The COVID-19 crisis as a double-edged revealer: Japanese employees’ hope for change in corporate warrior culture and the gendered impediments to such change

Abstract

In Japan, the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded amidst a heated debate about the country’s ‘working style’, work–life balance (or lack thereof), and a growing recognition of the urgent need for comprehensive change in the prevailing work culture. This article proposes that the crisis acted as a double-edged ‘revealer’. As such, it simultaneously raised employees' hopes that the crisis would trigger change in the masculine corporate warrior culture, while exposing the deeply entrenched impediments to this desired change. Beginning with the public debate about the crisis as a potential trigger for change in the so-called ‘Japanese’ work culture, which has also fuelled hopes for change, the article examines the narratives of employees forced into new forms of flexible working by the COVID-19 pandemic. These female and male accounts shed light on gendered experiences of work, and perceptions of what constitutes the ‘Japanese’ ideal worker. The accounts also reveal a growing and troubling awareness of the barriers to change in the culture of work.

Stop fighting to the bitter end, Japan! (Ganbaruna, Nippon)

Take the option of not forcing [employees to] come to work.

To all [respectful] executives.

Aono Yoshihisa, Cybozu CEO, Nikkei newspaper, 6 March 2020.

1. Introduction

The global COVID-19 pandemic caused severe social and economic disruption, including forced rapid, wide-ranging, and significant disruptions to work and family life (Shafer et al. 2020; Yildirim and Eslen-Ziya 2020). The unexpected length of the pandemic, along with the changes in work–family arrangements that it has brought, have prompted public and academic interest worldwide in the new balance that it has imposed on work-family relations. Research has focused on the impact of school and daycare closures, lockdowns, and social distancing on gender differences and inequality within the household, between work and home, and at work (Andrew et al. 2020; Petts, Carlson, and Pepin 2020; Craig and Churchill 2021; Zamarro and Prados 2021). Another area of research, based mainly on quantitative surveys, concerns the flexible working arrangements that have been rapidly adopted by businesses, in particular telecommuting. With more mothers and fathers working from home, the question of whether COVID-19 proved to be a great leveller in terms of the unequal division of work, paid and unpaid, between the genders (Chung et al. 2021), has become pertinent.

As elsewhere, Japan declared several ‘states of emergency’ during the pandemic as a preventive measure to halt the spread of the disease. However, unlike many other countries, it never enforced a mandatory lockdown, instead implementing a policy of ‘soft lockdowns’.¹ Furthermore, while elementary schools were abruptly ordered to close by the government on 2 March 2020, a subsequent announcement by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare exempted preschools from the nationwide school closures due to the potential impact of the closures on working parents (Takaku and Yokohama 2021).

Notwithstanding Japan’s ‘soft’ policy on mandatory closures—which in any case only included relatively short school closures—each ‘emergency declaration’ included a request for employees to work from home ‘as much as possible’. The government’s pleas, backed up by increased public interest in the possibilities of flexible working, appear to have had an impact. Compared to the slow spread of workplace flexibility practices before the pandemic, the ‘exogenous shock’ of COVID-19 led to an increase in home-based work, especially among white-collar workers (Morikawa 2021). The increase in remote work or some form of flexible working arrangement remained steady even after the end of the ‘state of emergency’ declarations.²

‘Ganbaruna Nippon’ (Stop fighting to the bitter end, Japan!), the quote that opens the article, is taken from a full-page announcement published in Nikkei, Japan’s leading financial newspaper, in March 2020. The author was Aono Yoshihisa, a well-known activist CEO, who wrote to his fellow Japanese executives urging them to stop forcing their employees to commute to work during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency. The business interests of Cybozu—a software company that develops web-based groupware and cloud services—in promoting telework under the extraordinary circumstances of the moment were evident, given that many of its products are designed for remote working.

Thus, Aono’s plea can be read as a call to the business community to utilize the pandemic crisis to embrace flexible working, affording employees some control over when and where they work (Chung 2020; Chung and Lippe 2020). However, this article proposes a broader perspective, interpreting this plea, as well as similar ones from both the corporate sector and civil society organizations in Japan, as a genuine call to use the pandemic as a catalyst for a comprehensive overhaul of work styles in Japan and a broader change in prevailing Japanese work culture. This pandemic-triggered debate met and augmented an ongoing and vibrant debate about the country’s ‘working style’, work–life balance, and the growing recognition of the urgent need to change the prevailing highly masculine work culture.

The article proposes that the pandemic crisis acted as a double-edged revealer. As such, it simultaneously raised hopes among employees whose experiences and narratives this article focuses on, that the crisis would trigger change in the dominant masculine ‘Japanese’ work and ideal worker culture, and exposed deeply entrenched impediments to this desired change. Through the narratives of workers who have experienced flexible working for the first time as a result of the pandemic, the article explores how their hope for change is intertwined with a painful recognition of the barriers to this desired change.

2. The gendered ideal worker culture in Japan: the ‘corporate warrior’

Conceptualising the ‘ideal worker’ in Japan, Brinton and Mun (2016) suggested that employee commitment is judged by the ‘desire and ability to “work hard”’. Specifically, ‘in the Japanese corporate context, this [working hard] means sacrificing time with family to be at the workplace’ (Brinton and Mun 2016: 270, my italics). Indeed, long working hours and overtime have been identified as critical elements of Japan’s ideal worker culture (Boling 2008; Nemoto 2013a, 2013b). Blair-Loy (2003) described work, especially in the case of white-collar employees and professionals, as culturally defined by the ‘work devotion schema’. As a form of normative control, this schema reflects the deeply engrained cultural presumption that work demands, and deserves, undivided and unmitigated allegiance extending beyond the workplace; it elevates the importance of paid work while positioning caregiving as a distraction (William et al. 2013; Blair-Loy et al. 2015).

The logic of this schema of devotion, which is responsible for the ‘ideal worker’ culture of organisational life in Japan and elsewhere, is that the employee should always be available, willing to work long hours, and able to fit outside commitments around their paid work (Acker 1990, 1998; Williams 2000; Williams et al. 2013). This image of the ‘disembodied worker’ is, self-evidently, only nominally neutral. The ability to prioritize work, and thus subscribe to the ideal worker culture, is clearly gendered (Acker 1990; Williams 2000; Chung and Lippe 2020).

The Japanese version of the ‘work devotion schema’ incorporates additional gendered expectations and assumptions. These include social drinking with colleagues on a regular basis, and accepting mandatory work transfers, even if this means living away from one’s family (Allison 1994; Fujita 2021). This complete devotion to the company not only means that the ideal worker is ‘simply unavailable for housework’ (Boling 2008: 315); it also draws boundaries and ‘[encourages] masculine behavior’ (Nemoto 2013a: 513).

