In the deep south of Japan sits the tiny island of Himeshima. Farmers cultivate delicious prawns, the rare chestnut tiger butterfly flitters around the beach and 2,400 islanders wallow in total job security.

It has been so on Himeshima for 40 years and suddenly, faced with the most alarming economic downturn since the Second World War, everyone from the central Government in Tokyo to the country's biggest industrial conglomerates is desperate to copy its secret: work sharing.

The island's magic formula amounts to a four-decade experiment in job preservation, a running agreement by employees to sacrifice wages and regular working hours for the sake of keeping everybody in work. Everything on Himeshima — the local bureaucracy, the ferry company, the prawn farms, the clinic and the care home — joins in.

Even though wages have remained more or less the same for decades, the island's mayor told The Times that Himeshima has not seen anything like the sort of economic migration that has gutted thousands of “ghost villages” across Japan.

It is a statistic that has impressed local bureaucracies around the country, and appeals naturally to the instinctive belief within Japan's ruling bloc that unemployment quickly breeds social chaos and costs votes. Yoichi Masuzoe, the Labour Minister, last week described work sharing as a “revolutionary concept” and a source of worker solidarity in dire economic times.

The concept of work sharing has also appealed immediately to corporate Japan as a means of cutting costs while maintaining the image of social responsibility.

The country's largest companies, many of them exporters bludgeoned by the collapse of consumer confidence in the United States and Europe, are under enormous pressure to cut costs and have delightedly fallen on the phrase “work sharing” as the slogan to carry themselves through the meltdown.

In the auto industry Toyota, Isuzu, Mazda and Mitsubishi Motors have all introduced versions of the scheme. Trades unions, temporary workers and many ordinary Japanese are less thrilled by the concept than their employers and leaders might have imagined, and suspect that work sharing as practised on the mainland will be a poor imitation of the version on Himeshima.

Where previously the workforce looked favourably on management, it has come to view its corporate and political masters with suspicion and contempt. Many believe that “work sharing” is a disguise for “massive pay cuts” - and deep, quiet job cuts among all contract workers.

by Leo Lewis in Tokyo