'Hello Work', goodbye to Japan's old certainties

"We see it more and more these days," says Shinji Takano. "These aren't people with psychiatric problems, but the stress has made them very unstable. You can see it in their eyes, and in the way they respond to questions. They don't listen, and when they don't get exactly what they want they get angry."

Not long ago Mr Takano's staff had to call the police to remove a trouble-maker, and there is no doubt that there will be more incidents in the months ahead. But this is not a tough police station or an inner-city casualty ward, and none of Mr Takano's clients look like aggressive types. One thousand of them come here every day; few of them leave happy or hopeful. For this grey place in the Iidabashi district of Tokyo is one of the city's biggest job centres, a place of painful importance to more and more unwilling Japanese.

A decade ago, few inhabitants of Tokyo would have known where their local job centre was, but these days there are prominent signs in Iidabashi subway station pointing the way to Mr Takano and his computer terminals. A few years ago, government job centres were jauntily rechristened "Harou Waaku", a Japanese rendering of the English words "Hello Work", and few names could be more ironically inappropriate. More and more of those who visit Hello Work Iidabashi go away disappointed, as company after company sacks workers.

A climax of sorts came last week after a crescendo of depressing news. One after the other, some of Japan's most famous and prestigious electronic companies have announced massive sackings.

Between them Toshiba, NEC, Fujitsu, Kyocera and Oki will shed some 50,000 jobs and close or merge factories in Japan and abroad. And then, on Tuesday, the latest jobless figures were revealed: 5 per cent unemployment, or 3.3 million people, the highest number since records began in 1953. Yesterday, in another blow, Hitachi followed the other electronics giants and announced 14,700 job cuts.

This would be bad news anywhere in the world, but it is especially traumatic in Japan, which has no experience of large-scale lay-offs. For most of the post-war period, the jobless rate was below 2 per cent. Ten years ago, only 1.3 million Japanese were registered unemployed. Virtually everyone, in other words, could find a job, and a job meant a job for life. If you didn't like the position you had, it was a matter of course to resign and find a new one. Hard, uncomfortable jobs depended on immigrant workers from South-east Asia and Pakistan.

A decade later the number of unemployed has increased two-and-a-half times, and Japan does not know what has hit it. Mr Takano's sheets of statistics show who are the worst-affected: older white-collar workers with non-technical managerial backgrounds, the archetypal Japanese "salarymen".

Jobless shop workers aged over 55 in Tokyo compete for just 16 vacancies per 100; for managers of the same age the number of vacancies is three per 100.

"People who come here have to learn to be flexible about the area they look for a job," says Mr Takano, manager of Hello Work Iidabashi. "It's very, very hard for older workers. If someone in that category had the choice between staying on in a job they didn't like and leaving to look for a new one, I'd advise them to stay."

Hiroshi Miyasato, who wanders rather disconsolately out of Hello Work, worked for 20 years as a graphic designer of advertisements for a small company in Tokyo. In the best years, he earned 8.4 million yen a year ­ almost £50,000 at today's exchange rate. But a month ago he was sacked at the age of 59 and, with a son still at musical college, he cannot afford not to work. "But it's hopeless at my age," he says. "There just aren't many jobs advertised for designers, and the two I applied for said no. I'll give it one more month and then look at different kinds of jobs ­ maybe a security guard or a caretaker." The best he could expect to earn would be 200,000 yen (£1,200) a month.

At any one time about 10,000 people are registered at Mr Takano's job centre, and in a month no more than 1,000 of them find work. The situation is going to get much worse before it gets better.

Japan's Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, has won remarkable popularity since taking office in April promising to restructure the economy, but the one certainty about his policies is that they will worsen unemployment.

He has demanded that sickly banks call in the bad loans which have undermined their credibility, but that will bankrupt thousands of companies and force their workers on to the dole. The Government estimates that there could be as many as 600,000, the equivalent of another percentage point on unemployment, all new clients for Hello Work, all hurt, many frustrated and some angry.