The work devotion schema obviously reinforces gender inequality in organisations, underscoring the differing cultural expectations from mothers and fathers (Kelly et al. 2010). The ‘masculine’ (Nemoto 2013b) Japanese organisational culture has shaped career paths for women into dichotomized patterns of either emulating workplace masculinity or ‘opting out’ (Stone 2007; Nemoto 2013a). As Osawa (2005) suggested, corporate employment systems in Japan still make it difficult for women to continue working after marriage and childbirth. Furthermore, the rigidity of working styles has also hindered women’s participation in regular employment (Tsutsui 2016), pushing them into part-time positions (Osawa 2005; Osawa et al. 2013). The ‘non-regular worker’ characterisation of this kind of employment highlights the limits of the temporary or tentative ideal worker status that women can attain in Japan (Williams et al. 2013).

Another meaningful attribute of Japan’s ideal worker culture is the embedded notion of self-sacrifice. Labouring selflessly for the company, extreme perseverance in the face of difficulty, total devotion—all are cardinal virtues of the Japanese work ethic, labelled ‘companyism’ (kaishashugi) (Kidani 1999; Ogasawara 2016). This highly valued culture of work devotion is closely tied to Japanese nationalism, self-sacrifice for the ‘company’ occupying a central role in the nation’s postwar economic recovery and growth (Nemoto 2013a).

The term ‘corporate warrior’ (kigyō senshi) entered the lexicon during the postwar era of remarkable Japanese economic growth, depicting the hardworking male breadwinner who replaced the Japanese soldier of World War II as the new masculine ideal. Over time, the term came to represent the most socially and culturally desirable type of worker (Taga 2005; Hidaka 2010). The term, which was prevalent mainly until the 1970s, captured the spirit of self-sacrifice as embodied in the national ideal worker, who was willing to sacrifice for the economic growth of the nation (Ogasawara 2016). After the 1970s, as the economy began to slow down and men's roles in the family were reconsidered, the term ‘corporate warrior’ lost some of its pervasiveness and was partly replaced by ‘company man’ (Ogasawara 2016: 172). However, the gendered nature of the terminology remains. As suggested by Dasgupta (2013), over the decades of ‘Japan Inc.’ (roughly between the late 1950s and the early 1990s), the white-collar male office worker, the Japanese salaryman, who was seen as carrying the Japanese economy on his shoulders, has gained the status of Japan’s ‘everyman’; or, in the terminology of Connell (1995; see also Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), the overarching embodiment of hegemonic masculinity.

3. The dark side of the corporate warrior culture: the gap between discourse and practice

In August 2016, then Prime Minister Abe Shinzō declared that Workstyle Reform (WSR) (hatarakikata kaikaku) was the ‘greatest challenge’ facing Japan (Kojima et al. 2017). The proposed reform presented a long list of improvements and changes to the country's dominant workstyle. However, it prioritized the urgent need to alleviate or ‘correct’ the culture of long work hours.³ In fact, the launch of the Council for the Realization of Work Style Reform was triggered by yet another case of ‘death from overwork’ (karōshi). Recognized as an extreme outcome of Japan’s demanding work culture (Kato 1994; North 2011), karōshi has also been described as an aspect of the ‘dark side’ of the glorification of the Japanese corporate warrior (Kawahito 1991; Kidani 1999). Most cases of karōshi involve male company employees who embody ‘the selfless worker ideal’ to a tragic endpoint (North 2011). However, in late 2015, a young single woman employed by advertising giant Dentsu Inc., threw herself from the roof of an employee dormitory after enduring months of overwork. Prime Minister Abe and the Council for the Realization of Work Style Reform sought to assuage public anger over her death with a call for the end of karōshi (Asakura 2017).

Whereas the 2016 WSR campaign did indeed draw unprecedented attention to the need to change Japan’s dominant working style (Yamamoto 2017: 49), the Japanese government in fact began to initiate a series of work–family policies as early as the 1990s. This was linked to, among other things, growing public concern about the way men worked and the serious consequences entailed, the foremost of which was karōshi (Ogasawara 2016: 171). However, critical research has often exposed a gap between policies—even the most well-meaning ones—and practice.

Indeed, scholars have demonstrated that policies per se may do little to challenge the ‘ideal’ worker culture (Gambles et al. 2006: 55). Furthermore, this gap between policy and practice alerts us to the existence of another gap: the ‘elision’ that exists between practices and discourse (Fleetwood 2007a). There is no doubt that at least since the 1990s the discourse (i.e. commentaries, policy agendas, claims, etc.) in Japan about WLB, WSR, and indeed flexible working, has grown. However, as Fleetwood (2007a, 2007b) has so rightly suggested in highlighting the ‘detached’ nature of the relationship between practices and discourses, we should be alert to the possibility that what we are observing in Japan, as in other cases, may actually not be an increase in working practices associated with WLB, but rather an increase in the discourses about WLB and WSR.

As in other countries, family-friendly policies in Japan have tended to focus on women and children. In fact, in Japan, roughly up until the 1990s, the discourse also focused on ‘women’s problems’. As Ogasawara (2016) explains, the recognition of ‘men’s problems’ (Ito 1993) was closely linked to the growing concern about the masculine working style. Thus, since the 1990s and even more so in the 2000s, the Japanese government seems to have gradually shifted its focus to include the male worker and his work/family balance. The Ikumen Project, initiated by the government in 2010, backed the popular trend of encouraging fathers to be more actively involved in child-rearing (Ishii-Kunz 2013; Goldstein-Gidoni 2022). The launch of the Ikuboss award in 2015, which recognises corporate managers who promote supportive conditions for parenting and caregiving, has clearly identified masculine work culture as an obstacle preventing fathers from participating more in family life (Goldstein-Gidoni 2019, 2020).

Unfortunately, however, it is precisely the case of father-specific entitlements that seem to confirm the most persistent gap between policy—and its discourse—and practice. Surprisingly, a recent OECD report notes that Japan offers ‘by far the most generous paid father-specific entitlement in the OECD’ (OECD 2017). However, despite seemingly well-intentioned policies such as the childcare leave entitlement, they do not seem to have had any practical impact. Recent surveys suggest that despite an increase of around 2 per cent between 2016 and 2017, the propotion of men taking up their childcare leave entitlement is still around 5 per cent, compared to over 82 per cent for women (MHLW 2018). Men also tend to take much shorter childcare leave on average, usually just a few days.

