Japan Labor

Toyota Motor Corp. said Monday that it will cut the length of the working day at its plants because of public pressure to reduce Japan's typically long working hours. But the time lost will come out of employees' lunch breaks. A spokesman said Toyota will cut yearly working hours at its factories to 1,891 from the current 1,952 because of social pressure and criticism that Japan's working hours are too long compared with other countries.

Wages in Asia are increasing far faster than those in the United States, with factory workers' pay in Japan surging ahead that of U.S. workers, according to a Labor Department report. While many booming Asian economies still lag behind in workers' pay, Japan's average hourly pay rose to $19.01 in 1993, the latest year for which figures are available. It was a new high for Japan and well above the U.S. average for the year: $16.73 an hour.

Whenever he wants to make his legendary Olympic equipment, master craftsman Masahisa Tsujitani simply heads downstairs to a workshop about the size of a two-car garage. The 67-year-old hunches over his lathe and, with the skilled eye of a jeweler, the steady hand of a surgeon and the seasoning of an athlete, grinds the cast-iron mass into a sphere with grooves almost as fine as a fingerprint.

Tokuko Saito will soon shove her way into a world that for more than 1,000 years has been the exclusive domain of Japan's manliest men: She is training to be a sumo wrestler. At 5 feet 3 inches, 154 pounds and 45 years of age, Saito hardly inspires comparison to male wrestlers, 300-pound-plus mountains of nearly naked flesh. Undeterred, she will strap on the wide sumo belt--over shorts and a leotard--and step into the ring later this month for the first All-Japan Women's Sumo Competition.

As a recession-busting idea, it sounds deceptively easy: Move the dates of four national holidays to give overworked Japanese some three-day weekends and a chance to spend some of their huge stockpile of savings. Advocates say switching the dates would cost nothing, delight the public and prompt about $11 billion worth of leisure and tourism spending.

Average wages and household spending in Japan fell in March, with the country's economic troubles hitting blue-collar workers the hardest, the government said Friday. The average monthly salary declined for the eighth straight month to $2,374, 1.5% less than last year when inflation is taken into account, the Labor Ministry said. For the fiscal year ended March 31, salaries fell 1.2%, their first decline in four years. Working-class households saw monthly salaries drop 2.

Contradicting widespread fears that an increasingly high-tech economy is squeezing out low-skilled immigrants, a new study has concluded that even computer-products manufacturers and other information-age businesses will continue to need new arrivals with little education and skill.

In the 1980s, the notoriously hard-working Japanese coined a term to describe workers who die suddenly after putting in extremely long hours. The word is "karoshi," or death from overwork. Japan has a new word for the '90s: "karojisatsu," suicides from overwork. Spurred by an economic slide throughout the decade, the number of such suicides has swelled to an estimated 1,000 or more a year, according to a group of lawyers involved in lawsuits over work-related deaths.

The minimum workweek for full-time employees in Japan in 1997 was reported to have fallen below 40 hours for the first time since the government started tracking the statistic in 1966. Weekly fixed working hours at private companies that responded to a Labor Ministry survey fell on average 1 1/4 hours from 1996 to 39 1/2 hours, Kyodo news agency reported.