Who Kept Japan Working?
This chart shows the cumulative change in Japan's employed population by gender since 2000, using complete-year averages of the monthly seasonally adjusted Labour Force Survey. It describes employment counts, not hours, wages, job quality, or individual work histories.
What does it show?
Japan employs 3.8 million more people than in 2000 despite an aging, shrinking population, because women filled the gap: 5.0 million more employed women against 1.1 million fewer employed men. The women's line bends upward after 2013, when womenomics became national policy.
Methodology
Monthly seasonally adjusted employed-person counts for Japan are taken from the Statistics Bureau's Labour Force Survey through the Statistics Dashboard API. Each calendar year is the mean of twelve monthly observations; incomplete years are excluded. Values are converted from 10,000 persons to millions and shown as the change from the corresponding gender's 2000 annual average. This service uses the API feature of Statistics Dashboard, but the contents of this service are not guaranteed by the Statistics Bureau of Japan. Employment counts do not measure hours, wages, job quality, or individual employment histories.