Tenkin, New Marital Relationships, and Women’s Challenges in Employment and Family

Abstract

Along with significant demographic change caused by declining birthrates and an aging population, Japan is facing a labor shortage. The government has tried to implement labor market reforms, setting two objectives—women’s job continuity and promotion—as major strategies to increase the total labor force (Kantei 2014). The Act on Promotion of Women’s Participation and Advancement in the Workplace (Josei Katsuyaku Suishin Hō) was put into effect in April 2016. This legislation encouraged firms to boost women’s active participation in the workforce through measures that included an increase in the number of female managers (Gender Equality Bureau 2016). These reforms have cast a larger spotlight on women’s employment. I argue that these government actions, however, may make little contribution to women’s promotion in the workplace because of the tenkin system: the established business practice of various kinds of personnel transfer that require the employee to move house (JILPT 2005: 64).1 In most corporations, both blue-collar and white-collar regular workers (seishain) are trained and promoted using personnel transfers (Cole 1979, Sugayama 2011, Gordon 2012). For blue-collar workers, these transfers are a means by which they acquire new technical skills and receive employment security, even in the case of plant closures (Yamamoto 1967, Koike 1977). For white-collar, career-track employees, transfers facilitate promotion by helping them develop their managerial skills and thereby ascend the corporate hierarchy (Hatvany and Pucik 1981, Pucik 1984, Koike 1991). But transfers