Japan's economy continues to struggle with weak growth and young workers are having a difficult time finding jobs.  According to the New York Times's Martin Fackler, those young workers who do find jobs are likely to hold so-called "irregular jobs" well into their thirties, with the regular jobs held for older workers.  Fackler:

An aging population is clogging the nation’s economy with the vested interests of older generations, young people and social experts warn, making an already hierarchical society even more rigid and conservative. The result is that Japan is holding back and marginalizing its youth at a time when it actually needs them to help create the new products, companies and industries that a mature economy requires to grow.

So one big casualty of this demographic inequality may very well be entrepreneurship, and Fackler points out that the characteristics of Japan's economic growth in the Twentieth Century--namely, innovation--seem nonexistent today.

While many nations have aging populations, Japan’s demographic crisis is truly dire, with forecasts showing that 40 percent of the population will be 65 and over by 2055. Some of the consequences have been long foreseen, like deflation: as more Japanese retire and live off their savings, they spend less, further depressing Japan’s anemic levels of domestic consumption. But a less anticipated outcome has been the appearance of generational inequalities.

These disparities manifest themselves in many ways. As Mr. Horie discovered, there are corporations that hire all too many young people for low-paying, dead-end jobs — in effect, forcing them to shoulder the costs of preserving cushier jobs for older employees. Others point to an underfinanced pension system so skewed in favor of older Japanese that many younger workers simply refuse to pay; a “silver democracy” that spends far more on the elderly than on education and child care — an issue that is familiar to Americans; and outdated hiring practices that have created a new “lost generation” of disenfranchised youth.

Read In Japan, Young Face Generational Roadblocks here.