For the fourth straight year, the administration is urging business leaders to raise wages for their workers in the annual spring pay negotiations with labor unions, with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe specifically calling for wage hikes of "at least the same level as last spring." The Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengo), the nation's largest umbrella labor organization, meanwhile adopted a policy of seeking a 4 percent raise — including a 2 percent hike in workers' base pay scale.

This now familiar scene is being re-enacted even as consumer spending and prices have fallen for several months in a row, threatening the Abe administration's bid to bust deflation. Companies are more wary than in previous years against wage hikes, citing declining profits due to the yen's upturn and cloudy prospects for the global economy. But significant wage increases for a broad spectrum of workers remain crucial to a sustained recovery in personal consumption, which accounts for 60 percent of Japan's gross domestic product. The prodding from the government aside, profitable companies need to do their own share of the work to boost the fragile growth of the domestic economy.

The employment situation continues to improve. The jobless rate in October remained at 3.0 percent while the ratio of job offers to job seekers rose to 1.40 — the highest since August 1991. Last month, that ratio was 1 or higher in all 47 prefectures. While job increases in the initial years of Abenomics mainly involved low-paying irregular positions, the number of full-time regular corporate employees rose on a year-on-year basis in 2015 for the first time since 2007 — before the global recession. Last year, the gain in the number of regular employees topped that of irregular workers for the first time in 21 years.