I saw the following in a recent article in the Economist magazine.

"There are some signs that Britain is already becoming a little Japanese—and not just because it is now popular to watch women in bikinis eating live cockroaches on prime-time television. For example, the trend for children to live at home with their parents has accelerated. In Japan half of those between 20 and 34 are fridge raiders; in Britain the proportion has hit one in three for men and one in six for women, with an overall increase of 6% this year alone. A supply of people able to work for less than their cost of living gives parsimonious firms a convenient pool of temporary workers. This is how two-tier labour markets, with a group of insiders enjoying job protection and a group of outsiders with none, are born. Undoing the situation can be impossible....."
(Bagehot: The stuck society-Britain has become a country where nothing much is changing (ECONOMIST Dec 8th 2012))

I have to admit that this is the first time I heard this idea: that Japan has widespread 'boomerang' adult children and that this sustains general wage-suppression which entrenches economic under-performance.
There is something intriguing about this explanation though. Are many commentators saying this?

I'm certainly no economist, but I've always heard the cause-and-effect going the other way around: children live at home with their parents *because* wages are low, the cost of living is high, and it's hard to find stable full-time jobs.

People in their twenties certainly don't *enjoy* not having a more private place to bring their boyfriends/girlfriends...

I see what you. The article is ambiguous about the cause-effect thing.

Without reading more specifics, it sounds like anti-not-moving-out-of-home-people propaganda (note the derogatory usage of fridge raider) to me.

That short blurb makes it sound like that people are happily choosing to stay at home to lower their cost of living and accept lower wages when in reality, people are being prevented from moving out because greedy baby boomers who bought cheap investment houses decades ago are charging a fortune in rent, not to mention the hosuing bubble.

If we're going to criticize the youth of today for staying at home then we should equally criticize investment house owning baby boomers who aren't helping the situation.

And what's the women in bikini eating bugs show called? Hopefully AKB48 is in it!

Pretty obvious that low wages, job insecurity and (in relation to that) high rent/house prices keep people at home, not the other way round. If there was enough demand for employees in stable jobs, most people would probably start moving out. No different in Japan or the UK. In fact that the number of 25-34 year old Japanese living with their parents is increasing while housing cost is slowly falling in Japan, even in Tokyo (I know, but it's all relatively to what it was in the 1990s) is already giving away the causality here.