The Graduate

Hideki Hattori is 23 years old, out of college and starting on his own at the worst possible time. He is wearing a navy-blue porkpie hat pulled down to his eyebrows, a plaid shirt by a niche fashion house called Hysteric Glamour, baggy pants, a chain of oversize dice hanging from his waist and silver rings on his fingers. Being a deejay would be kind of cool, he says, but he likes graphic design too. And then he met this salesman who tried to import beetles from Indonesia, and that sounded promising—except all the beetles died while waiting to clear customs. "Maybe I could do that," he says.

It's all unknown, because the way Japanese college kids started life has shifted underneath them like one of Tokyo's earthquakes. This is how it used to work: a year before you were to graduate, the companies would come recruiting. They assigned you to a department. You had a job. Forty years later, you retired.

No more. "I'm a freeta," Hattori explains. That's a new word, referring to people who float from job to job, dabbling in one dead-end, low-skill position after another. It's putting a nice spin on what used to be called loser. That's O.K. with Hattori. It's even cool. Hattori graduated a year ago—March 2000—from Yokohama National University, a prestigious public school. "I never really looked seriously for a job," he says. His parents, both government bureaucrats, pay his rent. "I'm optimistic about my future," he says. "It isn't like I am going to starve."

T.L./Tokyo