV Tokyo's business documentary series "Gaia no Yoake" (The Dawn of Gaia; 10 p.m.) will look at NEET, an acronym coined in England that stands for "not in education, employment or training," and which describes young adults who are neither in school or in the workforce.
According to the government, there are about 850,000 NEETs in Japan. The number is rising every year, and the social strain is serious enough to have prompted the Japanese government to approve an annual budget of 37 billion yen for measures to help young adults get out of the house and into a job.
Some of these measures involve schools that teach young people how to be independent, but they also include seminars for parents of NEETs who don't know how to talk to their children. The program looks at these measures and also explains the business environment that created the problem.