Japan Occupation Direct Crosswalk v1

What it is

The 328 minor groups of the Japan Standard Occupational Classification (JSCO), set as a statistical standard in December 2009 by Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) Notification No. 555 (excluding 999, not classifiable), are linked directly, not via ISCO-08, to an occupation master of 1,016 nodes: the 1,016 O*NET-SOC codes in the O*NET® 31.0 Database (O*NET-SOC 2019 taxonomy). There are no Japan-specific other occupations in v1. Relations follow the definitions of the ESCO–O*NET crosswalk (2022) and always read from the O*NET-SOC side.

Three AI judges worked independently: two Anthropic Claude runs using different evidence, and one OpenAI Codex run. A link is confirmed when the third judge took part and a majority held, provisional when it rests on the two Claude runs (or on a second-round review applied to them) without a third-judge majority, and reviewed when the operator checked it. 698 of the 1,619 links (43%) are provisional.

This is AI Changing Work's judgment mapping. It is not a correspondence from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) or from USDOL/ETA, and MIC has not reviewed it.

• The links do not pass through ISCO-08 (International Standard Classification of Occupations). The only JSCO–ISCO-08 comparison we found published by MIC is an approximate table at major-group level; we found no minor-group correspondence table (checked 2026-09-24), and AI Changing Work did not make one. The occupation descriptions of the two classifications were compared directly.
• Candidate Japan-specific occupations judged to have no O*NET-SOC counterpart were all resolved into O*NET-SOC links on operator review, so v1 has no Japanese other occupations (ACW-JP-*). The occupation master is therefore the 1,016 O*NET-SOC codes.
• v1 contains O*NET-SOC ↔ JSCO links only. It does not contain the occupation IDs or titles of job tag, the occupation information site of the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training (JILPT), or correspondences between job tag occupations and JSCO.
• Relation definitions follow the technical report of the ESCO–O*NET crosswalk (European Commission × U.S. Department of Labor, 2022), and relations always read from the O*NET-SOC occupation side.
• Used together with the direct crosswalks that link other countries' classifications (Korea, France, Spain, Germany) to the same O*NET-SOC code backbone, it connects those classifications through the same master. Other countries' other occupations are not included in this package.

Key figures

Occupation master

1,016

1,016 O*NET-SOC codes (no Japanese other occupations)

JSCO minor groups linked

328 / 328

excluding 999 · 0 groups left unlinked

Links

1,619

match 778 · related only 841

Status

916 · 698 · 5

confirmed · provisional · reviewed

Provisional links have no majority that includes the Codex judge: either Codex did not judge them, or it did and no majority including it was reached. To use confirmed links only, filter the status column to confirmed and reviewed.

Of the 1,016 O*NET-SOC occupations, 934 have a JSCO link (719 of them a match) and 82 have none. Of the JSCO minor groups, 273 have a match.

How it was made

• 1a Forward mapping — 923 O*NET-SOC occupations → JSCO minor groups (judges A and B, searching top-down from major to sub-major to minor group)
• 1b Cross-check — all rows where A and B disagreed + a sample of rows where they agreed → judge X (562 rows)
• 1c Residual resolution — rules applied to the rows left after three-judge agreement + a second-round review (judge R) of 88 items
• 3 Orphan reverse mapping — the 34 minor groups that no O*NET-SOC occupation pointed to in step 1 → the 1,016 O*NET-SOC occupations (judges A and B)
• 4 Review — the operator checked, one by one, the items without judge agreement and the other-occupation candidates (4 items)

Step 1 covered 923 = 1,016 O*NET-SOC occupations − 74 "All Other" residual occupations − 19 military (SOC 55); these 93 were reopened as candidates in step 3. For Japan there were no candidates chained through institutional correspondence tables, so no candidate hints were given; the judges searched the full list of minor groups themselves, from major to sub-major to minor group. Step 3 is the same step as the "orphan validation" of the ESCO–O*NET crosswalk, and X was not used in it (judges A and B only).

• The judges did not see each other's answers. The JSCO and job tag material was the Japanese source text and the O*NET material the English source text, both as published. The reasons were checked so that they could not quote job tag text.
• Judges B and X read job tag (JILPT) occupation titles, short descriptions, tasks and task importance order as reference material for their judgments. The editions of that material and its source statement are in METHODOLOGY.md §2; no job tag data is included in this table.
• The published files contain codes and titles only. They do not contain MIC descriptions or examples, job tag text, O*NET definition or task statements, or the judges' reasons. JSCO titles are copied unchanged from the Japanese titles of the notification items.

41% of the step-1 forward-mapping links (636 of 1,553) are provisional. They have no cross-model (Codex) majority, so they are less reliable than confirmed links.

• First choices X disagreed with (KEEP): for 40 items, X did not choose the first-choice minor group that A and B both chose, and the second-round review (R) kept all of them. Since a judge of the same model family upheld the judgment of the same model family, these are 2/3 but kept as provisional.
• Rule checks: 0 violations of "at most one exact per O*NET-SOC occupation". 0 of the 328 JSCO minor groups left unlinked.

Review

1. Judge self-checks (every batch): row count = input · codes exist (328 JSCO minor groups / O*NET-SOC codes in the O*NET 31.0 Database) · allowed values only · count of departures from the two-question rule table · whether the full list of minor groups was actually opened (call log check) · no quoting of job tag text in the reasons.
2. Cross-model check: rows where A and B disagreed were sent to X. X did not see the other judges' answers.
3. Human review: orphan reverse-mapping links without judge agreement, low-confidence additions from the second-round review, and other-occupation candidates.
4. Load and publication check: the rows in this package were extracted again from the production database, and a separate checker not used for loading or for building the published files rebuilt them row by row from the judgment ledger and the source files (JSCO 2009 items · O*NET 31.0 titles) and compared them.
5. Rule check: 0 violations of "at most one exact per O*NET-SOC occupation".

Limitations

• This is a judgment mapping. It has not been validated against employment statistics. o_in_r and r_in_o (the judges' estimate, made before choosing a relation, of what share of workers in one occupation fall within the other side) are the judges' estimates, not measured headcount ratios.
• The judges are AI models. Human review was limited to items without agreement and to the other-occupation candidates. The step-1c rules are not a row-by-row review.
• Provisional links are 43% of the total (698 of 1,619). Agreement between two judges of the same model family is not strong evidence. The second-round review (R) is also from the same model family.
• If JSCO 2009 is revised, only the changed minor groups will be judged again.
• For JSCO minor groups with no linked job tag occupation, judges B and X also judged from the MIC source text alone.
• Military occupations (SOC 55) and the "All Other" residual occupations were left out of step 1 and were candidates only in step 3.

Changes

• v1 (2026-10-09): First release.

Attribution required when you share this data

AI Changing Work (2026). Japan Occupation Direct Crosswalk v1 (JSCO 2009 ↔ O*NET-SOC 2019). https://aichanging.work/data/jp-direct-crosswalk. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Terms of use and sources

Below is the full text of the package's LICENSE file, reproduced as published. In short: AI Changing Work's contributions (links, relation labels, match class, stage, consensus and status values) may be used under CC BY 4.0 to the extent AI Changing Work holds rights in them. O*NET-SOC codes and titles remain under the O*NET® 31.0 Database license (CC BY 4.0) with the attribution below. JSCO codes and titles are items of MIC Notification No. 555 (2009), are not protected by copyright (Copyright Act of Japan, Art. 13(2)), and are not licensed by AI Changing Work.

This v1 contains links between O*NET-SOC codes and JSCO minor groups only. It does not contain job tag (JILPT) occupation IDs or titles, or their correspondences.

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