Institutionalized Financialization and Youth Investment: Generational Insecurity in Japan

• In Event: Economic Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 5: Financialization, Wealth, and Inequality

Abstract

This paper examines how financialization interacts with generational insecurity in a coordinated market economy, focusing on youth investment practices in Japan. While financialization is often associated with liberal market economies, less attention has been paid to how state institutions mediate market participation in coordinated systems. The analysis is based primarily on in-depth semi-structured interviews with Japanese Generation Z investors, complemented by policy analysis and market statistics from the Japan Exchange Group and the Financial Services Agency. The interviews explore how young individuals interpret employment instability, wage stagnation, and future insecurity, and how these perceptions shape their entry into financial markets. Contrary to narratives of anti-institutional sentiment found in some liberal market contexts, Japanese youth do not frame investing as resistance to financial elites. Instead, respondents emphasize long-term diversified index strategies and disciplined accumulation. State-led initiatives, most notably the expanded New NISA program, play a central role in legitimizing and normalizing retail participation. Financial literacy programs and digital brokerage platforms further lower symbolic and practical barriers to entry. The findings suggest that financialization in Japan takes an institutionalized and state-guided form. Youth investment practices emerge not from market radicalism but from adaptive responses to generational insecurity within a coordinated capitalist framework. By foregrounding actors’ interpretations of insecurity and institutional mediation, this study contributes to economic sociology debates on financialization, state-market relations, and generational inequality in advanced capitalist democracies.

Author

• Mayumi Tabata