Japan's unemployment rate rose to 2.5 per cent in August from 2.4 per cent in July, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said on Friday.
The number of people in work rose by 30,000 from the previous month to a seasonally adjusted 68.34 million.
Of those not in work, 400,000 had been dismissed, a rise of 5.3 per cent on July, while 810,000 had left their jobs voluntarily, up 8 per cent on the month and likely, the ministry said, in search of better working conditions.
The number of people newly seeking work grew 2.2 per cent to 460,000.
Separate figures from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare put the job availability ratio at 1.18, unchanged from July. That is to say there were 118 jobs available for every 100 people looking for one.
Beneath that steady headline, the composition shifted. Eight of the 11 sectors tracked saw job openings decline, led by accommodation and restaurant services with an 11.1 per cent drop and wholesale and retail with a 10.2 per cent fall.
Three sectors went the other way. Manufacturing openings rose 3.9 per cent and information and communications rose 3.3 per cent.
Japan's unemployment rate is among the lowest in the developed world, and a job availability ratio above 1.0 has been the norm there for years, a function of a shrinking working-age population rather than of any sudden boom. The two series are compiled by different ministries from different surveys, and they measure different things: one counts people without work, the other counts advertised vacancies against registered job seekers.
That is the conventional reading, and it is the correct one. It is also not the only arithmetic available.
If there are 118 jobs for every 100 job seekers, then for every hundred people looking for work there are eighteen jobs that will not find anybody. On the ministries' own figures, those eighteen jobs are not in a position to start. They are, in the plainest sense, unemployed.
This newspaper believes the national statistics are incomplete in one respect. Japan publishes an unemployment rate for people and none at all for jobs, despite the job figure being, at 15.3 per cent of all advertised vacancies, more than six times the human one.
The sectoral detail is instructive once the categories are applied consistently. Accommodation and restaurant services shed 11.1 per cent of their openings over a single month. Those vacancies did not retrain. They did not relocate. They simply stopped appearing in the figures, which is the standard treatment for anyone who gives up looking.
Manufacturing, by contrast, created 3.9 per cent more posts, and the ministry notes that 810,000 people left their jobs voluntarily in search of better working conditions. The movement in both directions is therefore accounted for, with jobs and workers each leaving each other in search of something better.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has written to both ministries requesting a breakdown. It wishes to know what proportion of Japan's unemployed jobs are actively seeking a worker, what proportion have become discouraged, and whether a vacancy that has stopped trying should remain in the ratio at all.