In attempting to analyse the causes of unsatisfactory outcomes of WLB policies in Japan—such as the paternal childcare leave mentioned above—scholars have highlighted the lack of consensus among key players, as was the case with the WLB discourse in the early 2000s (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen 2011). Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen specifically point to the ‘antagonist’ position of employers, mainly as represented by Keidanren, the leading employers’ federation. This antagonistic position has indeed been explained with regard to the position of corporate leaders in Japan on gender issues. Specifically, scholars have shown that the position of these leaders may well align with dominant public values, or the core of a social structure premised on the gendered logic—one that has become almost ‘natural reality’, reflected in Japanese institutions, and through language (Yagi 2009: 103) that defines ‘men as earners and women as caretakers’ (Takahashi et al. 2014). Japanese companies, which continued to integrate their interests not only with those of their employees but also with those of employees’ families, maintained and strengthened this ‘reality’, especially during the period of high economic growth up to the 1990s. This so-called ‘happy collusion’ (Amano 2006) between the ‘gender triad’ of men, women, and corporations (Ogasawara 2016) has also been referred to as ‘the corporate gender contract’ (Goldstein-Gidoni 2012, 2019). This contract later weakened with the economic slowdown that began in the 1990s, although it has certainly not entirely diminished.

As with earlier WLB campaigns, the 2016 WSR campaign, characterized by an unprecedented ‘effective marketing’ campaign (Kojima et al. 2017) was also characterized by the same ‘fierce’ opposition from the business community (Shirakawa 2017). The WSR campaign was broadly criticized as a failure from the point of view of worker wellbeing. Moreover, it was linked to the spread of a ‘neoliberal culture of self-blame and individualistic ethic of hard work’ (Kojima et al. 2017). As such, the Japanese discourses of workstyle reform and work–life balance may resemble similar discourses on WLB in other neoliberal economies, where the gradual introduction of a neoliberal agenda to social, political, economic, and organizational forms ‘casts a long shadow’ over practices and discourses (Fleetwood 2007b: 354).

Thus, rather than simply assuming a direct relationship between ‘WSR as the greatest national challenge’ and the reform outcomes, it is necessary to apply a critical discourse analysis, to closely examine the processes in-between, and to engage with the relevant actors (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen 2011). In the case of the WSR, the ensuing ‘WSR boom’, namely the heated corporate and public debate about the genuineness or validity of the purported governmental and corporate workstyle reforms (Shirakawa 2017) and its key actors, is extremely relevant to our understanding of the broader context. However, before turning this same critical eye to the gendered corporate culture discourse in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, it is crucial that I first develop my proposal about the crisis as a ‘revealer’.

4. A crisis as a revealer: the ‘corona shock’ and the WSR discourse

Crises have the capacity to crystalize long-standing issues and make them more visible (Chwieroth and Walter 2019; Craig 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly highlighted long-term and contentious issues such as gender inequality and the division of employment, domestic labour, and care (Craig 2020). As typical of such major shocks, the pandemic was recognized as exacerbating troubling concerns and inequalities. At the same time, and particularly in the lingering shadow of the pandemic crisis, there has also been a growing recognition that governments and organizations can use policy to prevent such exacerbation (Raile et al. 2021).

As elsewhere, the pandemic aggravated pre-existing schisms in Japan. Moreover, as previous large-scale disasters have demonstrated, the COVID-19 crisis had the potential to act as a ‘revealer’ of vulnerabilities (Hoffmann 2005; Ivry et al. 2019). Like other disasters, such as the 3/11 Great East Japan Disaster of 2011, the ‘Corona Shock’⁴ can also be described as ‘not truly a physical event’, but rather as ‘socially constructed, manufactured over long periods of time’ (Hoffmann 2005). This article, however, proposes yet another revealing role for large-scale crises. Focusing on the experiences of employees, the article explores how the ‘Corona Shock’ acted as a revealer of the deeply embedded core practices and cultural values of work, and their position as impediments to desired change.

In April 2020, a striking headline introduced an article in a leading business management magazine: ‘The corona shock [crisis] exposed the over-foolish workstyle of the Japanese [people]’ (Kaya, 2020). The article drew a clear link between ‘telework as measures against corona’ and the WSR, suggesting that companies that are open to implementing work style reforms are more likely to adopt infection prevention measures. The commentator then blamed the ‘Japanese’ work culture, which he described as unable to accept the ‘logic’ of workstyle reform. He then described the main malaise of this Japanese work culture as being rooted in the custom of unclear responsibility, which encourages the ‘emotional’ evaluation of workers according to the level to which they can ‘always [show] hardship’ (itsumu ganbatteiru).

In sum, while the crisis has prompted those already active in the ‘WSR boom’ to promote their ideas about work/family balance and their cultural values of work, it has also acted as a ‘revealer’. As such, it has both raised hopes among corporate activists such as Aono Yoshihisa (quoted above), and certainly among employees, that the crisis could be a catalyst for change, while at the same time exposing the deeply entrenched obstactles to that.

5. Study and method

The main findings presented in this article were collected after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in February 2020. However, the article also draws on an extended ethnographic study (2015–2019) that explored the relationship between work and family and probed the public discourse about the work–life balance and the debate on the entrenched difficulties posed by Japan’s gendered corporate culture.

The research applied a social constructionist approach to grounded theory (Charmaz 2000, 2006, 2008). As such, it sought to attain a thorough analysis of how the research participants construct their lives, experiences and perceptions (Charmaz 2006). While the views and voices of the participants are integral to the analysis, the research also sought an interpretive understanding of the studied phenomenon that accounts for context (Charmaz 2008). Thus, before presenting the voices and narratives of employees who for the first time experienced flexible and remote work as a result of the ‘Corona Shock’, I seek to contextualize these new experiences within the ongoing vibrant public discourse on masculine work culture and to the quest for a better work–life balance.

One of the primary data sources for this study is the vigorous media and public discourse that used the pandemic as a trigger for change in Japanese work culture. In the first section of the findings, I discuss the Ganbaruna Nippon campaign and other COVID-19-related materials and present a critical qualitative analysis of this discourse on the Japanese corporate culture. The data for this analysis was gathered from public online and offline materials, including (online) attendance at meetings and large gatherings, both formal and informal. It also includes a close reading of the Japanese general financial and business management press, which is widely read by managers. The cultural analysis contextualises these materials within the general discourse on WSR and WLB, and more specifically offers a ‘reading’ vis-à-vis the ideas and debates about the ideal worker culture in Japan and the idea of the crisis as a trigger for change.

