This workshop addressed a set of terms whose interrelations are frequently misunderstood.
When politics experiences something new (and often undesirable), young people and precarious living conditions are often blamed as the cause. A typical example is the rise of the far-right Sanseito in Japan’s 2025 Upper House election, in which media emphasized internet-savvy youth and lower-middle strata facing precarity as the party’s support base.
However, empirical research on these phenomena questions the validity of such popular beliefs. In this workshop, social scientists conducting empirical studies of Japan examine the relationship between two of the three key terms—youth, precarity, and political engagement. Concrete topics of study cover various aspects of Japanese society “in crisis,” as indicated by the theme of each presentation: political ideology and behavior of the self-employed; activism of the female precariat; the relationship between school-to-work transition and the wellbeing of young people; the gap between objective and subjective conditions of youth precarity; social inequality and populism; the class basis of left-wing populism; and the ideological similarity and dissimilarity of supporters of traditional left-wing parties and the left-wing populist party. These presentations examined common misconceptions about youth, precariousness, and political engagement and provide an accurate understanding of the state of the art
