Japan's young face an increasingly bleak future

When Prime Minister Shinzo Abe decided last week against walloping Japanese with another tax hike, it was cause for worry not celebration among the country's young.

Despite the government trying everything short of dropping money from helicopters, the economy had slipped into recession. Abe, under pressure to reduce the developed world's heaviest debt burden, raised the sales tax in April. The economy, already fragile after two decades of malaise, shrank for two quarters in a row.

For young Japanese, the recession that unprecedented stimulus couldn't stop marks a crucial moment in their country's herculean effort to halt its decline.

The generation born as Japan's economic bubble burst in the early 1990s will be supporting a vast cohort of retirees and saddled with a national debt of more than a quadrillion yen. They will be making do without the culture of lifetime employment enjoyed by their parents and grandparents. Neighboring China's economy has eclipsed Japan's in size and its tech and industrial companies are increasingly potent rivals.

Mai Yamaguchi, a 29-year-old trading company employee heading into the Shibuya shopping area for an outing with her 4-month-old son, was unimpressed by Abe's decision.

"The pension system is on the verge of bankruptcy," she said. "I think it would have been better to go ahead and raise the tax as planned."

"This is our children's futures," said Yamaguchi, who was just a baby herself when Japan's economy hit its peak in the late 1980s. "Child care, elder care, social welfare are all going to be even bigger burdens for us."