After the breakout of the economic crisis in the fall of 2008,many Japanese manufacturing companies announced a series of organizational restructuring and plant closures.This resulted in many job losses,devastated the local economies that depended on export-oriented industries,and buoyed up the public anxiety for the future.The employment insecurity caused by the economic crisis made us realize the intrinsic problems of mediated employment such as temporary staffing or contract work.Mediated workers have employment contracts with temporary agencies or contract companies and not with the companies where they actually work.Because of the absence of a direct employment contract,mediated workers who lose their jobs do not express opposition to the workplace companies.Japanese companies,in particular,car and electronics manufacturers,aggressively employed mediated labor to deal with the fluctuation of production and to squeeze the labor cost.When the economic crisis broke out and an excess of labor accrued,it was the temporary staffs and contract workers that first lost their jobs.This revealed that the flexibility of employment,which companies can obtain by utilizing mediated employment,was founded on the workers’ risk of an unstable life: the risk was actualized by the economic crisis.In my paper,I first examine the spread of mediated employment in Japan.The upsurge of mediated employment in Japan is closely related to the deregulation process.The spatial distribution of mediated labor is also analyzed by census mapping.Then,I investigate the impacts of the job-cuts after the economic crisis in the case of Oita prefecture where many export-oriented manufacturing companies are located and build a flexible production system by broadly using mediated employment.Realizing that the job loss was inevitable,some local governments quickly decided to conduct emergency employment measures.My paper discusses the achievements and limitations of these measures.