From a somewhat long-term perspective, even though the working-age population in Japan has been declining, the total number of employees has grown by more than 4 million over the nearly ten years since 2013, mainly due to an increase in the labor force participation of women and seniors.
In the first wave of globalisation at the turn of the last century, the combination of sharp falls in transportation costs and large economies of scale in factories promoted the concentration of production and manufacturing employment. In the current wave, which began in the late 1980s, huge advances in communications and computing technologies have dramatically lowered the costs of coordination across stages of production.