Last week, a 25-year-old University of Tokyo graduate was arrested for allegedly posting death threats on his blog. The police say that the man, who has been unemployed since graduating from Japan's most prestigious university, had written that he would kill members of the education ministry for misleading him about "reality," suggesting that he believed all his hard study had amounted to nothing.
It's tempting to speculate that the man's threats were a kind of copycat gesture following the murder of a former health ministry official and his wife several weeks ago, which may explain why the arrest was barely covered. The press inevitably takes the blame when copycat crimes occur, since such crimes are seen to be a result of sensational coverage. But what shocks most people when they hear the story is not the nature of the threats or their target, but rather the news that the young man who allegedly made them graduated from the University of Tokyo and remains unemployed. The reader wants to know more. Did he not receive any job offers, or did he refuse all the job offers he received? On the Internet there is some talk that the suspect studied law and failed to pass the bar examination. Still, the idea of a University of Tokyo graduate not advancing to some elite corporation or career-track government job contradicts everything the Japanese educational system stands for.
The incident was not mentioned in a Nov. 29 Asahi Shimbun editorial about naitei — the system of promising students jobs before they graduate from high school or college — but it could have been. The editorial reported that 331 final-year students who had been promised jobs by companies when they graduated have since received notices that those companies were withdrawing their offers. Asahi deplored the action, stating that such promises are contracts. The situation indicates the seriousness of the current economic downturn, but the Asahi sees it more as a sign of the breakdown of a larger social order. "These students feel betrayed by society just as they are taking their first steps as shakaijin," the editorial says.