Telework is an issue in Japan

Officially, Shuhei Aoyama has been teleworking for a month. But that doesn’t mean he can avoid going to the office.

Several times a week, Aoyama makes a half-hour commute across Tokyo for a task seemingly more suited to the age of the samurai than of the supercomputer: stamping his official corporate seal on business contracts and government paperwork.

The stamps, known as hanko or inkan, are used in place of signatures on the stream of documents that fill Japan’s workplaces, including the hotel network that employs Aoyama. They have become a symbol of a hidebound office culture that makes it difficult or impossible for many Japanese to work from home even as the country’s leaders say working remotely is essential to keeping Japan’s coronavirus epidemic from spiraling out of control.

While the world may see Japan as a futuristic land of humanoid robots and intelligent toilets, inside its offices, managers maintain a fierce devotion to paper files, fax machines, business card exchanges and face-toface meetings.

Essential documents are not digitized, and computer systems are obsolete and tied to offices. Middle managers in Japan’s team-oriented workplaces are hesitant to allow employees to work from home, with some fearful that they will slack off or even drink on the job. And the workers who do have the option of teleworking fear harm to their careers.

Forced to balance the needs of the office and the risks to their own health, employees like Aoyama, 26, say they are losing patience with the country’s work traditions.

“It’s not so much our company’s culture as it is Japanese culture that’s causing the problems,” he said.

In other countries where people are staying home to limit the spread of the virus, many whitecollar workers have made a fairly routine shift to Zoom videoconferences and electronic document signing. But in Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, the sudden need for social distancing has caught companies off guard.

“Many organizations that were not ready, not prepared, are being forced to do telework, which is causing lots of trouble,” said Kunihiko Higa, a telework expert at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

“Many internal rules require face-to-face meetings,” Higa added. “They think they can’t manage workers who are not there.”