The shadow of joblessness

摘要

Another week, another set of impressive-sounding, or painful-sounding, job cuts from one of Japan's finest high-tech exporters. Last week it was Fujitsu, the country's top computer firm, cutting 16,000 jobs; this week it was the turn of Toshiba, a maker of memory chips, laptops and much else, to declare its plan to cut 19,000 jobs. Other cuts have come from nec, a big telecoms and chips firm, and more are rumoured to be on the way from Hitachi, one of the country's older conglomerates (see page 51). The whiff of change is in the air: along with a new, reformist, no-gain-without-pain prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, perhaps corporate Japan is starting to restructure, shedding its old lifetime employment rules and shaping up for a more vigorous future?