A key source of data was the narratives of employees who were experiencing, mostly for the first time, flexible working conditions, or more specifically remote working, as a result of the government’s encouragement to work from home ‘as much as possible’. In-depth interviews were conducted via Zoom mainly between May and December 2020. Interview partners were all from urban and suburban middle-class backgrounds, and mostly resided in Tokyo or Osaka, Japan’s second largest city. They were recruited mainly through a snowball sampling method. Some of the interviewees I had met before the pandemic as part of a larger ethnographic study on work–life balance. Zoom interviews were conducted with eighteen women and twelve men. Most were dual-earner heterosexual couples with young children; a few interviews were conducted jointly with the participants’ spouses. The group was made up of employees from a wide range of companies, including large- and medium-sized manufacturing, telecommunications, advertising, trading, and IT companies. All interviewees, women and men, were ‘regular employees’ (seishain), none of them were part-time or contract workers. A few of the women were on extended childcare leave or working reduced hours (jitan); none of the men fell into either of these categories.⁵

The in-depth interviews took the form of open-ended conversations lasting between 2 and 3 hours. The decision to conduct the interviews in a conversational rather than a question–answer mode reflects the social constructionist approach to grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Charmaz 2008). My aim was to elicit and interpret the research participants’ perspectives and experiences of meaning-making (Charmaz 2006). In the grounded theory research methodology, key themes are not introduced by the researcher but emerge as the research is conducted (Charmaz 2008). Such emerging key themes, which this article discusses, include the expectation, or hope that ‘the Corona’ might lead to changes in the prevailing work culture, and the link between the new option of flexible working, which first emerged during ‘Corona Time’, and the WSR. Another theme discovered through the research process was the binary division between ‘the Japanese company’ and ‘new-style’ companies, together with indications of the deeply entrenched masculine ideal worker culture in the ‘Japanese company’ as an obstacle to change.

As the main data for COVID-19 were collected in 2020, and as the pandemic and the consequent implementation of flexible working had lasted longer than originally anticipated, I sent a questionnaire by email to all my interviewees in November 2021. The questionnaire consisted of ten open-ended questions about current working conditions, experiences of working from home, preferences, and on productivity and the work–life balance. Twenty-five participants completed the questionnaire. The most detailed responses were to the last two questions: ‘Has COVID-19 had any impact on the WSR (hatarakikata kaikaku), and if so, what impact, and why do you think so?’; and a more general question, ‘What do you think about the way people work in Japan? Do you wish it would change? How do you think it would change?’

6. The ‘corona shock’ encounters—and exacerbates—the WSR discourse

In December 2020, I interviewed Kenta, a young man (25) who had been working for Cybozu since graduating from university. Kenta was part of the team responsible for Aono’s Ganbaruna, Nippon campaign. He explained that the focus on ‘not forcing [your] employees to commute’ came up following the onset of the pandemic. However, the team had in fact been working on the idea of ‘Japan, stop fighting to the bitter end’ since 2019. The background, he went on to explain, was not only intended to contrast with the national slogan for the upcoming Olympic Games.⁶ More specifically, it encapsulated a sense that perhaps there was ‘finally progress towards change related to WSR’ that they could leverage.

Prior to the pandemic, Aono Yoshihisa, CEO of Cybozu, had been one of the main actors in the heated corporate and public debate about the so-called reforms of the Japanese workstyle, dubbed the ‘WSR boom’ as explained above. Aono is known in Japan as an activist CEO and an advocate for workstyle reform, work and family balance, paternity leave, diversity in the workplace, and gender equality.⁷ His company’s 2017 ‘WSR is not fun’ campaign attracted no less attention—and critique—than the Ganbaruna, Nippon campaign.⁸

The Ganburana, Nippon campaign consisted of several TV commercials, a website titled ‘Ganbaruna, Nippon. Let’s increase workstyle choice with Cybozu’ (https://ganbaruna-nippon.cybozu.co.jp), and videos posted on the company’s official Twitter account throughout 2020. It culminated in a congratulatory advertisement on television and in Nikkei in December 2020. The ad, this time titled ‘Otsukaresama, Nippon’ (Thank you for your good work, Japan) was again aimed at the community of Japanese executives. After noting the difficulties and changes (emergency statuses and telework) of 2020, the message ended with the wish for a more ‘personal workstyle’ to be adopted in 2021 (2021-nen, yori jibunrashī hataraki-kata o). The meaning of this personal workstyle was explained as a wish that in the next year, ‘we will have a [new] workstyle with more [emphasis] on trying less to fight to the bitter end’ (rainen wa, motto ganbaranai hataraki-kata o).

I suggest that one of the explanations for the high level of public engagement with the Ganabaruna, Nippon campaign—58,000 tweets and the label ‘commercial hot topic (CM wadai)’ (Fujita 2020; Nakamura 2020)—was the decision to use (or, in fact, boldly negate) a fundamental value and keyword of Japanese work culture. Along with a number of related keywords such as ‘fortitude’, ‘perseverance’, ‘discipline’, ‘loyalty’, and ‘devotion’, ‘ganbaru’ is seen as a core value or ‘a kind of interpretative lens’ through which the Japanese tend to view the supposedly unique Japanese spirit (seishin) and indeed their own culture and society (Moeran 1984; Wierzbicka 1991).

Ganbaru, expressing the inner ability to ‘endure’, ‘to compete to the bitter end’, ‘to persevere’, secured a strong cultural hold during Japan’s postwar years of economic growth and became a crucial element of work, training, and promotion in Japanese work organizations (Frager and Rohlen 1976). It has also become closely associated with the ideological form of the masculine image of the corporate warrior (Roberson 2005).

North (2011), discussing the karōshi of a young Japanese stockbroker in 1990, offered an analysis of corporate documents and events valorizing the broker as ‘the embodiment of the ideal employee’. According to his analysis, ganbaru captures the spirit and tradition of discipline, dedication, deference, and indeed ‘ascetic diligence’. To demonstrate the strong cultural significance of the term in Japan, North compared the ideal employee and another highly valued masculine epitome of Japanese spirit, the sumo grand champion (Yokozuna). Both the ideal employee and the dignified wrestlers are expected to ‘merely mutter “ganbarimasu”, expressing the need to do still more’, thus acknowledging their selfless devotion (North 2011: 153).

The nature of the agitated reaction of the business community to the Ganbaruna, Nippon campaign is further evidence that the daring (daitan) decision to negate a core value such as ganbaru has definitely succeeded in attracting attention.⁹ Reactions tended not to relate to the practicalities of teleworking. Instead, both positive and negative responses focused on the notion of ‘hard work’. Responses included: ‘the phrase “stop fighting to the bitter end” sounds wrong to me’; ‘telework doesn’t mean that we are not working hard’; and ‘I want my manager to watch it’ (Fujita 2020; Nakamura 2020).

