> Personally (living in Japan) I've never experienced something like this, but it does happen.
I have some friends-of-friends living in Japan. It’s interesting to hear their experience with culture evolve over time. They openly admit that they get a free pass around some of the more difficult cultural situations due to not being born and raised originally in Japan.
Hearing their stories has definitely given me a different perspective on some of the overly idealized views of Japan that get repeated online. A lot of social media posters with experience in Japan fall into a routine where they post about how things in Japan are so much better and more straightforward than in the United States (and other countries) because it gets attention. They conveniently leave out a lot of the less romantic and positive differences though.
> A lot of social media posters with experience in Japan fall into a routine where they post about how things in Japan are so much better and more straightforward than in the United States (and other countries) because it gets attention. They conveniently leave out a lot of the less romantic and positive differences though.
That kind of whataboutism is a common issue in politics though. Why can't we all go and look for every field of politics look what other countries do and if what they do is better, then do that as well without taking the worse parts?
For example, look at Switzerland when it comes to education, to Germany's Mittelstand and trades education system for a vibrant and healthy SME business field, to the US for access to venture capital and cutting-edge research, to Austria or Denmark for their pension system, to Japan for public transport reliability...
Often, because some entrenched interests stand in the way.
Famously, NYC builds new subway tunnels very expensively, about three times more expensively than Paris. What stands in the way of a substantial cost reduction? Many factors, including local unions that defend their lucrative turf.
The French withdrew from the project of the Californian High-Speed Rail blaming total governmental dysfunction and comparing Californian public sector negatively to Morocco, where a French-built HSR actually was built successfully.
Well, Morocco can hardly be called a democracy [1]. It's easier to (literally) bulldoze through obstacles when you're a kingdom looking for a fancy toy for the ruler to show off, compared to building infrastructure in a democracy.
Many of these projects were started in times where the needs of the infrastructure had priority over local objections and environmental protection laws were not much of a thing though. There's a reason most of Europe's rail network is decades, sometimes centuries old, and there hasn't been much new construction for a loooong time.
Typical contracts will require a 1 month period between you announce you're quitting and you effective termination date.
If you have enough paid vacation you could pad that period with your vacation, but it requires pre-acceptance, so cooperation from your employer. Otherwise you're into non-accepted vacation territory, which could lead to financial penalties (basically withdrawing your salary, with potential tax adjustements. They could also try to sue you, and given you're fleeing assume they'd get a default judgement for instance)
Then there's all the paperwork you actually want to have properly done by your employer. They're legally obligated to, but it's always harder if you're in adversarial mode.
All in all, you can still quit cold turkey ("bakkure"), but that's a usually a PITA. Getting a pro to negociate a clean separation will be better than just disappearing, if you're not in the mood/capacity to face your employer.
PS; There are magical words that would give any employee an immediate option to never see their employer again. I don't want them in my comments, but anyone interested will find them with a simple search.
> If you have enough paid vacation you could pad that period with your vacation, but it requires pre-acceptance, so cooperation from your employer.
It doesn't necessarily need their cooperation. A letter sent by registered mail saying "I am using my paid leave for x days from y day", then another one saying "I resign on y day + two weeks" is enough. Of course, people would actually need to know and be willing to use their labor rights in order to do that, which is the service that quitting agents are providing.
I would assume most HN users are in the United States, where the notice period is two weeks by custom, or thirty seconds if you are mad enough that you don't care about things like references and eligibility for rehire. The latter is considered unprofessional but generally won't keep you from getting another job. Most people aren't aware that European-style job contracts exist.
I've had lots of arguments with Europeans on the internet about whether the benefit of their job security exceeds the costs of what Americans who are aware of the European system tend to perceive as indentured servitude.
In the US we have at-will employment, which online people like to only talk about the negatives (employer can fire you at any time without notice), but it goes the other way too: We can quit with no notice. It's still courtesy to give two weeks notice though, to handle transferring work/knowledge.
4 full calendar months for my current resignation period, e.g. if I resign today, my last official day will be the 31 March (December, January, February , March).
Contracts might require it, but the law says 2 weeks (on a regular full time contract or a limited contract after the first year) and contracts can't supersede the law.
It puts the employee in the strongest position, but doesn't completely voids a contract. For instance the employer can still fight it by justifying a necessity for them to have a longer period, or convincing a court the contract had enough provisions to make it a reasonable clause.
It would be a huge PITA on both sides though, I don't see many companies wanting that much trouble just for a single employee trying to leave the boat.
Are the actual official Japanese words for sexual harassment and power harassment... just Japanese pronunciations / abbreviations of the English terms?
In my experience, the connotations are very similar to English use. What matters is the context. Say sekuhara or sexual harassment at work: very serious connotation. Amongst friends or in media (comdey/anime/etc): potentially frivolous/unserious connotation.
It's very different IME. A catchy abbreviation of a serious subject would almost always be inappropriate in English-speaking spheres, especially in a business setting.
The second reddit link above includes an example, where the person has a visa change and would get in trouble with immigration if they continue to remain employed.
If the person was leaving because they accepted an offer from another employer, being on two payrolls simultaneously might also be a problem.
I think the real percentage of employees using a resignation agency is probably lower than 18.6%. Internet surveys tend to be less accurate and I don't know the methodology they've used to select the 800 or so participants.
But companies bullying employees on resignation seems to be a bigger issue than I thought.
Reading this, I was assuming that this behavior was enforced by reference checks for new hires being commonplace. However, the few sources I found in a quick search make it seem like asking/requiring references is a more recent practice due to western influence.
I too was struggling to understand the problem described herr: does unilaterally quitting a job actually harm the employee's future employment prospects inside Japan, or is the problem here just a matter of culturally enforced social stigma?
There are documents that your former employer often needs to provide you for stuff like health insurance. And now suddenly it's some direct confrontation to get a document, while your future employer (Who could still just let you go!) is asking you for a document to move forward. So you're facing a bunch of time pressure in gnarly cases, without many people around to help you out.
There are procedures to get around this stuff but since it's not the common case, when it does happen suddenly you get to learn about labor law.
I think anywhere in the world, when there is active antagonism causing bureaucracy to not be able to move forward, most people freeze up like a deer caught in headlights. Turns out that being a sociopath can be quite helpful for exploiting workers!
Sometimes I wonder what a society would look like if they could very reliably identify sociopathy at an early age, and then either euthanize those people or at least blacklist them so they can never have any job higher than a janitor. Would such a society work better than current societies? Or would it be like that episode of Star Trek where Kirk gets split into good and bad versions, and the good version was too ineffectual to be a decent captain without his bad side?
More like "It's a Good Life" from the Twilight zone. Have unhappy or bad thoughts? Off to the "corn field". Disagree with the decision makers? Want to do things differently? Want to just be different? Off to the corn field!
Sociopathy is no more a single thing than cancer or the common cold are single things. Even less so, because it is only defined by subjective interpretation of outward symptoms.
In the episode, the main character is the sociopath. My use of it is to say that giving people the power to execute or blacklist sociopaths will inevitable create more, only they'll be the ones in power.
"Lack of empathy" can easily be interpreted in many ways. What you are upset about are the actions of those you accuse of not having empathy. You think that killing anyone without empathy is the solution. You clearly have no empathy for those without empathy.
At least three of the four things you listed are things we can already detect. This doesn't make much sense as a reply to "what if we could detect sociopathy". And that's on top of it being a bad analogy to swap different traits and actions arbitrarily.
Suggesting we murder ("euthanize") people who are predisposed to a lack of empathy is probably the least empathetic reaction I could think of. The proposed answer to sociopathy is itself sociopathic.
This inherent contradiction is evidence enough that no sufficiently objective metric may distinguish "sociopath" from "not-sociopath". The power offered is great enough that it would be immediately abused.
