• Home
• About/Contact
• Economic Reports
• Research
• Advertising

• Business
• Economics
• Reports
• Finance
• Marketing
• Politics
• Real Estate
• Services
• Retail
• Tech

Subscribe

Japanese government wants men to have more family time

The Asahi Shimbun today reported on government plans to “halve in 10 years the percentage of workers who put in 60 hours or more a week from 10.8 percent in 2006″ and also “to raise the percentage of male workers who take child-care leave to 10 percent, up from the current 0.5 percent.” The stated goal of this program is to increase the nation’s birth rate.

The plan to keep men from working so much, however, seems to have fatal Catch-22: if Japan’s men work less, who will pick up the slack? According to the government, women and the elderly will. The Asahi tells us:

[T]he government aims to have 69-72 percent of women between 25 and 44 in the work force in 10 years, up from the current 65 percent…The government also aims to raise the rate of women in employment after their first childbirth to 55 percent in 10 years, up from the current 38 percent…For people in the age bracket between 60 and 64, the employment-rate targets, also in 10 years, are 79-80 percent for men and 41-43 percent for women, up, respectively, from the current 67 percent and 39 percent.

So…if more women are working more hours - which they should be able to do if they want to - who is going to have these children?

For me, the kicker was this statistic: “[T]he government plans to have workers take 60 percent of their paid leave in five years, up from the current 47 percent.”

I’ve always taken 100% of mine. I guess I’ve always felt I’ve earned them.

A Quick Summary of What’s Worth Reading this Saturday

Japan’s fiscal 2008 budget is expected to rise to about 85.71 trillion yen from 82.91 trillion yen this year. With a huge increase in debt servicing costs, which account for 22.2 trillion yen of the budget, Japan seems intent on selling more government bonds and keeping an insane debt to GDP ratio.

The city of Kyoto is planning to undertake a drive to boost the number of tourists who visit the city in the winter. In the interest of full disclosure, I am indirectly guilty of aiding them in this mission (but I would recommend that you go in September).

Japan Air Lines is set to introduce gourmet meals on its Tokyo-Osaka route for first class, with premium brands of champagne. I still like the Shinkansen.

Japan’s industrial output fell by 0.4% in July, and that damn earthquake in Niigata was to blame.

Sushi chefs in Europe are in a tiff over new laws requiring fish to be deep frozen before it’s served. Ho-hum. They must know how wonderfully bad the stuff we get in Tokyo is. Oh yeah, fish is put in ice on the boat anyway, gentlemen.

Japan’s unemployment rate is at 3.6%, a nine and a half year low. On Monday, tell your boss to give you a raise or good luck finding someone else who can do your job.

On Friday, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications announced that household spending in Japan was down down 0.1% in real terms from a year before to an average 291,632 yen. This follows five consecutive months of rise.

Japan’s Unemployment Stays at 3.8% in May, at Nine Year Low

Earlier today, the Statistics Bureau released it’s monthly Labor Force Survey, which showed Japan’s unemployment rate unchanged at 3.8% in May, holding at a nine year low.

According to the report, in May 64.99 million people were employed in Japan, an increase of 510,000 from the same moth last year. On the other hand, 2.58 million people were classified as unemployed in May, for a decrease of 190,000 from May 2006.

Looking into the data, one sees that the number of men wishing to change their current job was at its lowest level since January of this year, while the number of women expressing a desire to find new employment was at an all-time high. Both the numbers of men and women wishing to find an additional job increased in May from April. Compared to May of last year, the number of both men (+3%) and women (+13%) wishing to change jobs has increased, the number of men wishing for an additional job has decreased 8 percent, and the number of women wishing for an additional job remains unchanged.

Tokyo slips! Down one spot, now only the fourth most expensive city for expats!

Mercer Human Resource Consulting has released their 2007 annual rankings of the most expensive cities for expatriates, and Moscow has stayed on top while Tokyo slid from the third to the fourth spot. London climbed from number five to number two, and Seoul fell one place to number three. Rounding out the top five is Hong Kong.

If you’re looking for the budget expat experience, Asuncion in Paraguay was the least expensive city surveyed for the fifth year running, coming in at #143.

Although Moscow remained on top apparently due to rising housing costs, and London is notoriously famous for such, one has to wonder if the property value boom in Tokyo might help push it back towards the top.

At the end of its description, Mercer included this line in both bold and italic text: We do not recommend that expatriates use these figures to compare their own compensation packages.

Don’t worry, Mercer! Expats in Tokyo use a different yardstick, but it wouldn’t be a secret if I told!

Japan headed for (natural or demographic) disaster? The economic consequences?

