Here's a graph for the Japanese unemployment rate from 2003 to present:
The BLS system unfortunately doesn't seem to have a good way to make sure that if I use one of their graphs that you will actually see the same graph, so here is the same data for the U.S. in both graphic and tabular form just to be sure:
Series Id: LNS14000000  |
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| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2003 | 5.8 | 5.9 | 5.9 | 6.0 | 6.1 | 6.3 | 6.2 | 6.1 | 6.1 | 6.0 | 5.9 | 5.7 | |
| 2004 | 5.7 | 5.6 | 5.7 | 5.5 | 5.6 | 5.6 | 5.5 | 5.4 | 5.4 | 5.4 | 5.4 | 5.4 | |
| 2005 | 5.2 | 5.4 | 5.1 | 5.1 | 5.1 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 4.9 | 5.1 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 4.9 | |
| 2006 | 4.7 | ||||||||||||
As you can see from the data, over the last two years generally Japan's unemployment rate has been more than 0.2% below ours. For instance, in 2005, Japan's unemployment rate never exceed 4.6%, whereas ours was generally about 5.0%, with lows of 4.9% in August, October, and December.)
As to stringency, well, actually, I don't think either the U.S. or Japan uses a particularly stringent method (in fact, I think Germany's new methodology for calculating unemployment rates could be considered more stringent than either Japan's or the United States' and it is currently 12.2%), but I believe that the U.S. and Japanese methodologies are now not all that far different with the latest revisions to the Japanese system. While I always have exactly the same question as you raised about how comparable rates actually are, I have less concern now about comparing the U.S. and Japanese rates.
Unfortunately, I don't have time presently to dig out the description of the exact methodologies for you, but both are available on government websites (for the U.S., it would be found on the BLS, and for Japan it is probably on the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare website.)