Can anyone in Japan share what ground truth looks like around this? Does this churn matter to businesses when they’re in a labor supply shortage? Do these folks have other jobs they’re moving to? Or are they potentially NEETs bailing on being employed?
However I would say that IMO it's another case of foreigners buzzing by depicting boring and common stuff under a "weird Japan" light.
Shitty companies manipulating employees to stop them from resigning is something that exists in any country. And this escalating to the labor authorities or going through a lawyer is not a rare thing anywhere either.
It happens more frequently in Japan because the culture of not being confrontational is strong. The fact that lawyers can afford to specialize in this matter alone is just a logical result of the larger number of customers.
EDIT: I also want to add this: if you have been in a company for a while, you are eventually going to see or hear about how resignation is handled for other employees. If you want to quit and already know that the company is going to harrass you and make your life hell, is it so weird to save your time and mental health to delegate all of that to a dedicated professional?
Does it? You hear stories in the US of people trying to manipulate employees into not quitting or lambasting them for leaving, but trying to actually, seriously deny their ability to quit is nearly unheard of.
I don't recall seeing examples in the US of directly preventing someone from resigning. But I have read about situations where companies make it harder to get the next job, essentially forcing someone to stay in a bad work situation. For example, non-competes for service jobs (fast-food, hairdressers, etc.)
They would absolutely do that if contracts would be stronger. But as they want to keep their ease of firing and laying off people, contracts are weak in both direction.
IMO, it's an tortured example of Hanlons Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I see tons of shitty stuff roll downwards to employees in US companies, but I never see the kind of competence at the upper levels to pull off the kind of manipulation implied here. It's just negligence, ignorance, and dysfunctionality that tends to screw us yanks at the bottom.
> And what do you think a broad non-compete clause is?
Pretty universally illegal. California doesn't have noncompete clauses at all. Texas, the state I'm most familiar with, doesn't allow them to be enforced except for skills that are proprietary to an employer, .e.g., supporting specific software in a specific way or something. Pretty sure most states that have them are the same. Making burgers isn't going to do it, and nobody would sue you over it anyway, they'd sue the new employer whose lawyers will know better.
I have had an employer try to get me to sign an illegal noncompete before, but that was because it was a small employer who didn't know the law. When I quit I politely informed him that it was unenforceable. He didn't try. That doesn't mean employers who know better don't try to intimidate employees, but they could just as easily threaten to break your kneecaps. Probably they won't.
> Shitty companies manipulating employees to stop them from resigning is something that exists in any country. And this escalating to the labor authorities or going through a lawyer is not a rare thing anywhere either.
It is? In what other countries are we talking about here where a company escalates to the labor authorities to prevent you from quitting? Usually this kind of thing is reserved to harass visa holders, not native workers.
My gf used one. She had a legal right to quit but it was inconvenient for the company. They refused multiple times, they also gaslit with "what about the children we teach, if you leave the school might have to close" etc. etc.
Using the agency means you do a 10 minute phone call and that's it. You don't even have to work your remaining days or talk to the company ever again. The agencies seem to have some legal powers that a normal person doesn't, or at least in reality they get results much faster and aren't allowed to screw around.
What did amuse me is there's a discount if you use them multiple times.
> The agencies seem to have some legal powers that a normal person doesn't
I suspect the power that they have is actually knowing the law. Also by hiring one the employee has shown they are willing to hire a lawyer, so the employer can't bluff with legal threats. And very few employees are actually going to be worth the trouble to sue
The special powers are probably the following sentence: "sure, you could sue; also, we could check more closely for labor law violations; which would you like?".
Based on what I’ve seen and heard (luckily, not experienced), I think it depends on the company. Smaller ones with older management may be both more reliant on the labor and more used to lifetime employment. I suspect there’s probably some maximal fuckiness point. Most companies aren’t like that, but resignation in Japan has a lot of stigma even if everything goes well, so many people will use these services just so they don’t have to deal with it.
The way the culture works there’s no way for the managers to be anything but unfailingly polite to an external party that calls to resign on behalf of the employee.
So how is it the company can “refuse to let them quit” or “force” an employee to go to a temple? What is the actual enforcement mechanism other than guilt?
Apart from the paperwork that you need to pass on to your next employer, salaries can be structured in a way that makes the base pay rather low, but the yearly income is boosted up to a reasonable level by bonuses, overtime allowance (fixed monthly amount paid whether you work the overtime or not), etc. If the company doesn't want to let someone quit, they can make it financially painful by withholding these things, or subtracting "damages" caused by the employee leaving.
EDIT: Come to think of it I'm actually not 100% sure about the legality of this, but they sure try it!
They can reduce or plain not pay your bonus, yeah. But making the employee pay for "damages", even by subtracting them from remaining pay or bonuses, is very very illegal.
The problem is these companies are comfortable with this level of illegal, because they're multiplying potential fines by the odds the employee will actually go to the authorities, and then weighing that against the exploitation benefits multiplied by their whole workforce.
Japanese companies have some culture of bullying and harassment. The laws against it are limited and enforcement is toothless. But yeah, it's mostly ultimately a lack of courage from the employees in question.
It’s definitely illegal, labor rights are pretty strong in Japan. I think your typical Japanese person is just very compliant when faced with an uncomfortable situation and bad bosses abuse that dynamic.
> It’s definitely illegal, labor rights are pretty strong in Japan.
In some ways they are. Notably Japan has no concept of constructive dismissal, and companies have a pretty broad right to assign work and even to assign someone to work at a faraway office. There may be some anti-harassment law on the books, but it's very hard to get anything recognised under it, and if someone is just constantly assigned bad work, or no work, they have very little recourse.
And even if you could win a lawsuit, Japan doesn't do punitive damages or damages for emotional distress. So you'd be able to claim, maybe, lost wages for your time out of work, and... that's probably it.
Labor rights are far stronger in Japan than countries like the US, but like regulations everywhere, are only as strong as they are actively enforced, where companies suffer meaningful penalties for violating them. Japan is by no means a place where this is true, such that companies fear violating them.
Withholding a letter of recommendation maybe? If the culture truly is such that you get a job in your early 20s and stay there until you retire or die, then presumably a job seeker in their 30s would be virtually unhireable without a good explanation.
You need proof of layooff (離職票) to collect you unemployment benefits. It is illegal not to issue one, but it is possible for the company can cause you some pain in issuing it.
I don't understand, what really constitutes a "won't let me quit" scenario? If I hand in my resignation, I don't really care whether my employer rips it or not. I consider my contract terminated because it's a contract that can be terminated by either party to the contract. If I have a notice period, I'll work that period, then stop showing up. If they want to consider the contract as still valid, they can. And then they'd have to pay me, but I don't see why they would if I'm not turning up to work? There must be something in the above reasoning that isn't correct?
You probably wouldn't also give your letter of resignation with your knees on the floor, asking the boss to "forgive me because i failed you", right ?
Yes, japan is a whole different mentality, with a completely different set of values and social norms ( mostly focused on "don't show disrespect to others", and "don't embarrass yourself"). Traveling from japan to the US/Hawaii was probably where i experienced the largest culture shock (and not in a flattering way for americans). It felt like going from civilization to barbaric lands.
On the other hand i can see why some japanese people can't handle that much pressure on their everyday behavior and prefer the western mentality at some point in their life.
Imagine you have a strong deference to authority and an incredible fear of confrontation. It would be very easy for someone in a position of authority to take advantage of you.
People don't always do what's in their best interest. People talk to the police without a lawyer all the time. People sign away their rights just because they don't want to push back on things. It takes guts to stand up for yourself.
Maybe it's not in spite of but rather because of them?
