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Japan last year extended a two-decade streak of rising employment for disabled people. But businesses have struggled to meet legal quotas due to demographics as well as a work culture with entrenched patterns of corporate behaviour and a tendency for box-ticking.
The number of disabled people working for Japanese companies last year hit an all-time high for the 21st consecutive year. The total came to 677,461 for 2024, data from the health, labour and welfare ministry showed, an increase of 35,283 compared with a year earlier. The proportion of disabled people, including those with physical, mental and intellectual conditions, in the workforce rose to 2.41 per cent, a record for the 13th year.
The figures are encouraging, say employment support groups, while for the authorities they could be something to celebrate as the culmination of a half-century campaign for progress in the workplace.
The government in the 1970s introduced a mandatory employment rate for physically disabled people of 1.5 per cent of companies’ full-time staff. Indeed, many modern offices, transport and public spaces have advanced barrier-free infrastructure, while the quotas are an expression of a commitment to change.
Conditions and attitudes have improved over the decades, albeit from what many say was a low base, while the government has broadened its definition of disabled. It added intellectual disability in 1998 and mental disability in 2018, and raised the statutory employment rate to 2.5 per cent for companies with at least 40 employees. This target will increase to 2.7 per cent from July 2026, with fines for companies that fail to meet their quota.
Naoya Tsuji, managing director of the Nagoya-based AJU Center for Independent Living, a social welfare organisation that provides employment support for people with disabilities, believes the statutory rate is still too low.
“There are people with disabilities around me who want to work but cannot,” Tsuji says. “Ideally, it would be great if all of them could work.”
Many companies nonetheless are failing to meet the legal employment rate: only 46 per cent of private companies met the target, while the number of compliant companies slipped 4.1 percentage points from the previous year, the health ministry report from last year showed.
That decline, say the senior executives of four companies in the manufacturing, services and media industries, illustrates a bigger problem in Japan: the labour force is shrinking.
Participation rates, including those who have re-entered the workforce in their mid-sixties and beyond, reached 63.3 per cent last year, the highest figure since 2014. Many industries now have staff shortages, forcing companies to rethink their business models.
Two of the executives point out how difficult it has been for companies to hit the targets, especially as demographics have exacerbated the issue. Many of the disabled people who were hired under the initial targets are entering the official status of extreme old age, defined as 75 years old, while those hired in the 1980s are not far behind.
A lack of qualitative goals, meanwhile, has prompted some companies to employ disabled people either in unchallenging jobs or in work that does not bring them into the workplace, purely to meet the legal requirement.
One of the difficulties in hiring physically challenged people, Tsuji says, is the need for an accessible workspace.
“Society has made some progress in creating a barrier-free environment,” he says, compared with a time 30 years ago when some job vacancies posted at Hello Work, Japan’s state-run employment agency, said wheelchair use was prohibited. But “it is still insufficient”, he says, adding that the main reason for that is that employers have never worked with people with disabilities before.
“If the workplace environment were more barrier-free, people with disabilities would be able to work more,” he adds, and that would resolve the labour shortage “to some extent”.
Tsuji adds that flexible hiring practices and a more adjustable employment system, whereby people with disabilities are easily accepted and shorter working hours are an option, would also help more into work.
“Companies do not have an environment to nurture their employees, so they hire them simply to meet the legal employment rate, and many of the jobs are simple tasks,” Tsuji says.
“If we can help [disabled people] demonstrate their abilities through employee training, they can do a wider variety of jobs,” Tsuji says. “There are still too many people with disabilities employed with an eye on the numbers.”
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