Annual Rate of Unemployment

Rate of unemployment from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications' Labour Force Survey. The rate of unemployment by prefecture for 2009 has been referred to.

Please use this only as reference, as it is indicated in the Labour Force Survey as well, that
"Attention needs to be paid when using the results of the survey, because there is no sample design for representation by prefecture (excluding Hokkaido and Okinawa), and because of the small size of samples, the results may not be as accurate compared to the national result."

The rate of unemployment is greatest in Okinawa, with 7.5%. Okinawa faces various problems such as issues concerning the U.S. bases and economic disparity compared to the mainland, and the rate of unemployment has been a deeply-rooted issue for a long time. Following Okinawa in the top 10 are prefectures in the Tohoku area, Aomori, Miyagi, Akita, Fukushima and Iwate, indicating the high rate of unemployment in the Tohoku areas. In other areas, the rate of unemployment is higher in urban areas than in surrounding areas, such as in Tokyo, Osaka, Aichi and Fukuoka. The rate of unemployment is high in Okinawa, the Tohoku area, Hokkaido and urban areas.

The correlative ranking shows that it is positively correlated with the number of households living on welfare and negatively correlated with the number of manufacturing industry workers. It can be seen from this that the rate of unemployment is high in areas where there are few manufacturing industries, and that if the rate of unemployment is high, the rate of people living on welfare becomes high.