To me, it seems like if you were designing a brand new society optimized only to maximize the countries GDP, you'd implement the Japanese model - employees who never leave their employers, extremely long work hours and mandatory after work social activities.
China, Japan and SK have all effectively implemented a version of this and their economic growth post WWII has been nothing short of remarkable (China was poorer than Sub Saharan Africa in the 50's).
Obviously, you could say this has not been going very well for Japan more recently but I'd argue the main drawback to this paradigm is the inevitable population implosion.
As with other places, it worked extremely well as long as the society was inherently sexist, and women weren't allowed to have "men's jobs" and were basically forced by society at large to be mothers and homemakers for husbands who were almost never at home and who never spent any time with their kids. With nothing better to do with their lives and time, and reliable birth control not yet invented or easily available, people had lots of kids to keep the system going.
Nowadays, women want to have more meaning in their lives than just being married to some guy they barely know or care about and raising his kids as some kind of servant with 2nd-class citizen rights. This isn't just in Japan, it's in every developed nation. The result of this is a far lower birthrate, so you can't have a super-high GDP for too long; you get a boost at the beginning because nearly 100% of adults can now contribute to GDP, but it burns out in a few decades because there's no one to replace them.
The result of this is lower birthrate in the current cultural configuration.
As is, women regularly delayed having children until they're near or past their fertility window, if they want children at all. In our current society, it's difficult to both have a career and be a mother.
Very, very true. Professional women these days are going to extreme lengths now to have children at older ages: IVF, etc. As it is, it starts getting difficult at around age 35. Yet, advanced education can easily last until your late 20s, and your late 20s and 30s are the time when you need to build your career.
If scientists could come up with a way of making women much more fertile up to, say, age 60 (in an affordable and reliable way I mean, current treatments are unreliable and horrifically expensive), I wonder what effect this would have on the birth rate.
I'm not sure I'm joking when I say: if you manage to convincingly solve the "work/children" dilemma you may become a strong candidate for a Nobel prize (or at least The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences).
Nah, I would propose that people stop trying to "have it all", accept reality, and settle for one or the other (mainly one for men, and the other for women).
Nobody wants to hear that these days, if they ever did.
I could only find data for the last decade quickly, but looking at this, the USA was not the leader in GDP growth. It was in absolute GDP though, but OP was talking about growth
Japan's economic growth started well before World War 2. In fact, Japan wouldn't have been able to fight WW2 against the US for so long if it wasn't a fully industrialized country by that time. The country was devastated after the war (just as Germany was), but it wasn't starting from scratch. Many (if not most) of the large Japanese manufacturing conglomerates of today have been successful zaibatsu before the war, that have been only partially broken down and restructured as keiretsu.
I think it's a compelling story to see Japan, the Asian Tigers (two of them former colonies of Japan, the other two former British colonies) and China as having the same growth story, but I don't think it's the same story in all of these places. Outside commentators love to bring up Confucianism, but Confucianism (just like Christianity or Buddhism) is a pretty ancient philosophy and religion that have seen many iterations and has taken many different, perhaps even contradictory shapes and forms over the years. A certain version of it was extremely influential in Japan during the Edo period, but a modern Japanese would probably cite Confucius directly less than a culturally Chinese person would do. And it's certainly an influence in Japan, but the culture is just so different than China, which had its own local influences (including decades of Communism and a not-so-minor Cultural Revolution which targeted the "Four Olds").
I think the best explanation is that all of these countries (in their respective growth period!) had a good degree of political stability and achieved the necessary level of education. They all exercised government guidance through export-oriented policies, but left enough leeway for private companies to choose their own way (in other words, a heavy dose of government meddling that would make neoliberals blush, but not a full-on command economy). And most of all, the timing was right. These countries started to grow their industry (or rebuild it and re-orient it towards export in Japan's case) while fertility was still high and they were relatively poorer than the countries which bought up their goods. And of course, this all happened while world was rapidly globalizing.
It's easy to miss the complex factors involved and recommend the export-oriented playbook to countries where it won't fit, or to think that the same playbook would work forever. It's also easy to blame culture when the things fail. Within Japan, you'd find many commentators who believe the attitudes during the Showa era (1926-1989) were different and the current generation is just incapable of hard work, innovation or whatever else.
But from all I've read and heard about Showa era businesses, they were far less efficient than current Japanese businesses are. The businesses culture was probably probably less risk-averse, but that aversion is itself partly the result of decades of having a somewhat stagnant economy. My pet theory is that Japan was successful during its economic miracle period DESPITE the vast inefficiencies of its corporate culture. It only had western economies to compete with (the Asian Tigers hadn't started to roar yet and China was still far away from industrialization) and the wages in Japan were initially far lower than in the US. From various productivity metrics inefficiencies in other Western countries probably weren't much different back then (this tracks, since it all happened before the mass digitization of the workplace and government which Japan was late to). and despite management, office work and sales practices being inefficient, Japanese companies (most famously Toyota) have developed innovative methods for increasing efficiency and quality on the factory floor.
Fast forward to the 1990s, and Japan is seeing fierce competition from other cheaper producers on many products even before the baby boomer generation is facing retirement with a shrinking population. During that period rich economies are improving their productivity, while poorer economies can just undercut prices due to cheaper labor. Toyota's innovative manufacturing methods are getting adopted outside Japan as well. Japan still leads in places where it has technology advantages or even just a brand or market capture, but in general competition just becomes a lot harder.
At this point, mature economies can only do so much. No matter what the government and individual corporations do, we cannot expect anything close to the growth rates of the 1950s-1970s again. But inefficiencies are clearly hurting Japanese businesses.
Japan is one of the oldest nations in the world (in terms of demographics), and, unlike other super-old nations (Germany, Italy), is refusing to let in immigrants. Under such conditions, having just 0% GDP growth, and not a constant recession, is not a bad result.
This isn't ineficiency though, probably closer to bullying.
Quitting a job has no complex moving parts, and most corporation will deal with it with minimal paperwork (you really only need to prove you gave them your resignation. An email reply would be enough legally).
The issues these new graduates (the source of the TFA is MyNavi, which is new graduate centric) are facing are arbitrary, purposefuly set to make their life harder.
W.r.t quitting jobs, the economic inefficiency is that knowledge doesnt diffuse properly. A certain amount of corporate mobility is hugely beneficial. But that's just the tip of the iceberg for bad corporate culture; the social binge drinking, poor sleep, no social life, etc must be bad for productivity... I don't understand how they manage it.
Is that a cause, though? I can see both as being consequences of the sheer amount of money sloshing around in the Silicon Valley. It generally helps things because there’s just so much resources to tap. It also helps employees getting poached with better salaries and compensation. But it does not mean that it can be replicated that way in another country.
You're right. It's not that disloyalty necessarily enables better software but that, apparently, loyalty is not a requirement.
It can also be true that the work culture in Japan stymies effective modern software development. I've heard anecdotes to this effect but it doesn't seem like something you could easily measure.
It works by having it beaten into for you several decades of your childhood that you don't speak up, you put the groups first, and appearances trump reality.
I don't necessarily think it's any better or any worse than western culture. My perspective is "it just has different failure modes".
That isn't really what I meant, and yeah, I was ambiguous. When you have a culture where people can't tell the boss things he doesn't want to hear -- of which resignation is an example -- how do companies expect to get honest feedback? How do they detect problems earlier in the process? Etc.
Cultures are never just dysfunctional; there are usually a complicated set of compensations that makes the dysfunction more bearable. I'm curious how that works.
They don't want feedback. They want you to listen and obey. It doesn't actually matter if things are wrong, so long as in the moment the boss thinks they aren't, then to him they aren't since appearances trump reality. The boss would prefer you didn't disturb that. The result is sometimes things just blow up spectacularly later on down the track but "shou ga nai".