Those who watch Japanese movies may remember 日本以外全部沈没 (Everything Except Japan Destroyed), a B-grade film in which, well, everything except for Japan was destroyed.

This afternoon I noticed a few news reports expressing the opposite sentiment. Let’s start with a Cabinet Office report released on June 1st that warns of the challenges facing disaster prevention in Japan as more skyscrapers are built, shopping malls move underground, and the population continues to grey.

Earthquakes and storms threaten to do ever more damage to densely populated cities that are increasingly filled with high-rise office and residential towers. The number of buildings topping 100 meters has quadrupled over the past 15 years in Japan. At the same time, the report’s authors wonder if Japan’s current disaster response measures will be as effective when faced with a growing number of elderly who may be injured in the event of a natural disaster. According to the report, the number of single elderly households has nearly doubled over the last decade.

Further threatening Japan’s economy is the upcoming demographic crunch, which this observer still feels is going largely ignored by those in policy-making positions. In a recent article entitled “Japan leads world in demographic decline,” the Telegraph points out that although Japan is not alone in facing a future population decline, it shoulders the burden of being the trendsetter:

Read more

Japan Corporate Bankruptcies Rise for Seventh Straight Month

Earlier today, private research firm Teikoku Databank announced that corporate bankruptcies in Japan rose 2.8% in April 2007 compared to April 2006. 817 corporate bankruptcies were recorded in April, and the total number showed an increase for the seventh straight month.

The report covers bankrupt companies with liabilities of 10 million yen or more, and states:

Total liabilities were 591,268 million yen, sharply increasing both on a month-to-month basis (up 25.0%) and on a year-on-year basis (up 40.2%).

Four industries, namely the retail industry (138 cases), the transportation and communication industry (32 cases), the service industry (180 cases) and the real estate industry (31 cases), each recorded an increase in the number of bankruptcies from the corresponding period last year. Among them, the service industry posted its largest number of business failures since April 2005.

The number of recession-induced bankruptcies (599 cases) increased 1.9% year-on-year, accounting for 73.3% of the total. Especially, that of business failures due to sluggish sales (554 cases) went up 3.9%, or 21 cases, from the same period a year earlier.

Gentlemen, draw your conclusions.

Yakuza part-timers now outnumber full-time employees

We keep hearing that the number of keiyaku shain, or part-time workers, in Japan continues to grow while the number of seishain, or full-time salaried workers, continues to decline. Seishain, of course, formed the backbone of the ‘lifetime employment’ system that promised Japanese salaried workers a job for life, a salary that would continue to rise, and the safety and security of belonging to a home away from home. One of the defining features of the recent ‘economic recovery,’ however, has been the gradual reduction in the number of relatively expensive seishain workers and their replacement with the cheaper keiyaku shain.

In the Kansai region, the situation proved serious enough to warrant a visit from Hidenao Nakagawa, the secretary general of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Mr Nakagawa crashed the recent two-day Kansai Economic Forum, telling the region’s business leaders:

An elite business leader who doesn’t feel that Japan is a ‘beautiful country’ will simply tell the government to leave him alone. But, elite business leaders must think about their business within society as a whole.

If Nakagawa’s words seemed vague, they were clarified by Kansai Economic Federation Chairman Yoshihisa Akiyama, who said:

One of the weak points of the Kansai region is that the number of full-time, salaried employees continues to decline and it is extremely hard for many young and old workers to find full-time work.

There’s the thrust of the argument, without the silly bit about Mr Abe’s ‘beautiful country’ thrown in.

So, what does this have to do with the Yakuza? This morning a Kyodo piece in the Japan Times caught my eye, with the headline, “Part-time mobsters now outnumber career hoods.” There was even a wonderful chart to go along with the artcile; alas, the online version of the story did not include the chart, so I have photographed my newspaper to show it here.

This data is classic. First of all, we learn that it comes to us via the National Police Agency, which, “has been keeping such statistics since 1958.” This observer’s less cynical side assumes that it comes from high-ranking undercover agents who have infiltrated Japan’s crime syndicates in order to gather economic information. I could be wrong.

But what it does clearly show is that the Yakuza have been trendsetters. On the one hand, they seemed to have devoted themselves to downsizing (in terms of payroll) at least half a decade earlier than their cousins in the corporate world. At the same time, Yakuza have brought about flexible business operations, a rarity in Japanese business, by allowing workers to get more work done in less time, and be involved with other activities. I think there are plenty of other possible conclusions we could draw from the article, so I’ll leave it to you to read and and comment…

Copyright © 2006-2008 Japan Economy News

Disclaimer