NEET is an acronym for the government classification for people currently “Not in Employment, Education or Training”. It was first used in the United Kingdom but its use has spread to other countries, including Japan, China and South Korea.

In the United Kingdom, the classification comprises people aged between 16 and 18 (some 16 year olds are still of compulsory school age). In Japan, the classification comprises people aged between 15 and 34 who are unemployed, unmarried, not enrolled in school or engaged in housewoiic, and not seeking work or the technical training needed for work. The 1<NEET group” is not a uniform set of individuals but consists of those who will be NEET for a short time while essentially testing out a variety of opportunities and those who have major and often multiple issues and are at long term risk of remaining disengaged.

The demographic prevalence of NEETs has been indicated in employment statistics. The growth in the NEET population (whose estimated size rose from 480,000 in September 2002 to 520,000 in September 2003, according to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare), has been met with concern by Japanese politicians, due to the potential impact it would have on the Japanese economy. Other surveys by the Japanese government in 2002 present a much larger figure of 850,000 people who can be classified as NEET in the Japanese population, of which 60 percent is constituted by twenty-five to thirty-four year-olds.

Unlike most Western European countries, Japan's unemployment benefit terminates automatically after three to six months. Hence NEET in Jq>an are entirely financed by their parents. The problem is attributed entirely to the individual's social wtthdraml as well as the middle class parents* willingness to support this. This form of social withdrawal is linked to the hikiko-mori phenomenon. This phenomenon is seen as a symptom of Japanese working culture which some regard as unduly oppressive with routine demands for overtime and personal sacrifice, in extreme cases resulting in death due to overwork. NEETs, hikikomori or freeters may belong to a proportion of the younger generation who are unwilling to or incapable of putting up with the values imposed upon them by older generations and totalitarian society.

In Japan, NEETs are those who have rejected the accepted social model of adulthood in seeking full-time employment after graduation or further training through the governmental Hello Work schemes to obtain marketable job skills. Some experts state that this issue is due to the extended economic stagnation during the 1990s, which led to high unemployment amongst young people, 2.13 million by some estimates, reflected in a change in status of freeters, who were nominally employed, into NEETs.

NEET is distinct from freeter, the classification for those who continually move between low-wage jobs. Both are seen as a reaction by Japanese youth against the more traditional career path of salary man. The development of freeters and NEETs in Japan shows that the system of lifetime employment has disintegrated in the face of economic pressures together with globalization, where individuals are expected to innovate and communicate across cultures, and where a defined employee role may not exist. The availability of life-long employment in a single company has become increasingly untenable for both corporations and individuals.

Professor Michiko Miyamoto describes the situation as a: “breakdown of the social framework forged in an industrial society, by which young people become adults.”