The manufacturing sector still creates more jobs than the services industry in Japan, and prefectures with a reliance on manufacturers have lower unemployment rates than those that bank on services, the government said in an annual report Tuesday.

Nevertheless, manufacturing-dependent prefectures have been bleeding jobs due to the slumping information technology sector and falling exports, the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry said in the fiscal 2002 white paper on employment.

"The services sector has not created as many jobs as it did in the 1990s," Health, Labor and Welfare Minister Chikara Sakaguchi said at a news conference.

He also said the government will try to give detailed assistance to those who have remained jobless for a long time.

Calculating Japan's jobless rate under U.S. methods for the first time, the ministry claimed a 5 percent rate would translate into 4.2 percent before seasonal adjustment.

The figure contradicts the conventional view that Japan's method of calculation tends to show lower unemployment than other countries.

Under the U.S. method, the unemployed are defined as people who sought jobs during the past two to four weeks. Unemployed people who have not engaged in job-seeking activities over the past month are counted as members of the non-labor population, the ministry said.

According to this definition, the number of jobless people in Japan, based on an August 2001 survey, was calculated at 2.83 million, compared with 3.36 million under the Japanese method, according to the report.

In May, Japan's jobless rate rose 0.2 percentage point from April to 5.4 percent, almost reaching the record 5.5 percentage registered in December, as the number of jobless climbed to 3.75 million out of the national workforce of 67.31 million.

Sakaguchi presented the white paper at the day's Cabinet meeting.

"In 2000, there was a tendency of lower unemployment rates in prefectures with higher ratios of workers in the manufacturing sector and higher rates in prefectures with higher ratios of workers in the services sector," the ministry said in the report.

But in 2001, regions hosting major manufacturers "saw their employment rates deteriorate sharply due to the slump of industries related to IT and exports," the ministry said.

Comprehensively analyzing the job situation, including long-term joblessness, for the first time, the ministry called attention to the especially harsh job market in Okinawa, Aomori and Fukuoka prefectures.

The ministry also warned that many businesses are replacing workers on regular payrolls with part-time employees and that a growing number of young people with poor educational qualifications are joining the ranks of the jobless.

By prefecture, the jobless rate in 2001 was highest in Okinawa, at 8.4 percent, and in Fukuoka, at 6.2 percent. Both had low ratios of workers in the manufacturing sector.

In contrast, the jobless rate in Nagano, which is heavily dependent on manufacturing, was at 3.2 percent, the lowest among all 47 prefectures.

The ratio of job offers to job-seekers was the lowest in Okinawa at 0.26, meaning there were only 26 job openings for every 100 job seekers during the 12-month period.

The corresponding ratio for Aomori was 0.33. Yamanashi Prefecture had the highest ratio, at 0.94.

Gunma, Fukui and Shizuoka prefectures shared the runnerup spot with ratios of 0.88.

The white paper also compares conditions in Japan, once noted for its low jobless rate, with those in other countries.

It cautions that Japan will end up joining the ranks of "normal countries" in terms of joblessness if the unemployment rate continues to grow.

The number of "the long-term jobless" -- people who remain out of work for one year or more -- reached 920,000 in 2001, a sharp increase from 240,000 in 1991.

Such people accounted for 1.2 percent of the Japanese workforce in 2000, eclipsing the rate in the United States and Canada and tying that of Britain.

Half of the long-term jobless are males in the 15-34 and 55-and-over age brackets.

The number of long-term jobless in the 15-34 bracket jumped five-fold from a decade ago to 380,000 in August 2001.

The ministry also said 77 percent of the long-term jobless did not attend college or university.

Many households that include people without jobs are digging into savings or taking other measures to get by, the report says.