Toyota City job losses in Japan

Job seekers apply for jobs and unemployment benefits at the Toyota City branch of 'Hello Work'. The same workers who were once the envy of Japan now find themselves at the sharp end of the recession Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert

Toyota’s domestic full-time workforce of about 72,000 has so far been spared as the firm clings desperately to Japan’s tradition of lifetime employment. Instead, the victims are to be found among the thousands of temporary workers whose survival depends a regular supply of short-term contracts Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert

Between January and March, just over 8,000 jobseekers registered with Hello Work in Toyota, a 133% increase from the same period a year earlier, according to Masami Kawajiri, the centre’s deputy director. Now about 1,000 people pass through its doors every day of the week Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert

Job offers, by contrast, are down by a third from last year, leaving the newly unemployed to compete for a handful of openings in restaurants and other parts of the service sector. Pictured, morning shoppers in the Toyota Plaza shopping precinct Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert

Until recently, Toyota was synonymous with Japan’s economic might, a place of unrelenting prosperity that looked on with pity at the slow decline of Detroit, its twin town and great carmaking rival across the Pacific. It is twinned with Detroit and the county of Derbyshire, where it has a factory Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert

The global economic crisis has changed all that. Last week, in what industry observers are calling 'the Toyota shock', the world’s biggest carmaker reported its first net loss for almost six decades Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert

Located at the end of the train line an hour from Nagoya in central Japan, Toyota City is a town planner’s tribute to the automobile. There is no city centre to speak of, just a collection of discount shops and fast-food outlets near the train station, and the sketchy bus service is more suited to a rural outpost than a city of 420,000. Pictured is Toyota Stadium Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert