Americans are often amazed at the various work practices found in other parts of the world.  For many global U.S. companies, it is especially difficult to be local yet remain global in practice and still abide by U.S laws and standards.  Work culture often varies depending on the nationality of the ownership of the company.

For those U.S, companies with operations in Japan, it can be very concerning that the culture has specific unwritten cultural work rules.  For example, the taboo of an employee leaving before his or her manager is one that does not resonate in the U.S.  Another is that employees normally work 60 hours a week, which has led to a phenomenon called Karōshi (death from overwork), where corporate employees have been known to spontaneously drop dead of exhaustion.

In the Japanese culture, women are more highly educated than in any other country in the world.  When they graduate university; however, women are less likely to reach the higher rungs of an organization.  There are barely any women CEOs.  Overall, as reported by the Economist, female participation in the labor force is 63% in Japan, far lower than in other rich countries. When Japanese women have their first child, 70% of them stop working for a decade or more, compared with just 30% in America.  Most are gone from the workforce for good.

Another issue is maternity harassment, or “matahara", which can discourage women from having children.  This situation was brought to light in a recent Japanese newspaper article.  A woman working at a private child care center in Aichi Prefecture was reprimanded for getting pregnant before it was her "turn" as dictated by the head of the child care center. The child care worker and her husband apologized to the child care center director, but the woman was chided by her boss for "selfishly breaking the rules."  At this particular child care center, the director had set up "shifts" for when the female staff could get married and pregnant.

Incidentally, when the couple requested time off to get married, the director said no.

How widespread is this practice in Japan?  Is this just an isolated incident?  Toko Shirakawa, a journalist who is well versed in the issue of Japan's declining birthrate, says that setting the order in which workers can get pregnant happens not just at child care centers, but at other workplaces where woman comprise the majority of the employees.  The Mainichi, a leading Japanese newspaper, reported that a 26-year-old woman from the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka who works at a cosmetics-related company said that last year, she was told by a female supervisor at work that she would be allowed to have a child when she was about 35 years old. A document mapping out childbirth and child-rearing schedules for the woman and her 22 female colleagues was distributed by email, which came with the warning that "work gets backed up if four or more people take time off at the same time. Selfish behavior will be subject to punishment."

"Even when pregnancy rules are not strictly enforced, women are inclined to refrain from getting pregnant at the same time as their female colleagues who take maternity or child care leave, because they don't want to cause trouble to their other colleagues," Shirakawa said in an interview on this subject.  It should be noted that the practice is illegal.  Shirakawa also found that women who sue receive relatively little settlement money.

In a country which has an aging workforce and declining birthrate, maybe it should rethink its traditional cultural values.

Source:  The Mainichi 4/2/18, USAToday 4/3/18, The Economist 5/24/14