Minoru Omoishi, 35, took three months' leave in 1999 to care for his newborn triplets.

When he returned to work, he was shocked to find that the electronic parts company had treated his leave as absence, downgrading his employee ranking from C to E, the lowest on the scale.

Akihito Kobayashi with his daughter Reika along the Rhine river in Germany

The director of personnel, when questioned about the downgrade, said: "Our company is actually quite forgiving. In other firms, people get fired for taking child-care leave."

Takayuki Hiraga, a 29-year-old male nurse, had a similar experience in 1999 while working in a Hokkaido kindergarten.

After submitting his application for child-care leave, he was immediately told to find a new job.

He ended up not needing the leave, because his daughter passed away. But an ensuing comment by the kindergarten director's wife shocked the already despairing Hiraga. "What happened to your daughter was terrible, but you should understand, it's wrong for men to take such leave," she said, according to Hiraga.

Despite growing demands for men to take part in child-rearing as more women work outside the home, experts and citizens' groups say society and the government have done little to encourage men to do so.

Although Omoishi's and Hiraga's cases may be extreme examples, an increasing number of men who apply for child-care leave face a backlash from their employers. Many give up on applying for the time off altogether.

A child-care law that took effect 10 years ago granted full-time working fathers the right to take leave. But the most recent figures from 1999 show that the number of fathers who took such leave was only 0.42 percent, while that of working mothers was 54.6 percent.

According to Toshiyuki Shiomi, a professor at the University of Tokyo's education department, the reason for the low rate is the ingrained view that child-rearing is a woman's job.

Men and women who are now at the age to raise children were brought up in families where the separate roles of parents were clearly defined, he said.

"The psychological imprint on these people is so strong that it is difficult for them to change, even if they think they ought to," Shiomi said, adding that companies rarely encourage men to help raise the next generation. "(Employers) only want to get the most out of their current staff."

A poster in 1999 by the then Health and Welfare Ministry stated that a man who does not take care of his children should not be called a father. The ministry was trying to boost the birthrate, but many parents reacted to the slogan very coldly.

"Some men grumbled, saying that a poster reading, 'A company that does not support a father who raises his child should not be called a company,' would have been more appropriate," Shiomi explained. "The slogan was pushing the social problem completely onto the individual."

Revision of the law

The alarmingly low birthrate -- 1.35 children per woman in 2000 -- prompted the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry to seek a revision on the law for child-care leave for the first time in 10 years.

A provision of the Law Concerning the Welfare of Workers Who Take Care of Children, established in 1992, merely stipulated the right for both men and women to take child-care leave until a child is 1 year old.

Except for a clause prohibiting firms from dismissing employees for applying or taking leave, and restricting work after 10 p.m. for those with children under 6, the law states no other measures to protect parents.

The revision, enacted in November and coming into force in April, includes a clause prohibiting disadvantageous treatment by employers.

It also introduced a new leave system to allow parents to take care of ill children under 6, but firms are not legally required to provide employees with such time off. Under the revision, it is only stipulated as a goal that companies should make efforts toward.

In terms of financial support, workers taking child leave will receive 40 percent of their salaries, drawn from employment insurance, until the child is 1 year old.

Resolutions attached to the revision also say "the government should take necessary action to raise a consciousness for managing both work and households," and "a study on men's child-care leave should be conducted to promote its introduction."

However, there are no concrete plans on how to follow up on such ideas.

Citizens' groups demanded in vain that the ministry include in the revision a so-called father quota, a plan that assigns a portion of child-care leave specifically to fathers.

Such measures have proven highly effective in Norway, where after a child's birth the parents are entitled to 42 weeks' leave at full pay or 52 weeks off at 80 percent pay. Beginning in April 1993, fathers have been obliged to take at least four weeks of the paid-leave period.

According to Norwegian officials, in 1993, only about 4 percent of the fathers entitled to parental benefits utilized that right. But the introduction of the quota boosted the number of fathers taking child-care leave to 80 percent.

However, a labor ministry official believes a father quota in Japan would be unrealistic.