Aono was not the only CEO to use the pandemic to promote a personal agenda on flexible working and WSR. A fascinating and indeed contrasting agenda was, unsurprisingly, delivered by an established conservative magazine, which published a lengthy interview with the CEO of Itochu, a leading general trading company (sōgō shōsha). The article highlighted a provocative quote: ‘Productivity is improved by telecommuting? I think it’s a complete lie’ (Okafuji 2020). Itochu is one of a small number of large general trading companies seen as representing the ‘antagonist’ side of the WSR debate (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen 2011). A key quote from the interview sums up the CEO’s deepest fear about teleworking: ‘If you drink tea at home and start watching TV, you’ll just mess around, and if your wife tells you “hey you, won’t you help me”, you cannot ignore [her], and productivity will drop by a third.’

This view reaffirms conservative notions of work, gender, and care in Japan as encapsulated in the so-called ‘happy collusion’ (Amano 2006) between the triad of men, women, and Japanese companies (Ogasawara 2016). More generally, it confirms the ‘flexibility stigma’: the belief that workers who take up flexible working arrangements for care purposes are less productive and less committed to the workplace (Chung 2018; Chung and Lippe 2020).

Such a perspective, which verifies adherence to a set of norms prescribing that women take primary responsibility for caregiving in the family (Tsutsui 2016), has been found to be characteristic of managers across a range of industries in Japan (Brinton and Mun 2016). Moreover, it strongly endorses a deeply entrenched gendered division of roles (Yagi 2009), one that has also become the most common survey item used to measure attitude changes about Japan’s normative differentiation of social roles and the division of labour between the sexes (North 2012: 17), namely ‘Men should work outside the home for wages, and women should protect the household’.

While the chairman and CEO of one of Japan’s leading sōgō shōsha chose to reiterate one of the main characteristics of the Japanese masculine work culture, namely the emphasis on ‘face time’ in large companies (Mun and Brinton 2015), other large companies appear to have chosen a different path. In fact, a few companies used the unprecedented opportunity to shake up their image as conservative Japanese corporations ‘after decades of silently accepting the status quo’ (Lewis 2020). One striking example was the ‘Calbee Corona’ declaration, presented in July 2020. The snack food giant produced a ‘Calbee New Workstyle’ plan as its ‘new normal workstyle’. In addition to standardizing mobile working and fully implementing flexible working, the company also announced the abolition of the practice of ‘unaccompanied transfer’ (tanshin funin).¹⁰ Inter-regional transfers, or tenkin, de rigueur in many Japanese companies, are used for training and promotion of long-term employees. As Fujita (2021) explains when discussing corporate transfers of dual-career couples in Japan, the widespread and taken-for-granted implementation of tenkin is in fact based on the gendered assumption that only men are subject to it. Women, on the other hand, who are seen as responsible for domestic roles, are either excluded from tenkin, regardless of their wishes, or forced to remain in secondary positions not subject to tenkin. Tanshin funin, an extreme manifestation of this gendered custom, occurs when the worker lives apart from the family as a result of tenkin. It is evident that the vast majority of unaccompanied transfers are made by men who leave domestic responsibilities to their wives (Fujita 2021).

Calbee’s decision to use the pandemic crisis as a trigger for change in the entrenched masculine Japanese work culture was based on the results of a questionnaire the company conducted with its employees in May 2020. This internal survey showed that more than 60 per cent of their staff had no desire to return to pre-pandemic working practices. The narratives of the workers whom I ‘visited’ in the homes that had become their workplaces during the period they referred to as ‘Corona time’ reveal very similar hopes for change in work culture—hopes that were probably reinforced by this corporate public debate and propaganda. However, the research participants also revealed growing awareness of the impediments to this desired change in their companies’ perceptions of what constitutes the ‘ideal worker’.

7. ‘Thank you, Corona’: crisis triggering hope for change

A custom I adopted during the intensive period of online interviews (May to December, 2020) was to end the interview with the question ‘How would you describe Corona in one word? (Corona no hitokoto?)’ Surprisingly at first, the reply was often positive. Satsuki was not the only one who replied with a somewhat apologetic ‘Thank you, Corona’. In July 2020, almost two months after the end of the first ‘state of emergency’ in Tokyo, Satsuki, a 35-year-old mother of a toddler, was still working from home every day. She was employed by a small and young media-related company, which she had recently joined after realizing that the big publishing company she had worked for since graduating from a leading Japanese university was the ‘so-called old world’. When I asked Satsuki to explain further her positive ‘one-word’ answer, she clarified:

It [the Corona] gave us the opportunity to stop and think. I cannot [easily] say ‘thank you’ [since other people may have suffered], but I would say that I was wondering before if such [a crisis] would occur. I think that we were too busy or too much bound to a single way of living. If we can break through with Corona, we may be able to move in the right direction. I’m not sure if Japan’s current policies and the likes are making good use of the lessons learned, but I think we should make good use of it.

Like other interviewees, Satsuki was grateful for flexible working, which allowed her ‘to do house chores in my spare time and to spend more time with my child’. Other mothers related to their husbands now ‘washing the dishes after dinner’, or sharing childcare more than they had before.

In both the interviews and the questionnaire, the option of a more ‘personal’ flexible working style was interpreted as beneficial, particularly for women. For example, one of the interviewees mentioned in her response to the November 2021 questionnaire that she was happy for a friend who, after being a housewife for a long period, had recently ‘returned’ to work on a contract and still [even though only a contract worker] was immediately permitted to work remotely.

Namie, a 40-year-old mother of three and employee of a large human resources company, expressed during her interview the ‘impression’, or hope, that ‘with the impact of Corona, finally everything is moving forward’. In her replies to the questionnaire, she gave concrete examples of the positive impact of Corona on WLB and WSR:

[I know] a working mother who was working for reduced hours (jitan) and could switch to full-time work and set up base in Fukuoka; a father, who had been tanshin funin (unaccompanied transfer) in Osaka and returned to his home in Tokyo; and someone who went back to Hiroshima to care for her parents while working remotely for her job in Tokyo. As for me, I don’t have to move, but I now can do my side job as long as I switch my computer screen. I think we have more opportunities to live where we want to and do the work we like.

More strikingly, however, both in the interviews and the lengthy responses to the questionnaire, was the hope for a more profound change in the ‘mindset’ in relation to the crisis. One of the emerging themes of the study was that Corona, or urgency, can or should be an accelerator for the necessary change in the Japanese way and culture of work. As explained by Ren, a 35-year-old father of a four-year-old and employee of a large company, during our long online conversation in June 2020:

Due to Corona, it [flexible working] accelerated all at once. I mean, we were forced into the situation when there was no other way. Something like this [remote work] usually will not be progressed because the older generation would say ‘I don’t really know how to use it.’ I think it happens a lot. But [with Corona] it progressed a lot because it was unavoidable.

