Japanese Rice Pictures

As of 2001, Japan's shrinking labor force consisted of some 67 million workers. Japan has a low unemployment rate of around 4 percent. Almost one in six Japanese, or 20 million people, lived in poverty in 2007. Housing in Japan is characterized by limited land supply in urban areas, particularly in Tokyo. More than half of all Japanese live in suburbs or more rural areas, where detached houses are the dominant housing type. Japan's GDP per hour worked is the world's 19th highest as of 2007.
Japan ranks 12th of 178 countries in the 2008 Ease of Doing Business Index and has one of the smallest tax revenues of the developed world. The Japanese variant of capitalism has many distinct features. Keiretsu enterprises are influential. Lifetime employment and seniority-based career advancement are relatively common in the Japanese work environment. Japanese companies are known for management methods like "The Toyota Way", and shareholder activism is rare. Japan's business culture has many indigenous concepts such as the nemawashi, the nenko system, the salaryman, and the office lady. Recently, Japan has moved away from some of these norms. In the Index of Economic Freedom, Japan is the fifth most laissez-faire of 30 Asian countries.
Japan's exports amounted to $US4,210 per capita in 2005. Japan's main export markets are China (18.88 percent), the United States (16.42 percent), South Korea (8.13 percent), Taiwan (6.27 percent) and Hong Kong (5.49 percent) as of 2009. Japan's main exports are transportation equipment, motor vehicles, electronics, electrical machinery and chemicals. Japan's main import markets as of 2009 are China (22.2 percent), the US (10.96 percent), Australia (6.29 percent), Saudi Arabia (5.29 percent), UAE (4.12 percent), South Korea (3.98 percent) and Indonesia (3.95 percent). Japan's main imports are machinery and equipment, fossil fuels, foodstuffs (in particular beef), chemicals, textiles and raw materials for its industries. By market share measures, domestic markets are the least open of any OECD country. Junichiro Koizumi's administration began some pro-competition reforms, and foreign investment in Japan has soared.
Some of the largest enterprises in Japan include Toyota, Nintendo, NTT DoCoMo, Canon, Honda, Takeda Pharmaceutical, Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, Sharp, Nippon Steel, Nippon Oil, Japan Tobacco, Tepco, Mitsubishi, Seven & I Holdings Co, Hitachi, Nissan, Æon, Fujitsu, and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. It is home to some of the world's largest banks, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange (known for its Nikkei 225 and Topix indices) stands as the second largest in the world by market capitalization. Japan is home to 326 companies from the Forbes Global 2000 or 16.3 percent (as of 2006).