Back in 1980 when the weekly job-seekers' magazine Travail was launched, it was a social phenomenon that gave women the information they needed to independently switch jobs and build their careers. People even adopted the magazine's title (which means "work" in French, and is written in hiragana as torabayu) into conversations in phrases such as torabayu suru (do travail) when they were talking about changing jobs.
In those pre-Internet times, when faith in Japan's lifelong employment system was still unquestioned, Travail broke fresh ground in the steadily growing demographic of female workers soon to be supported by 1985's Equal Employment Opportunity Law.
Now, 27 years after that first issue, the pioneering job-hoppers' journal from Recruit Co. has recently taken another mighty step — by shifting all its classified advertisements to its online Travail site at toranet.yahoo.co.jp. This came alongside a revamped version of the print magazine that offers readers a range of well-illustrated career-related features.