Multiple contradictions emerged in the 1990s in the Japanese high school-work transition process. On the one hand, many employers continued to value what I called in Chapter 2 the institutional social capital of schools. They continued to rejuvenate their workplaces by hiring new graduates from the same schools they had traditionally turned to, drawing on the inherent predisposition for camaraderie that they presumed school alumni would feel for one another. Many employers continued to expect and hope that their new hires would stay in the firm for many years. In this way, they were stakeholders in their new employees’ futures.

The institutional social capital students had access to via their attachment to school was translated by employers into institutional social capital and “social glue” among employees. Meanwhile, as I will say more about in this chapter, parents continued to rely on the school as a stakeholder in their adolescents’ futures. Many parents whose adolescents were not proceeding on to higher education viewed high school as the principal institution that would actively guide their teenagers into the next phase of their lives and orient them to the world of work.