A new term has entered the Japanese lexicon: Oyagacha, which combines the words “oya,” or “parent,” and “gachapon,” those simple vending machines containing plastic capsules, each with a different small toy inside. “Oyagacha” represents the idea that a person cannot choose their parents, just as, when a person puts a coin in the gachapon machine and turns the crank, they can’t choose which toy they get.

Oyagacha is used to explain social phenomena. In a piece written for Asahi Shimbun’s Koron section on Oct. 14, University of Tsukuba sociology professor Takayoshi Doi says an individual’s approach to the wealth gap issue may depend on their age. When talking about opportunity, people from older generations argue that achieving your goals is all about making an effort, while younger generations say that effort doesn’t guarantee anything.

Doi sets the line dividing these two views sometime during the 1990s, when the economy stopped growing appreciably. People who started families before 1990 saw a substantial return on their efforts in terms of education and job promotion. Those who came of age after 1990 entered a world where annual growth never exceeded 2%, so the return on their efforts was relatively small. And yet members of this cohort are constantly told that their material success depends completely on the amount of effort they put into it. Doi says if a child tells their parent they are disappointed because they didn’t win the oyagacha (parent lottery), the parent becomes defensive. What young people really mean by this, however, is that success is a matter of fate, such as being born into a state of material well-being, rather than a matter of one’s talent or ambition.