As everyone knows, the bursting of the bubble and its various after-effects have increased people's worries about the future and depressed consumer confidence, thus reducing demand and forcing companies to cut their payrolls, thereby adding to the population's anxieties about their future. This vicious circle is now firmly programmed into the Japanese economy, and companies are busy firing people, pushing early retirement programmes, reducing recruitment, redeploying staff, instituting 'flexible' pay schemes, limiting overtime, and swapping full-time personnel for temporary or part-time staff, in fact reducing their workforces wherever possible.

The General Picture

The total waged workforce last December stood at 64.43 million, a year on year drop of 650,000 (1998's monthly average was 65.14 million. The unemployment rate for men is 4.4% (for 1998 it averaged 4.2%) and for women 4.2% (1998, 4.0%). However, the number of people regarded as no longer in the workforce, the majority of whom are women, increased by 750,000 from a year earlier to 40.19 million.

While the December figures seem to be better than November's, government officials admit that the decrease is due to a rise in the number of discouraged workers who have given up looking for work and are therefore not counted as unemployed. They also said that the figures illustrated a trend that always happens at the year's end where job-seekers temporarily stop looking for work.

The manufacturing sector lost 440,000 jobs in 1998, and the construction industry lost 230,000, while service sector jobs also decreased in December by 440,000, the first month of decline since September 1996. In 1998, the number of employers seeking workers fell 15.3%, while the number of job-seekers rose 15.6%

In November, of the 2.9 million people out of work,, 840,000 were heads of households, an increase of 200,000 year on year. By the middle of last year, one in thirty households in Japan had no wage earners.

In an October 1997 survey conducted by the Management and Coordination Agency, of 1.1 million people surveyed, about a quarter of those not working had been seeking work for more than a year. 480,000 people had been unemployed for more than 12 months at the end of February 1997, 20.9% of total unemployment. For those between 15 and 24 years of age, the figure was 18.2%. For those over 65, the figure was 42.9%.The proportion of people leaving their jobs in 1997 rose to 14.9% of the workforce, the highest ratio in 6 years.

Some regions are faring worse economically than others, for example, Hokkaido, Tohoku, Shikoku and Kyushu, and joblessness is particularly acute among small and midsized companies where the credit crunch is forcing drastic cost-cutting and pushing the number of bankruptcies to record levels.

There is, however, little doubt that three sectors of the population are suffering most at the moment: young people, women and the elderly.