The compensation that makes the dysfunction more bearable is the culture of "gaman" which is deeply, deeply ingrained from a young age. It's normal for them to just suck it up and tolerate shit they don't like. It's a way of life. For everything thing else there is "shou ga nai" which often translates to "it can't be helped" and many Westerners think it's just Japanese people giving up too easily and don't really get it, but it comes from the Buddhist philosophy of accepting things as they are.
Agreed and I would add to the list the ungodly amount of hours they work. I know per hour they might not be as productive (or simply held back by antiquated processes within their companies) but they seem to make up for it in part by working so much overtime.
Yes, a large part of why Japanese society appears (and in fact performs) so perfect is because of an absolute fear of shame.
From the moment you are born you are taught to care about what and how others think and feel about you and your conduct. If it's not your social peers, it's the literal Sun ("Otentou-sama") looking down upon you and judging your every single moment. If you shame yourself, you also bring shame upon your family and your ancestors both living and dead.
To be clear: This does work, and most Japanese are happy to serve society rather than feel compelled to do so at threat of cancellation. There are also benefits for the compliant, namely in the form of social safety nets both legal and social to ensure a minimum standard of living.
Japanese expats are a particular bunch, they left Japan because they couldn't stand the shaming and strict adherence to social codes. A kind of "you can't fire me if I quit" response.
The survey (https://career-research.mynavi.jp/reserch/20241003_86953/) which is the basis for the 1 in 5 claim seems sus, I would bet it's not true. (I don't read Japanese, but had Claude read it for me; if someone who does read Japanese could confirm, that would be interesting.)
They say 16.6% of people who changed jobs last year used these services, but only 23.2% of companies report having any employees use them. If 16.6% is correct, the % of companies number should be much higher, supposing companies have multiple resignations per year.
The method for the first number on how they found their respondents is described just as "internet survey," with no further info. There are a lot of ways to do this that would over-sample people who use these services.
I think there is a possibility that this year's figures will be significantly higher.
The resignation agency service was widely reported in Japanese media in the first half of this year, which made its existence known to the public. This trend can also be confirmed on Google Trends[1].
In fact, the representative of 退職代行モームリ (Taishoku-daikō Mōmuri), the largest resignation agency company, stated in an interview that the number of users during this year's onboarding season was ten times that of last year[2].
Sounds like the issues around dating, marriage and children aren’t really cut and dry in Japan. The population crisis isn’t a “just so” thing. The society optimized for one set of criteria but is buckling under others.
> Those fortunate enough to leave are sometimes asked to send apology letters to colleagues or deliver speeches expressing regret for their “selfishness” and “disrespect.” Of course, these are the most extreme cases–but they do occur, according to Momuri.
So, not that much different mindset than a US startup founder who takes 70% equity, while offering the first hire 0.5% to 2% in options (vesting over 4 years, with exercise rules that further discourage ever getting any equity at all)?
(Edit: Fastest downvoting I've ever seen on HN. :)
The "selfishness"/"disrespect" is literally just politeness, the person writing it is often not genuinely thinking this, and the people reading it also know it's bullshit. Journalists should stop directly translating Japanese as the nuance is lost.
if I was a douchebag boss, I would manipulate them into staying then publicly reprimand and fire them shortly thereafter to come out a "winner" in the situation. I haven't seen managers stoop that low yet, but state-side I've seen managers take extreme personal offense and paranoia about team morale when there was even one flight risk on the horizon. (omg they didn't even pay $100k for their once-in-a-lifetime chance to exercise our magic stock!)
Same. It’s over, you won’t get performance or loyalty above some cold baseline, while still paying for the most expensive class of resources. What’s the point even?
I can guess that maybe it’s a well-known cultural thing that only prevents people of this culture to think about leaving. A sort of a group control thing.
> Some companies are notorious for resignation difficulties, excessive overtime and intense work pressure. So much so that they are labeled as “black companies.” The problem has become so severe that Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s Labor Standards Bureau has published a list of these companies to warn potential job seekers.
If only they were in a position to do something about it.
Do that in Japan and you're gonna be unemployed forever. You'll either open your own business (fat chance of that succeeding) or move abroad (again, with what money in your 20's?).
Yeah, that's why these agencies exist. Use them and you can literally stop showing up to work and still get all your required documents, with no hassle.
For anyone going through anything like this, one letter from a lawyer will turn everything around in minutes and in Japan, legal advice is fairly affordable.
Recently I someone living in Japan on Reddit who experienced a "they won't let me quit" scenario which may provide some perspective on what it's like: https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/comments/1gk4enr/current_... https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/comments/1goyw04/end_of_a...
Personally (living in Japan) I've never experienced something like this, but it does happen.
> Personally (living in Japan) I've never experienced something like this, but it does happen.
I have some friends-of-friends living in Japan. It’s interesting to hear their experience with culture evolve over time. They openly admit that they get a free pass around some of the more difficult cultural situations due to not being born and raised originally in Japan.
Hearing their stories has definitely given me a different perspective on some of the overly idealized views of Japan that get repeated online. A lot of social media posters with experience in Japan fall into a routine where they post about how things in Japan are so much better and more straightforward than in the United States (and other countries) because it gets attention. They conveniently leave out a lot of the less romantic and positive differences though.
> A lot of social media posters with experience in Japan fall into a routine where they post about how things in Japan are so much better and more straightforward than in the United States (and other countries) because it gets attention. They conveniently leave out a lot of the less romantic and positive differences though.
That kind of whataboutism is a common issue in politics though. Why can't we all go and look for every field of politics look what other countries do and if what they do is better, then do that as well without taking the worse parts?
For example, look at Switzerland when it comes to education, to Germany's Mittelstand and trades education system for a vibrant and healthy SME business field, to the US for access to venture capital and cutting-edge research, to Austria or Denmark for their pension system, to Japan for public transport reliability...
Often, because some entrenched interests stand in the way.
Famously, NYC builds new subway tunnels very expensively, about three times more expensively than Paris. What stands in the way of a substantial cost reduction? Many factors, including local unions that defend their lucrative turf.
The French withdrew from the project of the Californian High-Speed Rail blaming total governmental dysfunction and comparing Californian public sector negatively to Morocco, where a French-built HSR actually was built successfully.
Well, Morocco can hardly be called a democracy [1]. It's easier to (literally) bulldoze through obstacles when you're a kingdom looking for a fancy toy for the ruler to show off, compared to building infrastructure in a democracy.
[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/538683/umfrag...
Still, plenty of democracies managed what California couldn't, and built a useful HSR network.
Which in Cali would mean SF to LA, and that is probably not going to happen.
Many of these projects were started in times where the needs of the infrastructure had priority over local objections and environmental protection laws were not much of a thing though. There's a reason most of Europe's rail network is decades, sometimes centuries old, and there hasn't been much new construction for a loooong time.
"There's a reason most of Europe's rail network is decades, sometimes centuries old, and there hasn't been much new construction for a loooong time."
I beg to differ. There is quite a lot of HSR construction in Europe going on right now.
Italy: Brescia-Verona, Verona-Vicenza, Vicenza-Padua, the Brenner Basis Tunnel to Austria, Turin-Lyon, Naples-Bari, Palermo-Catania-Messina
France: Bordeaux-Toulouse, Lyon-Turin to Italy
Spain: Murcia-Almería, the Basque Y, Burgos–Vitoria-Gasteiz, Madrid-Extremadura
Austria: Koralmbahn, Semmering Basis Tunnel
Germany-Denmark: Fehmarn Tunnel
UK: London-Birmingham
The Baltic States: Rail Baltica
All in active construction right now. Some with delays, as usual.
why can't you just email them and stop turning up?
