The rebirth of cool: It's not easy being a lovable middle-aged man in Japan
For the first time since … never, the ojisan (middle-aged man) is on a roll. Until recently, many have treated middle-aged men in Japan with a sense of dismissiveness, if not outright contempt. Mainstream media have always portrayed middle-aged men as being overbearing and clueless at ...
Japan's working women top 30 million as jobless rate improves to 2.3%
The number of women holding a job rose 530,000 from a year before, contributing to the total number of employees hitting a record 67.47 million.
Working harder in a bid to save labor is proving exhausting
The utopia of utopias is "Utopia" by Sir Thomas More (1478-1535). Its best feature is leisure. There are no idle nobles; everyone works. A burden shared is a burden lightened. Utopians "do not wear themselves out with perpetual toil from morning to night, as ...
The Cabinet of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe approved Friday a suite of labor reforms designed to solve Japan's demographic challenges while creating conditions to promote job growth, particularly for those struggling to find stable work. Under the annual economic policy blueprint, the government wants to ...
Japan to encourage foreign workers to maintain employment outside major cities
The government is planning measures to encourage foreign workers with specific skills under the country's new visa statuses to secure jobs and continue employment outside of big cities, officials said Monday. The measures are designed to prevent a concentration of such workers in urban areas, ...
South Korean students flock to Japan as birthrate sinks and unemployment climbs
More and more highly educated young people from South Korea, which like Japan has a rapidly graying population and needs more foreign labor for its economy, are coming to Japan because it's difficult to find work at home. Amid high youth unemployment driven by hiring ...
Keeping up appearances in the workplace in Japan
Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan Inc., which employs about 17,000 people, announced earlier this month it would allow office workers to come to work in jeans and sneakers. Factory workers in the company will still be required to wear uniforms and sales staff will still be ...
Japanese firms circumventing traditional hiring timetable to find quality recruits
It's a rite of spring: Major corporations hire fresh university graduates en masse every April, starting them all at the same salary with assurances of rising pay and lifetime employment. But lately, some companies, including Rakuten, SoftBank and Line Corp., are breaking with that tradition, ...
The problem with padding employment records in Japan
In August, it was reported that central government ministries and agencies, not to mention national legislative offices and local governments, have for years been fulfilling their legal responsibility to hire certain numbers of people with disabilities by fudging criteria for determining what qualifies as ...
Startup takes stress out of fed-up workers' exit plans
There was the 24-year-old insurance saleswoman who got sick of being yelled at when she couldn't reach her quota. Then there's the exhausted designer who clocked 160 hours of monthly overtime. And the ramen noodle shop employee who suffered stress to the point of ...
How three women shattered glass ceilings to become the first female chief economists at global banks
There's a particular telephone conversation that HSBC Global Chief Economist Janet Henry has down pat. Here's how it goes: "You get a call from a headhunter," she says. Then Henry inevitably finds herself saying, "No, I'm not interested." But it doesn't end there. "They always ...
U.K. Cabinet ministers were infuriated this week by an apparent government breach of a protocol that prevents ill or heavily pregnant politicians from being forced to attend Parliament to vote, to the disadvantage of a representative currently on maternity leave. Pro-EU Liberal Democrat Deputy Leader ...
