But the main hope of many foreign companies and economists for the zones—and for Abenomics reform in general—has been relaxation of employment and labor laws. However, due to stiff opposition by the ministry of health, labor and welfare, and its minister, Tamura Norihisa, his hope seems likely to be unrealized.
Professor Yashiro points out that recent LDP/NK proposals to increase flexibility of companies to hire workers on fixed term contracts, rather than for life, are basically efforts to undue actions of the previous DPJ government which sought to mandate lifetime employment to all “workers,” a term in Japan that applies also to managers.
Abenomics reformers hoped to make the “strategic zones” laboratories for experimentation in labor policies, permitting foreign companies in particular to operate more-or-less according to their own or other international labor practices. Japan’s ministry of health, labor, and welfare has refused to go along, arguing that a country’s labor laws and regulations should not be differentiated geographically.
Thinking of Abe’s “national strategic zones” initiative, and the Koizumi era initiative that preceded it, it is hard not to think of Deng Xiaoping’s “special economic zones.” Is Japan’s economy so ossified and cartelized as to require reform of the type needed in China’s then Soviet-style planned economy? To ask the question is, I suppose, to answer it.