Typical contracts will require a 1 month period between you announce you're quitting and you effective termination date.
If you have enough paid vacation you could pad that period with your vacation, but it requires pre-acceptance, so cooperation from your employer. Otherwise you're into non-accepted vacation territory, which could lead to financial penalties (basically withdrawing your salary, with potential tax adjustements. They could also try to sue you, and given you're fleeing assume they'd get a default judgement for instance)
Then there's all the paperwork you actually want to have properly done by your employer. They're legally obligated to, but it's always harder if you're in adversarial mode.
All in all, you can still quit cold turkey ("bakkure"), but that's a usually a PITA. Getting a pro to negociate a clean separation will be better than just disappearing, if you're not in the mood/capacity to face your employer.
PS; There are magical words that would give any employee an immediate option to never see their employer again. I don't want them in my comments, but anyone interested will find them with a simple search.
> If you have enough paid vacation you could pad that period with your vacation, but it requires pre-acceptance, so cooperation from your employer.
It doesn't necessarily need their cooperation. A letter sent by registered mail saying "I am using my paid leave for x days from y day", then another one saying "I resign on y day + two weeks" is enough. Of course, people would actually need to know and be willing to use their labor rights in order to do that, which is the service that quitting agents are providing.
I'm a bit surprised that people are so caught of guard.
I have never had a resignation period of less then 1 month in several European countries (BeNeLux and Poland)
My last job had resignation period of 7 week from the Monday after sending my notice.
I would assume most HN users are in the United States, where the notice period is two weeks by custom, or thirty seconds if you are mad enough that you don't care about things like references and eligibility for rehire. The latter is considered unprofessional but generally won't keep you from getting another job. Most people aren't aware that European-style job contracts exist.
I've had lots of arguments with Europeans on the internet about whether the benefit of their job security exceeds the costs of what Americans who are aware of the European system tend to perceive as indentured servitude.
In the US we have at-will employment, which online people like to only talk about the negatives (employer can fire you at any time without notice), but it goes the other way too: We can quit with no notice. It's still courtesy to give two weeks notice though, to handle transferring work/knowledge.
Over a month seems really long to me.
4 full calendar months for my current resignation period, e.g. if I resign today, my last official day will be the 31 March (December, January, February , March).
Contracts might require it, but the law says 2 weeks (on a regular full time contract or a limited contract after the first year) and contracts can't supersede the law.
Yes. The law clearly set 2 weeks [0].
It puts the employee in the strongest position, but doesn't completely voids a contract. For instance the employer can still fight it by justifying a necessity for them to have a longer period, or convincing a court the contract had enough provisions to make it a reasonable clause.
It would be a huge PITA on both sides though, I don't see many companies wanting that much trouble just for a single employee trying to leave the boat.
[0] https://jsite.mhlw.go.jp/miyagi-roudoukyoku/library/miyagi-r...
People don't want to deal with the fallout of saying that, hence quitting agents
>I don't want them in my comments
Why not? Are they obscene somehow?
I'd compare it to jury nullification, it's something anyone probably knows, but you wouldn't want to be posting on SNS while being a juror.
I presume you are referring to sekuhara (sexual harassment), pawahara (power harassment) and the like
Are the actual official Japanese words for sexual harassment and power harassment... just Japanese pronunciations / abbreviations of the English terms?
Yes. In Japanese this kind of abbreviation does not carry the childish/frivolous connotations it does in English.
In my experience, the connotations are very similar to English use. What matters is the context. Say sekuhara or sexual harassment at work: very serious connotation. Amongst friends or in media (comdey/anime/etc): potentially frivolous/unserious connotation.
It's very different IME. A catchy abbreviation of a serious subject would almost always be inappropriate in English-speaking spheres, especially in a business setting.
The second reddit link above includes an example, where the person has a visa change and would get in trouble with immigration if they continue to remain employed.
If the person was leaving because they accepted an offer from another employer, being on two payrolls simultaneously might also be a problem.
It’ll become messy if they keep paying you?
A friend of mine in Japan recently needed a lawyer to quit their job. Very unusual to me, being an American.
It makes one feel a bit better about At-will employment, which is a two way street.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
I believe the Japanese problem has a lot to do with culture, not just law.
Did they say why?
Nah, but it sounded like a very stressful situation that they even had to.
Yeah nobody I know has told me they’ve experienced this, but maybe it’s common amongst some groups and not others. Black companies are something else.
I think the real percentage of employees using a resignation agency is probably lower than 18.6%. Internet surveys tend to be less accurate and I don't know the methodology they've used to select the 800 or so participants.
But companies bullying employees on resignation seems to be a bigger issue than I thought.
Reading this, I was assuming that this behavior was enforced by reference checks for new hires being commonplace. However, the few sources I found in a quick search make it seem like asking/requiring references is a more recent practice due to western influence.
I'd guess it's just guilt and shame?
Just guilt and shame, companies don’t have a right to do it but people just comply anyway.
I too was struggling to understand the problem described herr: does unilaterally quitting a job actually harm the employee's future employment prospects inside Japan, or is the problem here just a matter of culturally enforced social stigma?
There are documents that your former employer often needs to provide you for stuff like health insurance. And now suddenly it's some direct confrontation to get a document, while your future employer (Who could still just let you go!) is asking you for a document to move forward. So you're facing a bunch of time pressure in gnarly cases, without many people around to help you out.
There are procedures to get around this stuff but since it's not the common case, when it does happen suddenly you get to learn about labor law.
I think anywhere in the world, when there is active antagonism causing bureaucracy to not be able to move forward, most people freeze up like a deer caught in headlights. Turns out that being a sociopath can be quite helpful for exploiting workers!
Sometimes I wonder what a society would look like if they could very reliably identify sociopathy at an early age, and then either euthanize those people or at least blacklist them so they can never have any job higher than a janitor. Would such a society work better than current societies? Or would it be like that episode of Star Trek where Kirk gets split into good and bad versions, and the good version was too ineffectual to be a decent captain without his bad side?
More like "It's a Good Life" from the Twilight zone. Have unhappy or bad thoughts? Off to the "corn field". Disagree with the decision makers? Want to do things differently? Want to just be different? Off to the corn field!
Sociopathy is no more a single thing than cancer or the common cold are single things. Even less so, because it is only defined by subjective interpretation of outward symptoms.
I'll have to go rewatch that episode; it doesn't sound familiar.
However, I thought sociopathy was pretty well-defined as having a complete lack of empathy.
In the episode, the main character is the sociopath. My use of it is to say that giving people the power to execute or blacklist sociopaths will inevitable create more, only they'll be the ones in power.
"Lack of empathy" can easily be interpreted in many ways. What you are upset about are the actions of those you accuse of not having empathy. You think that killing anyone without empathy is the solution. You clearly have no empathy for those without empathy.
You are the monster you fought against.
At least three of the four things you listed are things we can already detect. This doesn't make much sense as a reply to "what if we could detect sociopathy". And that's on top of it being a bad analogy to swap different traits and actions arbitrarily.
Suggesting we murder ("euthanize") people who are predisposed to a lack of empathy is probably the least empathetic reaction I could think of. The proposed answer to sociopathy is itself sociopathic.
This inherent contradiction is evidence enough that no sufficiently objective metric may distinguish "sociopath" from "not-sociopath". The power offered is great enough that it would be immediately abused.
One person suggesting an overboard response means that it's impossible to do an objective test in the first place? That argument makes no sense to me.
[dead]
Can anyone in Japan share what ground truth looks like around this? Does this churn matter to businesses when they’re in a labor supply shortage? Do these folks have other jobs they’re moving to? Or are they potentially NEETs bailing on being employed?
This definitely exists, even when switching jobs.