Katsuhiro Tsuji, assistant head of the ministry's Work and Family Harmonizing Division, said, "Given the deep-rooted Japanese consciousness that men work outside the home and women do housework, introducing a scheme that no employer has ever dreamt of will only be met with opposition."

Masaki Matsuda, a 38-year-old Yokohama resident who works part-time jobs and does the bulk of the child-raising while his wife works full time, recalled that his high school sociology teacher used to predict the collapse of Scandinavian countries due to the heavy burden of their substantial social welfare programs.

"But 20 years later, they seem to be doing much better than Japan, with both welfare and employment being secured," said Matsuda, who is a member of Ikujiren, a citizen's group pushing for men's child-care leave.

"Even if it was not a whole month, like in Norway, if Japanese fathers were granted a day to use for their children as their right, our society would change a lot."

A member of Ikujiren wrote in an essay, "It is the conventional Japanese view that it is the mother who takes leave when the child is sick because the father cannot inconvenience his company. This is the same as saying it's OK to inconvenience her company."

Favoring the workplace

According to Shiomi, this inherited mentality is one of the causes of Japan's low birthrate.

It is usually difficult for married women to maintain a demanding job throughout their working lives, because many stay home when children are young and when elderly parents need care, he said.

"Since they cannot continue a demanding full-time job during these periods, they are forced to switch to low-paying, part-time jobs or quit working. Due to the inconvenience and lower lifetime income as a consequence, an increasing number of women have been declining to get married or to have children," he said.

Matsuda said that women have been inconvenienced for a long time by not being given a pay raise or promotion, just because they take child- or family-care leave. But because it is considered women's business, no one questioned it.

The issue surfaced as a serious one only after men started to take such leave, he said.

Matsuda explained that some group members staged child-care strikes backed by labor unions before 1992, when there was no law for men's child-care leave.

"I'm waiting for more men to make companies realize that men can also complain, and that, whoever and whatever the sex of the employee, they can take child- or family-care leave," he said.

Even at firms known for strong welfare programs, the number of workers who take such leave is still low.

Electronics manufacturer NEC Corp. was awarded the top prize of the 2001 Family Friendly Company Award by the Health, Welfare and Labor Ministry. NEC in February 1992 became the first company to grant a male employee child-care leave, two months before the law took effect.

According to Seiji Kondo of NEC's personnel department, in the 10 years since the law took effect, 1,798 female employees have taken child-care leave, but only nine men have done so. While women often took leave for up to a year, the men took only around two months.

"We realize this figure is not high for a company of 35,000 employees," he said, claiming that it is difficult for the firm to improve the system in the current business climate.

Taking on new roles

There are also those unafraid of breaking with tradition.

Akihito Kobayashi, 41, is currently on leave from the Yokohama Municipal Office.

When his wife found out she was pregnant, she had just started work on an assignment in Bonn, which made it difficult for her to take child-care leave. Kobayashi, who has always believed a man and a woman should live together as equal partners, took leave to join her.

His life in Germany was not easy at the beginning. He felt isolated being alone with the baby at home and a bit of jealousy toward his wife, who has a challenging job.

"However, as time went on, I realized that child-raising is indeed self-raising," he said. "It's more difficult than working, and there is so much you can learn from it. More men should experience this unique and rewarding challenge."

A reporter in his late 30s, who declined to be named, took two months' leave to take care of his baby.

While younger members of the personnel department in his company were impressed and showed keen interest in his move, the personnel director apparently griped to others that he would not know what to do if everyone started taking such leave.

His colleagues, while being understanding about his situation, said they would never tell their wives that there was a man taking child-care leave at their office out of fear that they would be asked to do the same.

Though he is taking a certain risk, he considers himself much better off than some of his colleagues whose children show little recognition of their fathers.

"Many mainstream companies in Japan have only pursued economic efficiency during the postwar growth period at the expense of workers' home lives," he said. "But I believe there is the potential for more consideration of one's life and family, and this could lead to new economic growth. The number of fathers taking child-care leave may become a barometer of Japan's new wealth."