The American media keeps wondering whether or not the United States will have to endure a "lost decade" of sluggish growth and stagnant employment like the one Japan suffered through after the real-estate bubble burst in the early 1990s. It seems unlikely. The American economy is dynamic while Japan's has always been passive and reactive. Nevertheless, the so-called American dream is likely a thing of the past. The gap between the rich and everyone else is growing by the minute, and in that sense Japan is an appropriate example.

That may sound strange since Japanese people have always maintained that they are a uniformly middle class society. The poor, of course, exist, but traditionally they were hidden away; and it was considered bad form for the rich to flaunt their wealth. The bubble era and the subsequent lost decade brought class distinctions out into the open. Rich people are now profiled on variety shows while the growing ranks of people living on the margins have become the subjects of searching, portentous NHK documentaries. In between, the middle class is wondering what happened to its bright future.

This idea provides the real-life ballast for Fuji TV's drama series "Freeter, Ie wo Kau" ("A Part-time Worker Buys a House"; Tues., 9 p.m.), which is based on a novel by Hiro Arikawa. Focusing on Seiji Take (Kazunari Ninomiya), a recent college graduate who heedlessly quits his full-time office job after only three months, the story taps into widespread anxiety over the current employment situation but the dramatic component has less to do with economic hardship than with the fragile bonds that hold a family together.