Japan implemented overtime limits for truck drivers on 1 April 2024. Under the new rules, drivers can log no more than 960 hours of overtime a year. The rules were driven by health-and-safety concerns after two decades of extended-hours accidents. The industry called it the “2024 problem” and the label stuck. On the government’s own estimate, Japan’s transport capacity will fall by roughly 34 per cent by 2030 unless the sector automates, a projection reported by CNBC and the World Economic Forum in their coverage of Japan’s automated-logistics plans.

Japan’s population peaked in 2008 and has been declining for seventeen years. The working-age population is shrinking faster than the total population because the age structure is skewed toward retirees. Truck driving, historically, has been a physically demanding occupation with an average driver age well above the working-age average. In Japan, the average long-haul driver age now approaches the fifties, per Prologis, the US-listed global industrial real-estate operator, in its analysis of the Japanese truck driver cap and its supply-chain effects. Retirement is accelerating; new entrants are not replacing retirees at anything close to a matching rate.

Immigration into truck driving runs into the political limits Japan has historically maintained around large-scale foreign labour intake. Higher wages would attract marginal supply but cannot close a numerical population gap. What the government has actually funded is automation, through an automated cargo corridor between Tokyo and Osaka set out in the next section. On the evidence of where public money is going, the working assumption in Tokyo is that automation has to fill the capacity gap that labour policy cannot. That assumption changes the investment case, turning automation from a technology-adoption decision into a question of availability in time.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism is developing an automated cargo corridor between Tokyo and Osaka, informally described as a “conveyor belt road”, per CNBC’s coverage of the MLIT announcement. The concept is a dedicated lane or other dedicated infrastructure within the existing road network for logistics, running twenty-four hours a day under automated and unstaffed conditions. Trial test runs are targeted for 2027 or early 2028, and full operations for the mid-2030s.

The 500-kilometre Tokyo-Osaka corridor links Japan’s two largest metropolitan economies and carries a large share of the country’s mid-to-long-haul freight, making it both the most consequential route to automate and the most technically complex: it includes urban and suburban approaches at both ends and passes through Nagoya. The government corridor is a fifteen-year project. That timescale is longer than the acute phase of the 2024 problem, which is why the immediate mitigation is happening on private-sector highway autonomy.

T2, the autonomous-trucking company backed by Mitsui and Co, began Japan’s first commercial Level 2 (driver-supervised) autonomous trunk-line operations between the Kanto and Kansai regions in July 2025, and has set a goal of a commercial Level 4 highway transport service by 2027, according to T2’s stated plans (Robotics and Automation News). Long-haul highway driving between Osaka and the Tokyo metropolitan area is among the highest-volume, most standardised segments of the Japanese trucking network, and among the most exposed to the 2024 overtime cap because the round-trip distance exceeds a single legally permitted overtime shift.

Highway autonomy on the Kansai-Kanto run is Level 4 autonomy, in which the vehicle drives itself on limited-access highways with human drivers handling the surface-road segments at each end. Full self-driving is not on the table. The economic gain is driver-hour elimination on the highway leg, not driver elimination as such, which lets the same driver population support more delivery volume without breaching the overtime cap.

Nippon Express Holdings, Yamato Transport, Sagawa Express and Japan Post all operate long-haul networks exposed to the same overtime constraint that is driving the T2 project. Whether they follow Japan’s first commercial highway-autonomy operator into their own networks will depend on how T2 performs as it scales toward Level 4.

Korea, Taiwan and, over a longer horizon, Thailand and China each face a working-age population set to decline within the decade, and each runs the long-haul overland freight networks where a driver shortfall bites hardest. Singapore, port-centric and short-haul, sits outside that comparison. Japan is running the experiment first. The template it is establishing has three components: government-led corridor infrastructure investment, regulatory clearance for private-operator highway autonomy, and a labour-hour cap that forces industry adoption rather than deferral. How far that template travels across the region depends on whether each government will fund the infrastructure leg as directly as Tokyo has.

Three signals. The first is T2’s progress toward commercial Level 4 highway operations, and the route configuration it settles on, against its 2027 goal. The second is MLIT’s budget allocations for the Tokyo-Osaka automated corridor. The third is an updated government or Japan Trucking Association estimate of the actual capacity shortfall against the 34 per cent 2030 projection.

The demographic clock is not going to slow, and the technology and the policy have to keep pace with it.