Photo/Illutration The government building housing the offices of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

Japan’s inflation-adjusted real wages slid 2.6 percent year-on-year in October, the largest fall in seven years and four months, the labor ministry said in a report released Dec. 6.

Though nominal total cash earnings rose for the same month, real wages did not rise accordingly as the increase in the cost of living was much larger.

The decline in real wages in October represented the seventh consecutive drop from the same month a year earlier.

Including those of part-time workers, nominal wages rose 1.8 percent year on year to 275,888 yen ($2,015) for October, marking the 10th straight month of increase, the ministry’s report said.

But the consumer price index, which the ministry uses to calculate real wages, jumped 4.4 percent for the same month, the largest since 2014, when the consumption tax rate was raised to 8 percent from 5 percent.

Thus, the slide in real wages marked the largest since June 2015, when it dropped 2.8 percent year on year due to a steep decline in bonuses and other special allowances.

In 2020, nominal and real wages both decreased 1.2 percent from a year earlier due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

A slight recovery was made the following year--nominal wages edged up 0.3 percent and real wages rose 0.6 percent in 2021.

But real wages have returned to a declining trajectory this year as the cost of living has been increasing faster than the 1 to 2 percent growth in nominal total cash earnings.

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