However I would say that IMO it's another case of foreigners buzzing by depicting boring and common stuff under a "weird Japan" light.
Shitty companies manipulating employees to stop them from resigning is something that exists in any country. And this escalating to the labor authorities or going through a lawyer is not a rare thing anywhere either.
It happens more frequently in Japan because the culture of not being confrontational is strong. The fact that lawyers can afford to specialize in this matter alone is just a logical result of the larger number of customers.
EDIT: I also want to add this: if you have been in a company for a while, you are eventually going to see or hear about how resignation is handled for other employees. If you want to quit and already know that the company is going to harrass you and make your life hell, is it so weird to save your time and mental health to delegate all of that to a dedicated professional?
Does it? You hear stories in the US of people trying to manipulate employees into not quitting or lambasting them for leaving, but trying to actually, seriously deny their ability to quit is nearly unheard of.
I don't recall seeing examples in the US of directly preventing someone from resigning. But I have read about situations where companies make it harder to get the next job, essentially forcing someone to stay in a bad work situation. For example, non-competes for service jobs (fast-food, hairdressers, etc.)
They would absolutely do that if contracts would be stronger. But as they want to keep their ease of firing and laying off people, contracts are weak in both direction.
For agricultural workers it is quite common with 'we safekeep your passport for you' and similar schemes.
I think foreign workers are more exploited in general but outside of the cities it is way harder to escape such employers.
> Shitty companies manipulating employees to stop them from resigning is something that exists in any country.
I have never heard of it in the US. I’m sure some examples exist but I’d be really unpleasantly surprised if it’s a major social issue here.
Amen.
IMO, it's an tortured example of Hanlons Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I see tons of shitty stuff roll downwards to employees in US companies, but I never see the kind of competence at the upper levels to pull off the kind of manipulation implied here. It's just negligence, ignorance, and dysfunctionality that tends to screw us yanks at the bottom.
And what do you think a broad non-compete clause is? The goal is the same, just the means are different.
> And what do you think a broad non-compete clause is?
Pretty universally illegal. California doesn't have noncompete clauses at all. Texas, the state I'm most familiar with, doesn't allow them to be enforced except for skills that are proprietary to an employer, .e.g., supporting specific software in a specific way or something. Pretty sure most states that have them are the same. Making burgers isn't going to do it, and nobody would sue you over it anyway, they'd sue the new employer whose lawyers will know better.
I have had an employer try to get me to sign an illegal noncompete before, but that was because it was a small employer who didn't know the law. When I quit I politely informed him that it was unenforceable. He didn't try. That doesn't mean employers who know better don't try to intimidate employees, but they could just as easily threaten to break your kneecaps. Probably they won't.
Does a non-compete prevent you from leaving your current employer?
> Shitty companies manipulating employees to stop them from resigning is something that exists in any country. And this escalating to the labor authorities or going through a lawyer is not a rare thing anywhere either.
It is? In what other countries are we talking about here where a company escalates to the labor authorities to prevent you from quitting? Usually this kind of thing is reserved to harass visa holders, not native workers.
I mean that the employees escalates it, not the companies.
My gf used one. She had a legal right to quit but it was inconvenient for the company. They refused multiple times, they also gaslit with "what about the children we teach, if you leave the school might have to close" etc. etc.
Using the agency means you do a 10 minute phone call and that's it. You don't even have to work your remaining days or talk to the company ever again. The agencies seem to have some legal powers that a normal person doesn't, or at least in reality they get results much faster and aren't allowed to screw around.
What did amuse me is there's a discount if you use them multiple times.
> The agencies seem to have some legal powers that a normal person doesn't
I suspect the power that they have is actually knowing the law. Also by hiring one the employee has shown they are willing to hire a lawyer, so the employer can't bluff with legal threats. And very few employees are actually going to be worth the trouble to sue
The special powers are probably the following sentence: "sure, you could sue; also, we could check more closely for labor law violations; which would you like?".
Is that "gaslighting" or simply plain old guilt tripping?
You're right, thanks for the correction.
Based on what I’ve seen and heard (luckily, not experienced), I think it depends on the company. Smaller ones with older management may be both more reliant on the labor and more used to lifetime employment. I suspect there’s probably some maximal fuckiness point. Most companies aren’t like that, but resignation in Japan has a lot of stigma even if everything goes well, so many people will use these services just so they don’t have to deal with it.
The way the culture works there’s no way for the managers to be anything but unfailingly polite to an external party that calls to resign on behalf of the employee.
So how is it the company can “refuse to let them quit” or “force” an employee to go to a temple? What is the actual enforcement mechanism other than guilt?
Apart from the paperwork that you need to pass on to your next employer, salaries can be structured in a way that makes the base pay rather low, but the yearly income is boosted up to a reasonable level by bonuses, overtime allowance (fixed monthly amount paid whether you work the overtime or not), etc. If the company doesn't want to let someone quit, they can make it financially painful by withholding these things, or subtracting "damages" caused by the employee leaving.
EDIT: Come to think of it I'm actually not 100% sure about the legality of this, but they sure try it!
They can reduce or plain not pay your bonus, yeah. But making the employee pay for "damages", even by subtracting them from remaining pay or bonuses, is very very illegal.
The problem is these companies are comfortable with this level of illegal, because they're multiplying potential fines by the odds the employee will actually go to the authorities, and then weighing that against the exploitation benefits multiplied by their whole workforce.
Japanese companies have some culture of bullying and harassment. The laws against it are limited and enforcement is toothless. But yeah, it's mostly ultimately a lack of courage from the employees in question.
It’s definitely illegal, labor rights are pretty strong in Japan. I think your typical Japanese person is just very compliant when faced with an uncomfortable situation and bad bosses abuse that dynamic.
> It’s definitely illegal, labor rights are pretty strong in Japan.
In some ways they are. Notably Japan has no concept of constructive dismissal, and companies have a pretty broad right to assign work and even to assign someone to work at a faraway office. There may be some anti-harassment law on the books, but it's very hard to get anything recognised under it, and if someone is just constantly assigned bad work, or no work, they have very little recourse.
And even if you could win a lawsuit, Japan doesn't do punitive damages or damages for emotional distress. So you'd be able to claim, maybe, lost wages for your time out of work, and... that's probably it.
Labor rights are far stronger in Japan than countries like the US, but like regulations everywhere, are only as strong as they are actively enforced, where companies suffer meaningful penalties for violating them. Japan is by no means a place where this is true, such that companies fear violating them.
Withholding a letter of recommendation maybe? If the culture truly is such that you get a job in your early 20s and stay there until you retire or die, then presumably a job seeker in their 30s would be virtually unhireable without a good explanation.
In that case, I don't think Resignation Agencies could help to get them to spit out letter of recommendation.
But the again - these agencies might be solving an entirely different problem.
You need proof of layooff (離職票) to collect you unemployment benefits. It is illegal not to issue one, but it is possible for the company can cause you some pain in issuing it.
Do you get unemployment benefits in Japan even if you quit?
Yes, but only after 3 months without a new job as opposed to immediately if laid off.
If it's this bad you would think that you would be outright unhireable if you left an employer.
I don't understand, what really constitutes a "won't let me quit" scenario? If I hand in my resignation, I don't really care whether my employer rips it or not. I consider my contract terminated because it's a contract that can be terminated by either party to the contract. If I have a notice period, I'll work that period, then stop showing up. If they want to consider the contract as still valid, they can. And then they'd have to pay me, but I don't see why they would if I'm not turning up to work? There must be something in the above reasoning that isn't correct?
You probably wouldn't also give your letter of resignation with your knees on the floor, asking the boss to "forgive me because i failed you", right ?
