This chapter will examine the Japanese economy in terms of the labour market, human resource management, labour market and social policy and labour migration. It will begin with Japan's quintessential characteristics of human resource management: “lifetime employment” and “seniority pay and promotion”. The chapter will also examine the problems related to regular employment (but also non-regular employment) such as long working hours and the phenomenon of karōshi (death due to overwork) as well as the hataraki-kata kaikaku (“Work-Style Reform”) recently introduced by the LDP government. This will be followed by an analysis of labour market deregulation since the late 1990s and the increased use of non-regular workers. In relation to the changes and continuities of human resource management, the chapter will discuss cooperative industrial relations based on enterprise unionism. It will then discuss problems in the Japanese labour market such as gender discrimination and inequality, dualism (inequality between regular and non-regular workers in terms of wages, benefits, training, etc.) and poor working conditions.

This chapter will also conduct an analysis of the government policy aimed at improving Japan's low fertility rate, including labour and social policies related to childcare provision and maternity leave from the 1990s and those policies aimed at achieving a better work–life balance proposed by the current Abe administration. The chapter will then discuss the issue of declining population, especially in rural areas, and examine domestic and international labour migration as a possible solution to this problem as well as government immigration policy, including recent changes that opened official routes for the migration of low-skilled workers.

JAPANESE HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS

Japanese human resource management has been characterized by “lifetime employment” and “seniority pay and promotion”, especially since the economic miracle in the 1960s. A high percentage of regular workers in large companies (if not SMEs) tend to work for the same company throughout their career until they retire and their pay and promotion prospects depend on their seniority, i.e. how many years they have worked for the company.