[Hiroshi Ono assesses the repeated claims that Japan's long-term, or “lifetime,” employment system is dead. Examining recent surveys of the different ways in which lifetime employment has been defined and measured, he shows, not surprisingly, that whether you see lifetime employment as shrinking or not depends on how you measure it.

Ono points out that some people define lifetime employees as those who work at large firms with more than 500 employees and for the government. By this measure, the share of the workforce covered declined from 23.4 percent in 1985 to 19.2 percent in 2003.