Yes, japan is a whole different mentality, with a completely different set of values and social norms ( mostly focused on "don't show disrespect to others", and "don't embarrass yourself"). Traveling from japan to the US/Hawaii was probably where i experienced the largest culture shock (and not in a flattering way for americans). It felt like going from civilization to barbaric lands.
On the other hand i can see why some japanese people can't handle that much pressure on their everyday behavior and prefer the western mentality at some point in their life.
Imagine you have a strong deference to authority and an incredible fear of confrontation. It would be very easy for someone in a position of authority to take advantage of you.
People don't always do what's in their best interest. People talk to the police without a lawyer all the time. People sign away their rights just because they don't want to push back on things. It takes guts to stand up for yourself.
Related comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42169771:
> "I can't quit the job. If I say I'm going to quit, I'll be threatened that I will have to pay damages for quitting."
It's insane how successful Japan is in spite of their corporate inefficiencies.
Maybe it's not in spite of but rather because of them?
To me, it seems like if you were designing a brand new society optimized only to maximize the countries GDP, you'd implement the Japanese model - employees who never leave their employers, extremely long work hours and mandatory after work social activities.
China, Japan and SK have all effectively implemented a version of this and their economic growth post WWII has been nothing short of remarkable (China was poorer than Sub Saharan Africa in the 50's).
Obviously, you could say this has not been going very well for Japan more recently but I'd argue the main drawback to this paradigm is the inevitable population implosion.
As with other places, it worked extremely well as long as the society was inherently sexist, and women weren't allowed to have "men's jobs" and were basically forced by society at large to be mothers and homemakers for husbands who were almost never at home and who never spent any time with their kids. With nothing better to do with their lives and time, and reliable birth control not yet invented or easily available, people had lots of kids to keep the system going.
Nowadays, women want to have more meaning in their lives than just being married to some guy they barely know or care about and raising his kids as some kind of servant with 2nd-class citizen rights. This isn't just in Japan, it's in every developed nation. The result of this is a far lower birthrate, so you can't have a super-high GDP for too long; you get a boost at the beginning because nearly 100% of adults can now contribute to GDP, but it burns out in a few decades because there's no one to replace them.
Societies need to come up with a new model.
The result of this is lower birthrate in the current cultural configuration.
As is, women regularly delayed having children until they're near or past their fertility window, if they want children at all. In our current society, it's difficult to both have a career and be a mother.
Very, very true. Professional women these days are going to extreme lengths now to have children at older ages: IVF, etc. As it is, it starts getting difficult at around age 35. Yet, advanced education can easily last until your late 20s, and your late 20s and 30s are the time when you need to build your career.
If scientists could come up with a way of making women much more fertile up to, say, age 60 (in an affordable and reliable way I mean, current treatments are unreliable and horrifically expensive), I wonder what effect this would have on the birth rate.
Or we could work with the natural order of things, rather than against it... nah, too crazy.
I'm not sure I'm joking when I say: if you manage to convincingly solve the "work/children" dilemma you may become a strong candidate for a Nobel prize (or at least The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences).
Nah, I would propose that people stop trying to "have it all", accept reality, and settle for one or the other (mainly one for men, and the other for women).
Nobody wants to hear that these days, if they ever did.
Japan’s per capita GDP has been flat for 30 years.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/jpn/jap....
You can describe that as ‘recently’, but it’s an entire generation.
> if you were designing a brand new society optimized only to maximize the countries GDP, you'd implement the Japanese model
Of course you'll copy the US's model. In terms of GDP, the US has been doing so much better than the rest of the world in the last several decades.
I could only find data for the last decade quickly, but looking at this, the USA was not the leader in GDP growth. It was in absolute GDP though, but OP was talking about growth
longer work hours != efficiency
Japan's economic growth started well before World War 2. In fact, Japan wouldn't have been able to fight WW2 against the US for so long if it wasn't a fully industrialized country by that time. The country was devastated after the war (just as Germany was), but it wasn't starting from scratch. Many (if not most) of the large Japanese manufacturing conglomerates of today have been successful zaibatsu before the war, that have been only partially broken down and restructured as keiretsu.
I think it's a compelling story to see Japan, the Asian Tigers (two of them former colonies of Japan, the other two former British colonies) and China as having the same growth story, but I don't think it's the same story in all of these places. Outside commentators love to bring up Confucianism, but Confucianism (just like Christianity or Buddhism) is a pretty ancient philosophy and religion that have seen many iterations and has taken many different, perhaps even contradictory shapes and forms over the years. A certain version of it was extremely influential in Japan during the Edo period, but a modern Japanese would probably cite Confucius directly less than a culturally Chinese person would do. And it's certainly an influence in Japan, but the culture is just so different than China, which had its own local influences (including decades of Communism and a not-so-minor Cultural Revolution which targeted the "Four Olds").
I think the best explanation is that all of these countries (in their respective growth period!) had a good degree of political stability and achieved the necessary level of education. They all exercised government guidance through export-oriented policies, but left enough leeway for private companies to choose their own way (in other words, a heavy dose of government meddling that would make neoliberals blush, but not a full-on command economy). And most of all, the timing was right. These countries started to grow their industry (or rebuild it and re-orient it towards export in Japan's case) while fertility was still high and they were relatively poorer than the countries which bought up their goods. And of course, this all happened while world was rapidly globalizing.
It's easy to miss the complex factors involved and recommend the export-oriented playbook to countries where it won't fit, or to think that the same playbook would work forever. It's also easy to blame culture when the things fail. Within Japan, you'd find many commentators who believe the attitudes during the Showa era (1926-1989) were different and the current generation is just incapable of hard work, innovation or whatever else.
But from all I've read and heard about Showa era businesses, they were far less efficient than current Japanese businesses are. The businesses culture was probably probably less risk-averse, but that aversion is itself partly the result of decades of having a somewhat stagnant economy. My pet theory is that Japan was successful during its economic miracle period DESPITE the vast inefficiencies of its corporate culture. It only had western economies to compete with (the Asian Tigers hadn't started to roar yet and China was still far away from industrialization) and the wages in Japan were initially far lower than in the US. From various productivity metrics inefficiencies in other Western countries probably weren't much different back then (this tracks, since it all happened before the mass digitization of the workplace and government which Japan was late to). and despite management, office work and sales practices being inefficient, Japanese companies (most famously Toyota) have developed innovative methods for increasing efficiency and quality on the factory floor.
Fast forward to the 1990s, and Japan is seeing fierce competition from other cheaper producers on many products even before the baby boomer generation is facing retirement with a shrinking population. During that period rich economies are improving their productivity, while poorer economies can just undercut prices due to cheaper labor. Toyota's innovative manufacturing methods are getting adopted outside Japan as well. Japan still leads in places where it has technology advantages or even just a brand or market capture, but in general competition just becomes a lot harder.
At this point, mature economies can only do so much. No matter what the government and individual corporations do, we cannot expect anything close to the growth rates of the 1950s-1970s again. But inefficiencies are clearly hurting Japanese businesses.
Japan is one of the oldest nations in the world (in terms of demographics), and, unlike other super-old nations (Germany, Italy), is refusing to let in immigrants. Under such conditions, having just 0% GDP growth, and not a constant recession, is not a bad result.
This isn't ineficiency though, probably closer to bullying.
Quitting a job has no complex moving parts, and most corporation will deal with it with minimal paperwork (you really only need to prove you gave them your resignation. An email reply would be enough legally).
The issues these new graduates (the source of the TFA is MyNavi, which is new graduate centric) are facing are arbitrary, purposefuly set to make their life harder.
W.r.t quitting jobs, the economic inefficiency is that knowledge doesnt diffuse properly. A certain amount of corporate mobility is hugely beneficial. But that's just the tip of the iceberg for bad corporate culture; the social binge drinking, poor sleep, no social life, etc must be bad for productivity... I don't understand how they manage it.
