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- WSJ.com Page One Feature March 19, 2002 Japan's New Deal: Collect Deer Scat, Count It, Then Collect a Paycheck By YUMIKO ONO Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL HITOYOSHI, Japan -- Mitsukazu Izumi lost his job when his employer went bust recently. So on a chilly morning this winter, he tramped through a thick cypress forest and stooped to pick up the one thing keeping him off the unemployment rolls: deer droppings. Mr. Izumi, 45 years old, landed a position with the Deer Habitation Research Program, one part of the effort by Kumamoto prefecture in southern Japan to keep the jobless afloat. The former blouse-factory worker and nine colleagues spent all day hunting deer scat, which they scooped up and slipped into brown paper envelopes. Researchers counted the pellets to estimate the area's deer population. It isn't the sexiest job in the world, but with no other prospects in sight, Mr. Izumi is hoping this two-month taxpayer-funded position, which pays the equivalent of about $80 a day, will tide him over. "The future looked so grim," he says. "I wasn't sure what I should do." Japan's decade-long economic malaise has drawn comparisons with America's Great Depression. So far, Japan hasn't plumbed the depths of misery the U.S. saw in the 1930s, when the unemployment rate hit nearly 25% and President Franklin D. Roosevelt cooked up jobs ranging from building dams and sewing dolls to planting trees and painting murals. The Japanese jobless rate, at 5.3% in January, is close to a record high, and some economists expect the figure to approach 6% this year. But Japan's Great Recession has matched America's grim decade in at least one respect, by inspiring politicians and bureaucrats to Rooseveltian bursts of make-work creativity. Alarmed by rising joblessness, the government last year decided to shell out $2.7 billion on an emergency work-creation program, expanding a smaller plan begun in 1999. The goal: to create more than 500,000 temporary jobs over the next three years. Shiga prefecture in western Japan recently employed 63 jobless to prowl the streets and mark messy areas on a map, as part of its "Program to Investigate the True Condition of Litter." In Gifu prefecture, authorities have mobilized 250 unemployed workers to help children "adapt to school life." Further south, a city in Wakayama prefecture put 50 people to work catching snails. The prefecture also plans to turn hundreds of laid-off office employees into "green-collar" workers, who chop wood and prune trees, in a program it calls "a modern version of the New Deal." The program serves as a supplement to Japan's modest unemployment benefits, including insurance and a small training program for those seeking jobs in new fields. These projects come on top of a decade of colossal public-works spending that has kept millions of laborers busily building rural roads, bridges and ports of dubious utility. The string of economic-stimulus packages has helped run up Japan's national debt to about $5 trillion, or some 135% of annual economic output -- by far the highest level in the industrialized world. Just how helpful the new work programs will be to Japan's 3.4 million jobless is a big question. Historians have mixed views about the efficacy of the New Deal at solving unemployment; many say it was World War II that really got America's job-market hopping again. "This is nothing more than a stop-gap measure," grumbles Hisashi Yamada, a senior economist at the Japan Research Institute Ltd., a think tank. Such complaints haven't deterred the program's coordinator, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, which says it provides immediate relief for those in need. In their campaign to reduce suffering, the authorities have a competitive advantage: Japan's oft-overlooked genius for inefficiency. This country's automobile and high-end electronics factories are world-class, but in much of the rest of the economy, Japanese workers are laggards. Last year, Japan's labor productivity was just 72% of America's, down from 74% of the U.S. level in 2000, according to a study by the Conference Board. So, the local governments have succeeded in thinking up lots of inefficient jobs that would employ as many people as possible. Under the work program, local governments handed are cash by the federal government and are free to invent new jobs, as long as they follow some simple rules. The positions must last no longer than six months and be as labor-intensive as possible, with most of the money going into wages and not equipment. They should also be in designated industries, such as education and environment. Among those who rose to the challenge was Yukihiro Yamazaki, a wildlife-management official in Kumamoto prefecture, which oversees hilly Hitoyoshi. Mr. Yamazaki's staff needed to rein in feisty deer that were ripping up cypress bark with their antlers. Using modern methods, he could have taken pictures with cameras equipped with infrared sensors from a helicopter to estimate the region's deer population. But that method wouldn't have provided enough jobs to qualify for government cash. He and his colleagues quickly devised an old-fashioned pellet-counting project to do the job. (Scientists estimate that each deer excretes an average of 1,010 droppings a day.) They then hired the first 10 applicants, including a former taxi driver and the laid-off blouse maker. "It was perfect. This is not exactly a job that requires special skills," chuckles Mr. Yamazaki. The men were given quick pointers (deer pellets are cocoon-shaped, rabbit pellets are round) and sent off to the mountains. With so many jobless to employ, officials often have to be extra creative. In the rural town of Kozagawa in western Wakayama prefecture, 16 men were recently employed to clear a dirt-clogged ditch with shovels along a narrow mountain road, as part of a six-month forestry job. It will probably take the men a month and a half to work the five-mile strip, estimates Nobuharu Terada, head of the regional forestry association that's overseeing the project. He says the same job would take only a week and two people, if a special ditch-clearing truck were used. "What can we do? We have to absorb unemployment," says Mr. Terada, who adds sympathetically that the rotten leaves clogging the ditches can give off an overpowering smell. Not everyone is cut out for such government largesse. Motoshi Higashiguchi, a 42-year-old whose last job was driving a van delivering bread to bakeries, was out of breath recently after a few hours of ditch cleaning. "My back is so sore," said the red-faced Mr. Higashiguchi, wiping sweat off his brow. Still, he quickly reminded himself that he is lucky to have any job at all. "I'm not going to be the first one to give up," he said. But Mitsujiro Matsuura has managed to become something of a professional make-work employee. The 36-year-old former amusement-park staffer says he has taken part in five make-work programs over the past two years, including a six-month shift catching golf-ball sized snails in rice paddies, a job helping high-school students find jobs and one to research ways to improve a hiking trail. Mr. Matsuura, who is striving to support his wife and two teenage sons, says he is worried about his lack of success in finding a real position on his own. "These jobs are good just to get by for now, but there's nothing left when it's over," he says. Masakazu Kita, who hunted the pesky rice-gobbling snails along with Mr. Matsuura, says he had to scramble for five months after the program ended before he finally found his current job as a salesman for a chemical company. But the 40-year-old Mr. Kita looks back fondly on his snail-catching days. The snails kept him busy, since the workers had a self-imposed goal of harvesting five pounds of the mollusks every day. And that helped keep his spirits up, at a time when he was easily depressed. "It's just so tough to not have a job to go to every day, even if you're receiving benefits," Mr. Kita says. "It was good to be able to work, whatever that job was." Write to Yumiko Ono at yumiko.ono@wsj.com1 URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1016487994364031600.djm,00.html Hyperlinks in this Article: (1) mailto:yumiko.ono@wsj.com Updated March 19, 2002 12:42 a.m. EST Copyright 2002 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 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