8. The ‘Japanese company’ as an impediment to employees’ aspired change

Chung et al. (2021: 10) note that the ‘pandemic has provided us with a period for reflection on what we value as individuals, as families, and society in terms of work, including the value of unpaid work’. In this article, I focus on such reflection from the perspective of my research participants, Japanese employees. Satsuki and others noted that COVID-19 ‘gave us the opportunity to stop and think’. However, this unusual period of reflection led not only to an acknowledgment of the need for change and the hope that this entails, but also to a more painful recognition of the factors hindering this change.

My interview partners were often suspicious of the ‘genuineness’ of change. Like the doubtful eye they tended to cast on ‘declared’ reforms at the national level, they were often even more suspicious of their own company’s ability to change. I interviewed Junko in late May 2020. A 34-year-old mother, Junko had extended her maternity leave after the outbreak of the pandemic. However, she had kept in close contact with ‘working mothers’ in her company, mainly through the company’s Line group (a popular application for instant communication), which she joined when she became pregnant. Scheduled to return to work in July 2020, Junko was not very optimistic about her company’s genuine capability for change:

I want change to happen but in fact our company has returned to regular work without delay [soon after the emergency status was lifted]…particularly, [male] workers in their 40s and 50s don’t recognize it as ‘work’ if they don’t come to the office and make handwritten documents and talk to each other face-to-face. They think that workers might turn lazy if they work at home. On the other hand, the mother-circle (mamatomo), whom I talk with frequently, all wish for the culture of remote work to take root.

Junko, employed in a medium-sized housing company, had clear-cut explanations for her sceptical view of her company’s adaptability. Her scepticism was partly based on her experience of the company’s mishandling of previous workstyle reforms. However, the main reason Junko gave for her scepticism about workstyle reforms in general and flexible working in particular in her company, is actually the underlying ‘nature’ of the company, which she lucidly described as a ‘very old-fashioned Shōwa-type company’. ‘Shōwa’ designates a historical period (1926–1989). However, in public discourse, the Shōwa-type mindset has become closely associated with the masculine corporate warrior culture (Dasgupta 2013), as in ‘Shōwa man’, ‘Shōwa father’, and ‘Shōwa manager’; all symbolizing the salaryman, the epitome of Japanese hegemonic masculinity during the years of economic success (Goldstein-Gidoni 2020, 2022).

Junko was not the only interview partner to give a straightforward definition of her company’s ‘type’. ‘Shōwa-type’ was of several similar definitions, such as ‘the Japanese corporation’ (za Nihon kigyō, using the definite article ‘the’ (za) to indicate typicality), or ‘Japanese-style company’. These classifications were often accompanied by the adjectives ‘traditional’ (dentō-teki), ‘old’, or ‘old-fashioned’ (furui).

When I asked Junko what she meant when she described her company as a ‘very old-fashioned Shōwa-type company’, she used the term ‘vertical society’ (tateshakai). ‘Vertical society’ is a term associated with Chie Nakane’s (1970) description of ‘Japan of all times’ (Befu 1980). Nakane’s ‘Japanese Society’, like other authors such as Doi (1973), emphasises Japan’s uniquely paternalistic and hierarchical system. This kind of ‘group model’ (Befu 1980) literature, which has been strongly criticized for mystifying Japanese culture (Mouer and Sugimoto 1986), has also contributed to the image of the unique model of the ‘Japanese company’ (Clark 1979), epitomized, for example, in the concept of ‘Japan, Inc.’ (Kahn 1970).

Nakane’s ‘vertical society’, or more specifically the Japanese version of tateshakai, which is very popular in Japan, has been described as ‘extremely conservative’ (Hata and Smith 1986). It has also been seen as supporting the ‘ideological’ basis that maintained the power of the ‘Japanese employment system’ that emerged during the years of rapid economic growth. Rebick (2005) summarised the attributes of this specific Japanese employment system as based on long-term employment, seniority wages and a hierarchical system, internal training and mobility, organised early entry for new graduates, status differences between different types of employees, and large gender-based differentials and segregation. Time and again, my interview partners described these same attributes as a ‘deeply rooted culture’. Moreover, it was this entrenched corporate culture that was identified as ‘the problem’ and the ‘obstacle’ delaying change.

Closely related to the question of the potential for change was the clear typificiation of companies that emerged from the interviews. Minoru, a 38-year-old manager who has been employed by one of Japan’s largest telecommunications companies since his graduation, was one of many who provided such a binary typology:

My company is a so-called ‘The Japanese (za Nihon)’ traditional company and our work style is the so-called Japanese Style Employment System. New companies have a totally different way of thinking. I think that this is based on self-responsibility.

Minoru’s allusion to ‘new companies’ as a clear antithesis to his own ‘the Japanese’ company was not unusual. I had deliberately varied the companies in which my interviewees were employed, but the almost binary classification emerged spontaneously in the interviews, as interview partners talked about their own working experiences and, more specifically, their perceptions and hopes about the potential for genuine change.

The tendency for a binary division between types of work organisations in Japan is not new. However, the divisions have tended to relate to company size (Gordon 2000) or types of employment, usually regular versus non-regular (Osawa 2005; Osawa et al. 2013; Gordon 2017). The fundamental difference between a ‘Shōwa type’ company and the still vaguely defined new-style company—allegedly, one based on ‘self-responsibility’ and ‘personal workstyle’, as emerged in the in-depth interviews with employees—is thus new and revealing, especially in terms of the form work takes and the associated expectations of the ‘ideal worker’.

9. The organisational culture of Ganbaru as an obstacle to change

The binary division between the aspired company style and the so-called ‘old’, ‘Japanese-style’ company that interviewees noted in reflecting on working life in Japan was not always clear-cut. However, one of the obvious characterisations of the so-called ‘Japanese style’ is the infamous organisational culture (bunka) of ‘ganbaru’. When asked what she thought ‘the Japanese company’ was, 35-year-old Satsuki, who (as noted above) had quit working at a ‘Japanese-style’ company in favour of a smaller new-style company, was very specific: ‘What I feel most strongly is that it is more important to show the process of how you are trying hard/holding out (ganbaru) rather than results’.

The notion of ganbaru culture as such, with its focus on the ‘appearance’ or even the ‘pretence’ (ganbaru-furi) of ‘working hard’, came up frequently in the interviews. Tsubasa (34), whose wife works full-time, is the father of a toddler. Since graduating from a prestigious university, he has been employed at a large and well-known company. Tsubasa, who emphasised his company’s favourable position towards WSR, was among the smaller group of interview partners who were relatively optimistic that the pandemic crisis would accelerate positive organisational change even within large corporations: ‘Japanese companies that tended to be stiff are now softening a bit’. He was, however, more assertive about what might be hampering change in the Japanese workstyle.

