A Japanese woman’s job: Care for kids and parents, work late
TOKYO — Hiromi Nagasaki remembers working past midnight on New Year’s Eve and during holidays as a business systems consultant in Japan’s notoriously longhours work environment. Last summer, at the height of her career, she quit.
A consultant in the software industry in Tokyo, Nakasaki uprooted her life to look after her ailing mother, roughly 670 kilometres away in the city of Matsuyama.
“I didn’t want to wait until something happened to her,” said Nakasaki, 55. “I wanted to stay with my mother and help her live as long as she could.”
Nakasaki’s choice is one that faces a growing number of women who have successfully battled for recognition in a male- dominated business world, only to have to drop out once their parents or parents-in-law become old.
While Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe promotes the idea that the workforce needs more women, the government has done little to lift the burden of their traditional obligation to care for the aged.
“The government wants women to fare well in the labour market, but you can’t make it work if women are also asked to care for their parents,” said Yoko Yajima, a research analyst at Mitsubishi UFJ Research and Consulting Co., in Tokyo.
Japan is aging fast, adding 2.6 million pensioners in the next 10 years. The proportion of young to old is falling, putting a greater burden on fewer children to care for parents. Restrictive immigration policies mean a shortage of care workers or affordable home care services. Women are marrying later, narrowing the window between childcare and elderly care when they can work full time. The national and regional governments are struggling with more than 1,000 trillion yen (US$8.3 trillion) in debt, making it hard to pay for nursing homes.
In the five years to 2012, 486,900 Japanese quit or changed jobs to care for older family members, according to the statistics bureau. About 80 per cent were women.
“Japan has been a male society and men still make more money on average, so women tend to provide family care,” said Reiko Ishiyama, who creates elderly care plans at Tokio Marine Nichido Better Life Service Co. “It’s rooted in Japanese culture that women take care of household needs.”
While the proportion of working-age women with jobs rose to a record 63.6 per cent in 2014, they are only paid about 72 per cent as much as men. Abe said Japan should be “a society where women shine,” and he wants to see women account for at least 30 per cent of management roles by 2020.
“How can he say that?” Nakasaki said, shaking her head and sneering. “He’s kidding me.”
As an unmarried manager, she said she worked long hours, often catching the last train home at midnight. While the money was good, she was concerned that she wouldn’t be able to find a reliable nursing home to care for her mother, she said.
About 524,000 Japanese seniors were on waiting lists for nursing homes as of March 2014, 24 per cent up from five years ago, according to the health ministry. Mitsubishi UFJ’s Yajima said many people quit without saying anything about family care needs to their employers because they feel it would do no good.
“There’s a limit” to what the government can do for elderly care, said Mayuko Nakai, a deputy director at the labour ministry. “We must create work environments where those who provide family care can continue to work.”
With Abe’s administration hamstrung by public debt and stuttering efforts to lift wages and economic growth, some private companies like Marubeni Corp. and the local unit of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are stepping in to try to keep female staff from leaving.
In 2011, Marubeni surveyed workers in their 40s and 50s and found 11 per cent of them were looking after family members and 84 per cent expected to do so within five years. Over the past decade, the company has taken various steps such as adding paid holidays and extending unpaid leave up to a year.
“Elderly care can last a long time, and if you quit, you may become too old, say 65, to be re-hired,” said Rie Konomi, general manager of diversity management at Marubeni. “We want our employees to be able to juggle work and family care. We want them to continue because we need their experience.”
In January, Goldman Sachs began paying for up to 100 hours extra nursing per year for family members on top of existing health insurance benefits.
“This will help everybody, but realistically, family obligation more often falls on women,” said Gary Chandler, head of human capital management at Goldman in Tokyo.
The nation’s concentration on long working hours also makes it difficult to juggle work and family life. Only 16 per cent of 2.4 million workers caring for family members said they used support measures guaranteed by law, such as time off, paid leave and shorter work hours, according to the statistics bureau.
At Marubeni, none of its 4,289 employees took a leave for family care in the year ended March 2014, while they used less than a half of paid vacation, according to the company.