In August, the Japanese government announced it would assist one million members of the so-called "lost generation" -- around 17 million people now aged between their mid-thirties and mid-forties -- with their job search by providing subsidies and commission-based bonuses to private recruiting agencies.
The lost generation entered the workforce in the decade starting from the middle of the 1990s, just as the domestic economy nose-dived when the bubble economy burst. This threw them into a glacial job market, which supplied another name, the "glacier generation" -- from hyogaki sedai, or "ice age" in Japanese.
