JAPAN'S UNEMPLOYMENT RATE SEEN RISING TO 3.5 PCT Japan's unemployment rate is expected to continue to climb to about 3.5 pct within the next year from January's three pct record, senior economists, including Susumu Taketomi of Industrial Bank of Japan, said. December's 2.9 pct was the previous worst level since the government's Management and Coordination Agency began compiling statistics under its current system in 1953. "There is a general fear that we will become a country with high unemployment," said Takashi Kiuchi, senior economist for the Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan Ltd. The government, which published the January unemployment figures today, did not make any predictions. "At present we do not have a forecast for the unemployment rate this year, but it is difficult to foresee the situation improving," a Labour Ministry official said. Finance Minister Kiichi Miyazawa said the government had expected the increase and had set aside money to help 300,000 people find jobs in fiscal 1987 beginning in April. Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone told a press conference the record rate underlines the need to pass the 1987 budget which has been held up by opposition to proposed tax reforms. The yen's surge has caused layoffs in the mainstay steel and shipbuilding industries. Other export-dependent industries, such as cars and textiles, have laid off part-time employees and ceased hiring, economists said. Although the growing service industry sector has absorbed a great number of workers the trend is starting to slow down, said Koichi Tsukihara, Deputy General Manager of Sumitomo Bank Ltd's economics department. However, other economists disagreed, saying the service sector would be able to hire workers no longer needed by the manufacturing sector over the next five years. The economists said the service sector should grow as the government stimulates domestic demand under its program to transform the economy away from exports. Although Japanese unemployment rates appear lower than those of other industrialised nations, methods for calculating statistics make them difficult to compare, economists warned. "The three pct figure could translate into a relatively high figure if European methods were used," one economist said. More than half of January's 170,000 increase in jobless from a year earlier were those aged between 15 and 24, Sumitomo's Tsukihara said.