According to Tsubasa, ‘the biggest hindrance in Japan’ is the ‘culture’ of ‘keeping up appearances’ (seken tei o ki ni suru). Tsubasa directly linked this cultural tendency for being attentive to ‘the eyes around me’, to long working hours. For example, he avoids taking leave—including paternity leave, of which he took only three days, while his wife took a year’s leave. In particular, he linked the obstacle to the organisational culture of ganbaru:

What is ganbaru? It is because we worry about keeping up appearances (seken tei o ki ni suru). I think that in the end, the most important thing is how we [workers] are seen by others. When I look back to how I used to be when I was doing lots of overtime, especially in the first years after joining [the company] in 2010, it wasn’t only because I had so much work to do; it was because of how others saw me. If senior colleagues (senpai) were working, I couldn’t leave the office. Or, I couldn’t take full holidays because it would be a burden on other members of my section.

Tsubasa, who hoped that the culture of overwork would eventually disappear, described his behaviour of staying at the office until 11pm as a ‘pretence of holding out’ (ganbatteita furi nan desu). This reflection helped him to understand the relationship between the two most important corporate values, ganbaru and overtime work, and to recognise the power of corporate scrutiny.

The notion of long working hours as a display of ganbaru is in fact closely linked to the notion of ‘self-sacrifice’, another fundamental virtue of the Japanese work ethic (Brinton and Mun 2016; Ogasawara 2016), reflecting the masculine spirit of the corporate warrior (Dasgupta 2003, 2013; Nemoto 2013a, 2013b). In a joint interview with her husband Tsutomu (45) in May 2020, Emi (45), who has an 8-year old child and works for a large manufacturing company, expressed ‘high hopes’ for the crisis serving as a trigger for change. However, her answers to the questionnaire in November 2021 show that this hope is fading.

On the one hand, it seemed that Emi was truly trying to hold on to her hope, as reflected in her short reply to the question about the ‘impact of COVID-19 on WSR’: ‘I think it was a big trigger (kikake). Humankind (ningen) have no other choice but to change, when the situation becomes unavoidable’. On the other, as Emi, like many other employees, was forced to return to the office more than she wished to, even though the pandemic had not yet ended in November 2021, her hope seemed to have been eroded. She thus expressed a painful recognition of the strong cultural hold of the self-disciplined, self-sacrificing image of the ideal worker as an impediment for genuine change, despite the supposed promotion of flexible working:

Our company is one which has the culture according to which the right thing to do is to come to the office. Even in this [emergency] time, they ask workers why they don’t attend. From the point of view of those who think that attendance means work, teleworking people are not working. It may appear that teleworking will promote WSR, but I honestly don’t believe that fundamental change will occur. I don’t think that WSR will be advanced by telework. The reason is the way they see productivity. If the company understands productivity wrongly—that is, if they think that the company’s productivity is about people grinding their body into dust (mi o ko ni shite), and sacrificing themselves for the company (kaisha no tame ni gisei o harau)—then, can telework be labelled ‘productive’?

What also became very obvious in the case of Emi and her husband, were the gendered aspects of the ganbaru organisational culture. Emi and Tsutomo both worked for the same large manufacturing company for many years. However, he was a manager, while she, who had been working on a reduced hours system, described her employment condition as ‘working there for already twenty-four years and getting the same salary as a young worker who has just started working’. Tsutomo, who admitted that while watching his wife when they were both forced to work remotely, he ‘was surprised to see that women work so hard while working at home’, defined his wife’s job as a ‘typically female, more routine and less creative job’. In November 2021, while Emi was forced to go to the office at least two or three times a week, Tsutomu was able to do his managerial job mainly from his home office, usually spending only one day a week at the office. Such differences between expectations of female and male employees are not surprising, given that the ‘Japanese company’ and the ‘Japanese Style Employment System’ were envisioned and practically constructed around the corporate warrior or ubiquitous salaryman, who has come to signify both Japanese masculinity and Japanese corporate culture (Dasgupta 2003, 2013).

10. Gendered barriers to change: the lingering masculine organisational culture

Similarly to Emi, Namie (40), a mother of three who works for a large company and who, as mentioned above, was optimistic that with COVID-19 ‘finally everything is moving forward’, was actually much more reserved later in our long conversation when considering the feasibility of more profound changes in her own company and in general:

As far as my current company is concerned—I guess it may in fact apply to Japan in general—[what is needed] is changing the mindset (maindochenji). It is required to think of ways to make profit without overtime. If we don’t change the way of thinking that overtime work is necessary, I don’t think [WSR] will succeed. I don’t think that overtime is always bad because personally I like working, but the system now is like that I must choose between work and home. I think this bipolarization is wrong.

As noted above, long working hours, overtime, and sacrificing family time in favour of face time at work have all been identified as critical elements of the ideal worker culture in Japan (Boling 2008; Nemoto 2013a, 2013b; Brinton and Mun 2016). However, what also emerged clearly from the interviews was the gendered nature of the Japanese-style ‘work devotion schema’.

In this sense, ‘gendered’ ideal worker culture or ‘masculine organisational culture’ (Nemoto 2013b) does not imply a simple distinction between men and women. Instead, closely linked to the ‘work devotion schema’ (Blair-Loy 2003), it indicates a hierarchical division between highly valued ‘(paid) work’ and everything else. As suggested above, the Japanese devotion to work carries with it particular expectations, including after-work social drinking and mandatory work transfers (tenkin), which are highly gendered. Interviewees were acutely aware of this reality, as exemplified by the statement of Akemi (59), a leading female manager at a large consulting company, who suggested that the online technologies of COVID-19 offered some hope for change, as they ‘freed us from a lot of things that only men could do in a traditional family setup, such as going out drinking with customers’.

In Japan, like elsewhere, when more women entered the workforce (Osawa 2005; Tsutsui 2016), Williams’ (2000) definition, distinguishing between ‘mothers and others’ to describe the ideal worker norm, became more apt. As my female interview partners were all mothers, this division came up clearly in their narratives of working life, which they clearly demarcated as pre- and post-motherhood.

Namie, employed for many years by the same large corporation, described her pre-marriage (kekkon suru made ni) working style as just ‘going back and forth from home to office (ōfuku o shiteite), with no hobbies or the like’. Her own definition of this working style as ‘working like a “Shōwa father”’, lucidly captures the gendered ideal worker culture. When I asked her to elaborate on her working style pre-marriage, Namie explained (with two of her kids clambering over her as she spoke) while adding her perspective of WSR:

I used to work almost every day until midnight, and it’s not that I didn’t like working like that but to keep on living like that was just impossible [for me]. From the point of view of working style, we work less overtime now but still at nighttime men and women without kids work until very late and it means that their families are suffering. Also, they are working more instead of people like me who are working for reduced hours (jitan) and it’s not fair. I think it [WSR] has not brought real change in consciousness.

