KENGO KYOGOKU borrows about 122,000 yen (US$1,035) per month in addition to a scholarship and a part-time job, because his mother can’t afford to pay his college fees at the prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo.

    “The amount is huge,” said Kyogoku, a sophomore of communications and computer engineering. “I get depressed when I think about it. I wonder if I would have to pay it all back forever. But I have no choice.”

    Kyogoku is becoming the norm rather than the exception in Japan, where more than half of college students now need financial aid. Loans were rare in the past as most students came from affluent middle-class families who could afford the fees. Today’s parents inherited the legacy of Japan’s long economic ice-age, with fewer family-wage jobs and lower savings, fueling a sense of generational inequality.

    While Japan is nowhere near the level of the United States — students there owe some US$1.3 trillion in total, compared with about US$76 billion in Japan — the rise of college loans is a triple blow for the country.

    It puts a bigger financial strain on the shrinking younger generation who already have to shoulder a bigger share of the tax and welfare burden. It dissuades poorer students, who worry that they won’t get the jobs needed to be able to repay the loan. And it increases the strain on a deeply indebted government to boost scholarships to make education affordable.

    “In Japan, I feel more pain and more despair among young people,” said Matthew Goodman, a senior adviser for Asian economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “You have fewer and fewer young people. You need to make the ones who are there more confident, optimistic and productive.”

    Prime Minister Shinzo Abe set aside 7 billion yen in the budget Thursday to launch government scholarships in the year starting in April 2017 in an effort to make higher education affordable.

    “Family economic conditions shouldn’t dictate children’s future,” Abe said in October. “If everyone supports a child with scholarships and the child works hard to become a tax payer in the future, that’s an investment for the future indeed.”

    But, as with most administrations in Japan, the lion’s share of social spending still goes to the older generation who have the votes and influence to unseat politicians. People 75 and over outnumber children aged 14 and younger, and the trend is forecast to accelerate. By 2035, the older group will make up 20 percent of the population while only 10 percent will be under 15, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

    Japan’s education system was a pillar of its post-war economic ascent, providing the country’s industries with skilled workers who helped companies like Sony Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp. develop world-beating technology and production systems. Between 1960 and 1980 the proportion of 18-year-olds going on to college jumped to 37 percent from 10 percent, according to the education ministry.

    Today, roughly 80 percent pursue some form of higher education and a college degree no longer guarantees full-time employment with one of the big job-for-life corporations that were the backbone of the economy.

    On top of his loan and a 400,000 yen scholarship from the university, Kyogoku, who lives with his single-parent mother, works at a karaoke shop to cover his expenses and try to save for graduate school. “I’m pessimistic about the Japanese economy,” he said. (SD-Agencies)