Les Femmes Dans Le Monde Du Travail Nippon

Will "flexible working arrangements" and "concessions to work-life balance" contribute to contradicting the pessimistic predictions about Japan’s future?

A great number of countries in the world have changed their job legislation and adopted flexitime and work-life balance measures to give people the opportunity to work differently. So far, Japan seems to have been somewhat reluctant to implement similar actions. Could it be one of the reasons why pessimism is a recurrent key word in various analyses about Japan's future? The Japanese conception of work, the country's attitude to women and a specific demographic reality are the three major features usually pinpointed to support such a perception. These factors unquestionably interact with each other. Men are so obsessed with their work that they seem to have forgotten there is a life outside the office and their colleagues. In the meantime, their wives have been reduced to assuming the “classical” roles of “good” housewives and daughters nursing their aged parents after nursing their children and their homes. Thus Japan offers to the world the image of a society ossified in its social structures and unable to evolve. To start with, imposing flexitime and work-life balance measures upon workers might circumscribe overwork, one of Japan's major obsessions and a national plague. Workers might gradually be led into accepting the possibility of spending fewer hours

in the workplace and the idea of their being similarly efficient in their tasks partly carried out from home. Revamping their managing systems might encourage bosses to eventually have recourse to women's competences, a major step towards changing the sociological reality of the country. Indeed, men would have to admit there is a life outside the office, to recognize their wives are as entitled to work as they are, and women would appreciate having a life outside their homes ! Though common in our countries, this situation would be more unexpected in Japan, and would create an unprecedented dynamism leading to the creation of new structures, daycare centers for example, to precisely liberate working women from a number of chores and make their daily lives easier. Thus increasing the workforce would make up for the constantly increasing number of retiring people, and contribute to an expected economic impulse. Will Japan ever succeed in putting such a scheme into practice, thus refuting the most pessimistic estimates? Conducting such a radical program affecting the world of labor is undeniably a long-term enterprise. It implies structural, in-depth changes that cannot be achieved overnight. A country of strong contrasts, Japan must come to terms with centuries-old traditions in the wake of religious and philosophical precepts that have emphasized the role of men and relegated women to what society has always considered as “minor” roles. Japanese males must question themselves and do their best to regain self-esteem while acknowledging women's rights and competences. Changing a people's mindset is a highly delicate and complex process. But fundamental reforms, both political and economic, have to be initiated as well concomitantly. Apart from creating social structures, the government must intervene more drastically than in the past to impose a limitation of overwork for reasons of public health, to regulate salary inequities between men and women, and

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