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Placard: Will work for pride
Job loss hits Japanese hard, but culture's changing with times
By Julie Schmit, USA TODAY
TOKYO - The depth of change roiling Japan, where tens of thousands of jobs are being lost, is evident in
the household of Teruo Furukawa, 47.
After working 22 years in a social service center, he lost his job in April - a victim of restructuring. Gone
were his comfortable salary and the satisfaction of managing 30 workers.
His wife was forced to take a part-time job in a packaging factory. He learned to cook rice and clean
house.
"In the beginning, I was ashamed. I was afraid of what my neighbors would think," he says. "But my wife
has been very thoughtful, and my children say, 'Cheer up.' That is my new power."
Furukawa's life has been turned upside down - a fate that awaits many more Japanese as their employers
begin trimming bloated workforces like U.S. companies did almost a decade ago.
The security of lifetime employment - a pillar of Japanese culture - is disappearing, and men who long
defined themselves by their jobs must find new sources of identity. Their wives, some of whom married
them for their jobs as well as their charms, must adjust. And their children are learning not to tie their
self-worth so closely to their jobs.
"People's minds are changing. They don't trust companies anymore to take care of them, just like
Americans and Europeans," says Kazuhiro Wada, 50, who was laid off in July from a failing computer
company.
Despite eight years of recession, Japan has resisted a U.S.-style restructuring. But in recent weeks, giants
Nissan Motor, Mitsubishi and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone announced 51,000 job cuts by 2004,
bolstering expectations that Japan is serious about changing. While Japan's restructuring may be more
gradual than the USA's, "you will see a similar sort of pain," says Goldman Sachs analyst Kathy Matsui.
Many Japanese are already hurting. Last year, suicides reached a record 31,755. They were most
prevalent among men in their 50s, typically the targets of restructuring.
Atsuhiko Tateuchi, CEO of outplacement firm Drake Beam Morin-Japan, has counseled men who've lost
jobs but were too ashamed to tell their families. Instead, they spent their days roaming parks and shopping
districts until time to go home.
For the traditional Japanese "salaryman," a white-collar worker accustomed to spending a career at one
company and winning promotions based on seniority, losing a job is especially painful because his identity is
so closely tied to it. This is, after all, a country where men are more likely to introduce themselves by
naming their employer rather than their occupation. "For men, their job is their status," says Keiko Sofuku,
43. She lost her accounting job in January, but the stigma isn't so great for women because they're expected
to quit when they marry, she says.
Many men freely admit suffering from depression. Last year, Yoshihide Higashikawa, 51, lost a job he'd
held for 12 years. He is now enrolled in a training course that he hopes will lead to a job in the computer
industry. "I get very depressed," he says. "I worry about my age. I worry about the economy. It is not
good."
Family worries
His wife, he says, is more afraid than he is. That's not unusual. When Yasuo Takata, 45, told his wife that
he wanted to take a voluntary retirement package and leave his 22-year bank job, she threatened to
divorce him. "She had secured a position as the wife of an elite bank officer, and she wanted to protect
that," Takata says.
He eventually convinced her that leaving was the best option. He speculated that severance packages
would get smaller over time. In September, he left with three years of salary.
Not every worker leaves with so much dignity. Because Japan's laws make it hard to fire workers,
companies sometimes bully employees to leave, says Shidada Kyotsugo of the Tokyo Manager's Union,
which counsels workers. Kazuyoshi Terada, 51, found himself cut out of staff and client meetings after he
refused this spring to leave his 28-year job as a blueprint checker for a glass company. His co-workers
have been told not to talk to him. He stays because he still has one child to put through college.
Little help is available for those who do leave. Government-funded career-training facilities are scarce.
Bigger companies usually provide job counseling, but smaller ones may not. Most companies don't know
how to prepare workers for other jobs because they've never done it before, says human resources
consultant Toshiya Kosugi of Kosugi International.
Starting one's own company is still a foreign concept. A recent Financial Times survey found 8% of
Japanese find entrepreneurship respectable, compared with 91% of Americans.
Skills, mindsets and age are other obstacles for those out of work. Japanese salarymen are trained as
generalists and lack more marketable, specialized skills. Their pride can also get in the way. "They will say,
'I'm a Nissan man. Why should I work for a small company?' " Kosugi says.
In Japan, age discrimination is allowed. Drake Beam Morin has 6,000 jobs in its database. Seventy-five
percent of them require workers under age 40; 90% of Drake's clients are over 40.
Some help on the way
Help is growing. Dozens of outplacement firms have opened. Tokyo's Keio University is setting up a career
center to help workers assess their skills. The government plans to open 300 offices to help entrepreneurs
and small businesses start and maintain enterprises, and Thursday it proposed an economic stimulus
package that aims to increase the number of small and start-up businesses by 100,000 a year in five years.
What's more, some of the stigma is diminishing. Younger people are especially forgiving. One of Tateuchi's
clients agonized over telling his daughter, soon to be married, that he lost his job. He feared the groom
might call off the wedding. When he told her, she told him to do his best. The wedding was fine.
Shin-Ichiro Higaki, 24, and Shu Ishikawa, 24, reject the notion that they are their jobs. Higaki is a salesman
for toymaker Tomy. Ishikawa is a Fujitsu computer service representative.
They don't expect to keep their jobs for life. They work hard when they work. But on weekends, they
engage in their passion: playing big-band music.
"Work and play are both important," Higaki says.
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