The reduced working hours system (jitan) for parents of children until elementary school age is part of the governmental plan for supporting ‘the balance between work and family life’.¹¹ The plan, which also includes the promotion of childcare leave for fathers and care for elderly parents, is ostensibly gender-neutral with regard to the reduced hours system. However, none of my interview partners had ever heard of a father taking it up. The majority of the mothers, on the other hand, reported transitioning into the system, usually on their return to work after childcare leave, which is usually a year long.

Mihoko (45), a mother of a 5-year-old and an employee of a large mobile phone company, used the reduced hours system for only one year. She and her husband, whom she met at work—‘it was an “office-romance”’ (shanai renai)—stayed with the same company because they thought that ‘the company was easy to work in (hataraki yasui), very friendly to its employees’. While Mihoko took one-year maternity leave, her husband, who ‘could have relatively easily’ enjoyed the benefits of their company’s generous WLB polices, chose, as she explained it, to take only ‘a one-week paid holiday as he was afraid that his evaluation would go down’. Mihoko, on her part, thought that ‘even if my evaluation went down temporarily, I could recover it by working hard upon my return’. Mihoko maintained an optimistic favourable view of her ‘easy-to-work-in’ company, even though she confessed to being ‘shocked’ when the company ordered her to move into the inner office during her pregnancy so that she would not be seen by customers or other outsiders. As she recalled, ‘telling the story to other people, many people said that it was nice that the company was considering my condition, so, I thought, well, maybe it’s true and I took it like that’. However, returning to work after childcare leave ‘opened her eyes’ to the reality of the ‘mommy track’ (work earmarked for mothers) (Zhou 2015):

I had heard of ‘mommy track’ beforehand, but didn’t relate it to my experience. However, after going back to work and joining the reduced hours system, I really felt it. Because the time I could work was limited, I felt that I wasn’t given enough serious work. Therefore, I quit working reduced hours and returned to work full-time.

Mihoko’s decision to give up on the ‘women-friendly’ reduced hours policy was very atypical. Other mothers shared very similar experiences of an unpleasant late realisation, which usually came with pregnancy or childbirth, that from then on ‘they are basically put in the group that can no longer get promoted in the company ’, that ‘they would only be given clerical work’ and that ‘their salaries would be cut by about a half’. However, most women felt that they had no choice but to comply with the system, which is based on the gendered division between ‘mothers and others’. It is therefore not surprising that the mothers among my interview partners were the strongest supporters of the idea of using the crisis in order to make sweeping changes to the existing paradigm, while at the same time they were also the ones who recognised the gendered impediments that would hinder this desired change.

11. Conclusion

Starting from the slogan of a commercial and public campaign that dared to propose a bold public negation of ‘ganbaru’, one of the core values of the Japanese masculine corporate culture, this article offered a critical cultural analysis of the crisis-related accelerated discourse on the masculine corporate culture and work style reforms. By contextualising the ‘Corona-Shock’ discourse within the broader pre-pandemic ‘WSR boom’, the article also revealed corporate antagonism to change based on entrenched cultural notions of the gendered division of work and care. In addition, the critical analysis explored the gaps between discourse and practice.

The article focused on the narratives of employees, men and women, who faced new forms of flexible working due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Research participants’ accounts shed light on gendered experiences of work and on perceptions of what constitutes the ideal worker. The article depicted employees’ expressions of thankfulness for the crisis, alongside their hope that the crisis would lead to change. Interview partners noted that new forms of flexible working were among the positive changes enabled only through the pressure of emergency. Women, especially mothers, were the most appreciative of the new way of working, but they were also the most pessimistic about the plausibility of this change, based on their own painful experiences as ‘working mothers’ in a masculine corporate world.

Transcending the reflective quality of the crisis, which, as many interviewees shared, gave them the ‘time to stop and think’, through inductive qualitative data collection and a social constructionist approach to grounded theory analysis (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Charmaz 2000), some additional key themes spontaneously emerged (Charmaz 2006, 2008). These emerging themes included not only critical fresh perspectives that research participants expressed regarding the deeply embedded organizational culture of ‘ganbaru’, but also the striking division between the alleged ‘Japanese-style’ companies, which ‘cannot change’, and the so-called but not yet fully defined ‘new-style’ companies, which participants perceive as potentially able to promote change.

The article suggested that the COVID-19 crisis simultaneously triggered, or accelerated, hope for change in the masculine corporate warrior culture in Japan, while concurrently revealing the impediments to such transformation. In line with this double-edged nature of the crisis as a revealer, this acknowledgement of latently emerging diversity in corporate culture inspired a hesitant hope for more profound change in the Japanese corporate mindset.

It was certainly not my intention in this article to estimate or predict the outcome of the pandemic in terms of the implementation of flexible working practices in Japan. The social constructionist approach to grounded theory (as opposed to the objectivist approach, Glaser 1992) that I applied in this study enabled me to undertake not only an inductive inquiry through which I was able to understand research participants’ social constructions, but also to attend to questions of what and how, and even why (Charmaz 2008). Nevertheless, it has not enabled me to assess the objective influence of the crisis as a trigger (or cause) for actual change.

Nonetheless, in closing, I do offer some reflections about what might be the ‘objective’ impact of the COVID-19 crisis as a trigger for genuine change in the Japanese masculine corporate culture. While some increase in remote work has been observed in Japan, this increase may be limited to ‘high-skilled, high-wage white-collar workers who work for large companies’ (Morikawa 2021). Findings from this study revealed Japanese white-collar worker culture to be highly masculine. Moreover, Japanese workers expressed a painful recognition that the impediments for aspired change are highly gendered.

What, then, are the odds of a so-called ‘gendered pandemic’ (Petts et al. 2020) to successfully challenge a gendered corporate culture? Research prior to the pandemic shows that even with long-term efforts to promote and support flexible working programs that gives workers the flexibility and control over the temporal and physical boundaries between their work and non-work domains, the main obstacle remains ‘gender normative views about mothers’ and fathers’ roles’ (Chung and Lippe 2020). Thus, notwithstanding the high hope for change, it might be that much more effort and rethinking is needed before meaningful change affects Japan’s corporate warrior culture.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the comments offered by the anonymous readers. Special thanks go to Mariko Ishikawa for her collaboration in the study.

Conflict of interest statement

None declared.

Funding

The study was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant 1842/19).

Footnotes

References