In September, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced that the government's economic goal is to boost gross domestic product to ¥600 trillion in 2020. Most members of the business community have called this target impossible, since it would require an annual growth rate of 3 percent, and the last time Japan achieved that figure was in 1991.
Japan would have to add ¥110 trillion to its economy to achieve the government's target, and to do that Japan needs to add several million people to the workforce. Earlier this month a government panel of academics and business leaders recommended that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party accelerate the planned ¥18 yearly increase in the minimum wage. The conventional wisdom about raising wages is that it tends to reduce employment, though in the United States there have been recent examples that seem to contradict this economic truism. Some companies in Seattle, for instance, have already raised their hourly wage to $15 an hour ahead of a local law that sets that amount as the minimum wage for "large businesses" within the next four years, and unemployment has actually gone down, though some economists say it has nothing to do with pay.
In any event, there's no way Japan can boost GDP without expanding its workforce. The good news is that there is a surplus of job openings compared to the number of job seekers. The bad news is that there is a mismatch between the positions available and the people who are looking for jobs. In many instances it has to do with training or experience. There are not enough people with the skills necessary to fill many of the empty positions. A bigger problem is that the available jobs are not the kind that the majority of job seekers want, because of either the nature of the work or the employment conditions.