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Last year, Japan extended its two-year straight win in a row, increasing employment for people with disabilities. However, businesses struggle to meet legal quotas due to demographics and work cultures with retention patterns and box-tic trends in corporate behavior.
Last year, the number of disabled people working for Japanese companies reached an all-time high for the 21st year in a row. The total for 2024 was 677,461, and data from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Human Services showed an increase of 35,283 compared to the previous year. The proportion of people with disabilities, including those with physical, mental and intellectual conditions in the workforce, rose to 2.41%, a record in their 13th year.
The numbers are encouraging, according to the Employment Support Group, but for authorities it could be a celebration of the culmination of a half-century campaign for progress in the workplace.
In the 1970s, the government introduced mandatory employment rates for 1.5% of full-time corporate staff with physical disabilities. Certainly, many modern offices, transportation and public spaces have high barrier-free infrastructure, but quotas are an expression of commitment to change.
While the government is broadening its definition of people with disabilities, conditions and attitudes have improved over decades as many say are low bases. It added intellectual disability in 1998 and mental disability in 2018, increasing the statutory employment rate for businesses with at least 40 employees to 2.5%. This goal will increase to 2.7% from July 2026, with companies that do not meet their quota being fined.
Naoya Tsuji, managing director of Nagoya-based Aju Center for Independent Living Center, believes the statutory rate is still too low as it is a social welfare organization that provides employment support to people with disabilities.
“There are people around me who want to work but can’t, but there are people with disabilities,” Tsuji says. “Ideally, if everything goes well, that’s great.”
Nevertheless, many companies are unable to meet legal employment rates. Only 46% of private companies achieved the target, but the number of compliant companies reduced by 4.1 percentage points from the previous year, a Ministry of Health report last year showed.
Senior executives at four companies, manufacturing, services and media industries, have said it represents a bigger problem in Japan. The labor force is shrinking.
Participation rate, including those who have reentered the workforce since the mid-’60s, reached 63.3% last year. This is the highest number since 2014. Today, many industries have a staff shortage, forcing businesses to rethink their business models.
Two executives pointed out how difficult it was for businesses to achieve their goals, especially as demographics exacerbated the problem. Many of the disabled people hired under the initial goal have entered the official status of extreme elderly, defined as age 75, but those hired in the 1980s aren’t that late.
Meanwhile, the lack of qualitative goals has encouraged the employment of disabled people in jobs and jobs that are not taken to the workplace in order to meet purely legal requirements.
One of the challenges of hiring people who have been physically challenged is the need for accessible workspaces.
“Society has made some progress in creating a barrier-free environment,” he says. Thirty years ago, some jobs vacancies posted to Hello Work, the Japanese national employment agency, said that wheelchair use was prohibited. But “it’s still not enough,” he said, adding that the main reason for this is that employers have never worked with people with disabilities before.
“If the work environment is less barriers, people with disabilities will be able to do more work,” he adds, which will solve the labor shortage “to some extent” and “to some extent.”
Tsuji adds that flexible employment practices and a more adjustable employment system are an option for people with disabilities to be easily accepted and working hours shorter.
“Since companies don’t have an environment to train employees, they only hire them to meet legal employment rates. Many jobs are easy tasks,” Tsuji says.
“If we can help (disabled people) demonstrate their capabilities through training employees, they can do a more diverse job,” Tsuji says. “People with disabilities are still employed looking at numbers.”
