At some point during the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the world of the Japanese salaryman and woman took an extraordinary — but little noticed — swerve off its historic course. No longer, it seemed, were bigger companies necessarily better; career uncertainty was not so terrifying.
Corporate Japan was facing an onslaught of change in 2021. Its most staid companies, where traditions, working practices and career expectations had barely changed for decades, were being forced to rapidly adapt to work-from-home pandemic norms, remote meetings, hierarchy disruption and the sudden demise of the presenteeism that once firmly policed their work culture.
But behind all that, something far more transformative was evolving. Younger Japanese workers who, through decades of deflation, wage stagnation and a sense of slow national decline, had prioritised predictability in their career, had new ideas of what a company should offer by way of risk, reward, stimulation and opportunities for rapid promotion.