ABSTRACT
A change in Japan's industrial structure is partly responsible for this decline. As already noted (Chapter 2), large manufac turing enterprises have tended to establish their plants in rural and semi-rural areas and, in so doing, have absorbed workers from the local labour market. There are cases where this has taken place on a major scale. For example, Hitachi has created a metropolis in Hitachi City, now a large and growing industrial area. The effect of this movement on Japan's dekasegi is that some seasonal workers are moving into new categories of employment. Some seasonal work can take the form of parttime work (contracted for part of the year) in nearby plants or sub-contract firms. There is less need to travel away from home or to stay in the dormitories of industries in the metropolitan areas for half the year. Wages for seasonal workers in these circumstances tend to be higher than those for navvies moving from construction site to construction site in the cities. Skills can be developed while working in locally based industries with the result that trained agro-industrial workers can return each year to the same plant as known and experienced employees — if work is available. In this way dekasegi numbers decline but the practice persists, with casual/seasonal workers coming under other classifications.