Can you enumerate the issues new graduates are facing, and when they began on timeline?(if even possible to see explicitly first public)
Well, Japan hasn't done too well in the software world over the last 30 years.
Meanwhile American software companies and employees are both infamously disloyal and have done quite well.
Is that a cause, though? I can see both as being consequences of the sheer amount of money sloshing around in the Silicon Valley. It generally helps things because there’s just so much resources to tap. It also helps employees getting poached with better salaries and compensation. But it does not mean that it can be replicated that way in another country.
You're right. It's not that disloyalty necessarily enables better software but that, apparently, loyalty is not a requirement.
It can also be true that the work culture in Japan stymies effective modern software development. I've heard anecdotes to this effect but it doesn't seem like something you could easily measure.
It's fascinating and makes me want to know more about how the culture works.
It works by having it beaten into for you several decades of your childhood that you don't speak up, you put the groups first, and appearances trump reality.
I don't necessarily think it's any better or any worse than western culture. My perspective is "it just has different failure modes".
That isn't really what I meant, and yeah, I was ambiguous. When you have a culture where people can't tell the boss things he doesn't want to hear -- of which resignation is an example -- how do companies expect to get honest feedback? How do they detect problems earlier in the process? Etc.
Cultures are never just dysfunctional; there are usually a complicated set of compensations that makes the dysfunction more bearable. I'm curious how that works.
They don't want feedback. They want you to listen and obey. It doesn't actually matter if things are wrong, so long as in the moment the boss thinks they aren't, then to him they aren't since appearances trump reality. The boss would prefer you didn't disturb that. The result is sometimes things just blow up spectacularly later on down the track but "shou ga nai".
The compensation that makes the dysfunction more bearable is the culture of "gaman" which is deeply, deeply ingrained from a young age. It's normal for them to just suck it up and tolerate shit they don't like. It's a way of life. For everything thing else there is "shou ga nai" which often translates to "it can't be helped" and many Westerners think it's just Japanese people giving up too easily and don't really get it, but it comes from the Buddhist philosophy of accepting things as they are.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaman_(term)
Agreed and I would add to the list the ungodly amount of hours they work. I know per hour they might not be as productive (or simply held back by antiquated processes within their companies) but they seem to make up for it in part by working so much overtime.
Yes, a large part of why Japanese society appears (and in fact performs) so perfect is because of an absolute fear of shame.
From the moment you are born you are taught to care about what and how others think and feel about you and your conduct. If it's not your social peers, it's the literal Sun ("Otentou-sama") looking down upon you and judging your every single moment. If you shame yourself, you also bring shame upon your family and your ancestors both living and dead.
To be clear: This does work, and most Japanese are happy to serve society rather than feel compelled to do so at threat of cancellation. There are also benefits for the compliant, namely in the form of social safety nets both legal and social to ensure a minimum standard of living.
Japanese expats are a particular bunch, they left Japan because they couldn't stand the shaming and strict adherence to social codes. A kind of "you can't fire me if I quit" response.
It’s not inefficiency. This has a tinge of slavery to it.
The survey (https://career-research.mynavi.jp/reserch/20241003_86953/) which is the basis for the 1 in 5 claim seems sus, I would bet it's not true. (I don't read Japanese, but had Claude read it for me; if someone who does read Japanese could confirm, that would be interesting.)
They say 16.6% of people who changed jobs last year used these services, but only 23.2% of companies report having any employees use them. If 16.6% is correct, the % of companies number should be much higher, supposing companies have multiple resignations per year.
The method for the first number on how they found their respondents is described just as "internet survey," with no further info. There are a lot of ways to do this that would over-sample people who use these services.
I'm not gonna read the whole thing but the 23.2% is only for the first half of the year
上半期（2024年1月～6月）に退職代行サービスを利用して退職した人がいた企業は23.2％だった。
Hmm thanks — what about the historical trend numbers?
> "上半期（2024年1月～6月）に退職代行サービスを利用して退職した人がいた企業は23.2％だった。また、過去の退職代行利用者の実績を年度別に聞くと、2021年は16.3％、2022年は19.5％、2023年は19.9％"
These seem like full-year numbers, but they're much lower than what I'd expect if 23.2% is the half-year number — implying a huge jump in 2024?
I think there is a possibility that this year's figures will be significantly higher.
The resignation agency service was widely reported in Japanese media in the first half of this year, which made its existence known to the public. This trend can also be confirmed on Google Trends[1].
In fact, the representative of 退職代行モームリ (Taishoku-daikō Mōmuri), the largest resignation agency company, stated in an interview that the number of users during this year's onboarding season was ten times that of last year[2].
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
[2] https://nikkan-spa.jp/1996502
The posting's title is misleading. 1 in 5 Japanese workers in their 20s WHO RESIGN turn to resignation agencies.
Sounds like the issues around dating, marriage and children aren’t really cut and dry in Japan. The population crisis isn’t a “just so” thing. The society optimized for one set of criteria but is buckling under others.
> Those fortunate enough to leave are sometimes asked to send apology letters to colleagues or deliver speeches expressing regret for their “selfishness” and “disrespect.” Of course, these are the most extreme cases–but they do occur, according to Momuri.
So, not that much different mindset than a US startup founder who takes 70% equity, while offering the first hire 0.5% to 2% in options (vesting over 4 years, with exercise rules that further discourage ever getting any equity at all)?
(Edit: Fastest downvoting I've ever seen on HN. :)
The "selfishness"/"disrespect" is literally just politeness, the person writing it is often not genuinely thinking this, and the people reading it also know it's bullshit. Journalists should stop directly translating Japanese as the nuance is lost.
I don't get why these companies would want to keep employing someone who has stated that they want to quit.
If your dog, which is your property, decided it just wanted to go live across the street instead, would you just shrug and say OK?
That's basically their mindset.
if I was a douchebag boss, I would manipulate them into staying then publicly reprimand and fire them shortly thereafter to come out a "winner" in the situation. I haven't seen managers stoop that low yet, but state-side I've seen managers take extreme personal offense and paranoia about team morale when there was even one flight risk on the horizon. (omg they didn't even pay $100k for their once-in-a-lifetime chance to exercise our magic stock!)
Where I live, getting fired entails getting severance. Something you don't get when quitting. I would rather be fired then to quit myself...
Same. It’s over, you won’t get performance or loyalty above some cold baseline, while still paying for the most expensive class of resources. What’s the point even?
I can guess that maybe it’s a well-known cultural thing that only prevents people of this culture to think about leaving. A sort of a group control thing.
> Some companies are notorious for resignation difficulties, excessive overtime and intense work pressure. So much so that they are labeled as “black companies.” The problem has become so severe that Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s Labor Standards Bureau has published a list of these companies to warn potential job seekers.
If only they were in a position to do something about it.
They published a list, what more do you want?
In my 20s I had a boss who said he wouldn't accept my resignation, so I stopped showing up. Works every time.
Do that in Japan and you're gonna be unemployed forever. You'll either open your own business (fat chance of that succeeding) or move abroad (again, with what money in your 20's?).
Right, you'll be unemployed forever, in a country with a labor shortage.
Sounds legit.
Yeah, that's why these agencies exist. Use them and you can literally stop showing up to work and still get all your required documents, with no hassle.
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For anyone going through anything like this, one letter from a lawyer will turn everything around in minutes and in Japan, legal advice is fairly affordable.
Wow, I thought running a business was supposed to be the only job you can't quit because it's the job you pay to own.
The administration's response should be to make it a trivial task, online, via mynumber card system.
So you click here and there in the comfort of your home, insert your card, enter pin and done.
I could flip that culture on its head
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