(Bloomberg News) Three times a week, Seiya Ogawa bikes to an unemployment center in Kadoma, home to Panasonic Corp., looking for work to help pay for his son's final year at college.
"At this point, I'm willing to take any job," said the 49-year-old, who assembled electronic circuit boards in what was once a bustling manufacturing suburb of Osaka, Japan's third-largest city. This month, it's officially one year since he first signed on at the center, and "it's like my humanity's been stripped from me," he said.
Ogawa and his son rely on the incomes of his wife and daughter, a social role reversal that is spreading in Japan as factories and building companies fire workers and services that hire mostly women add employees. The new jobs pay lower average wages, making it harder for Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda to spur consumer spending and pull the world's third-largest economy out of a decade of deflation. The increasing burden as breadwinners also gives women less incentive to marry and have children early in a country that already has the fastest-aging population in the developed world.
"With Japanese companies increasingly moving abroad and a shrinking population making growth in construction work unlikely, these sectors just can't absorb male workers the way they used to," said Toshihiro Nagahama, chief economist at Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo. "Nominal wages are falling and falling as a result. This mancession is far from over."
National Pride
Japan's economy is shifting from monozukuri, or making things -- which the nation prides itself on -- to services, especially those catering to the 29 million seniors over age 64. Manufacturing and building industries, where seven out of 10 staff are male, will lose 4 million positions this decade, according to Tokyo-based Works Institute, funded by employment-services provider Recruit Co. Health care, 74 percent female, added people at the fastest pace across all industries in the past three years, growing 16 percent, Labor Ministry data show.
The shift is accelerating, thanks to a near record-high currency that's wiping out profits at exporters including Panasonic and Sony Corp., giving the government no time to ease the transition. Panasonic forecast its biggest annual loss in a decade this fiscal year, while Sony estimated it will lose 90 billion yen ($1.2 billion).
Panasonic and Sony shares have slumped 45 percent and 53 percent this year, helping pull the benchmark Topix index 21 percent lower. At the same time, Message Co., the nation's second-biggest operator of nursing homes by number of rooms, has risen 2.3 percent, and Nichii Gakkan Co., operator of the largest number of homes, is up 25 percent.
'Future Of Japan'
Services such as nursing and health care are "the future of Japan," said Curtis Freeze, founder of Honolulu-based Prospect Asset Management Inc., who is considering adding Message to the $300 million that Prospect manages because its employment policies may reduce staff-turnover costs. Manufacturers "are in the middle of restructuring, and they're going to struggle. It's the smaller services companies that will do most of the hiring."
Health care, with 19 percent of working women, isn't the only field to add jobs in the past three years: Education -- another profession where women outnumber men -- as well as research, restaurants and real estate also have grown, even as Japan lost a net 12.1 million positions.