PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY DENNIS WONG

The Class of '89. Clockwise from left: Yukari Yui, Keisaku Sato, Masao Noda and Atsushi Kanamaru

Can the Class of '89 Fix Japan?
	For graduates of Japan's top universities, the future never looked sweeter than it did in 1989. The economy was booming and success seemed inevitable. Then Japan fell apart. But this watershed generation might have what it takes to save the nation
	By Andrew Marshall | Tokyo

Posted Monday, June 9, 2003; 22:50 HKT
If you were Manabu Sakai and it was March 1989, then you were a very lucky man indeed. Imagine... You are 23 years old. It is spring. The cherry blossoms are out, drizzling with pink the Elysian campus of Tokyo University, better known as Todai. You have just graduated in law, which means that after three years of drinking, partying, tennis and more drinking—the study workload at Todai is famously untaxing—you now possess the most bankable degree from the most prestigious university in the second wealthiest nation on the planet. With corporate headhunters trampling one another to hire you, and with the stock market soaring to stratospheric highs, unemployment is not an option. It's not even a concept. Beyond the 200-year-old Red Gate, Todai's hallowed entrance, awaits the rest of the earth—and you, as one of your nation's best and brightest, are about to inherit it. "The country was wealthy. Next year it would be wealthier," recalls Sakai, now 37. "We took it all for granted."

Sakai and fellow members of the class of '89 had no inkling of what would happen next. On Dec. 29 that year, the Nikkei peaked at 38,916 points, having doubled in only three years. Then it began to fall, and then to plummet. The bubble had burst, just as the tumultuous '90s were beginning—the decade when the economy stalled, Kobe crumbled, the subways were gassed, and Japanese were finally forced to reckon the high social cost of their economic miracle. And Sakai? He would not become a rich corporate lawyer, a career his blue-chip degree essentially guaranteed in good times or bad. He first joined the Matsushita Institute of Government and Management—an élite political training ground—then dropped out to spend four years at a remote temple in Kumamoto, meditating upon his life, what had gone wrong with his country and how he could help put it right. Older and wiser, he now works as a political aide in Tokyo, and soon plans to run for public office, perhaps for a seat in parliament. "Our fathers' generation was always taught that poverty was bad and only wealth would make us happy," he says. "That's why they worked so hard. But now we're learning that chasing money doesn't make us happy. Something is missing. The last decade has encouraged us to search for it."

Sakai's postgraduate career might seem unorthodox, but in many ways it embodies the protean, questing nature of the class of '89, a generation forced to reinvent itself even as long-cherished certainties—lifetime employment, a booming economy, crime-free streets and stalwart political leadership—crumbled to dust. As Time's study reveals, the best and brightest of this watershed class not only survived one of Japan's worst and darkest decades; they adapted and prospered. Turbulent times have molded a demi-generation of Japanese who are radically different from their elders and juniors. They are neither driven by fear of poverty, as were their work-till-you-drop parents, nor blinkered by what they perceive as the default pessimism of today's youth. They pride themselves on being more open-minded, energetic, optimistic and resourceful—the kind of qualities Japan so desperately needs if it is to overcome its current malaise.

"This is a generation that is motivated by the carrot rather than the stick," says Takayo Yamamoto, research director of the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living. "Because they are knowledgeable about the good times and bad, because they know a pay cut isn't a life-and-death issue. They possess more breadth. They are very adaptive." They are, in short, Japan's great hope.

If the Eighty-Niners are optimistic, it is partly because they were raised in optimistic times. They were born in the '60s, a decade in which the Tokyo Olympics signaled Japan's postwar resurgence, and grew up in a nation burgeoning in pride, prosperity and global prominence. By the time they entered university, few corners of the planet remained untouched by their nation's products or unmoved by its example.

On graduating, they seemed poised to lead Japan into a new and dazzling imperial era, which dawned with the death in 1989 of Emperor Hirohito, the last potent symbol of old Japan.

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