Japan

It's Their Loss--Most Men Shun Child-care Leave
04/29/2006
BY SAYAKA YAKUSHIJI, CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Masato Yamada was delighted when he heard his wife was pregnant again. They'd tried to have children for 10 years before their first children--twins--had been born two years earlier. The impending birth of a third child was a huge surprise.

But the reaction of his wife, Atsuko, shocked Yamada. She was considering not having the baby at all.

She'd just started a new assignment at work. She liked it and the pregnancy would be a major obstacle.

Yamada, now a 38-year-old official at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, thought about their situation and devised a solution he hoped would make everyone happy. Instead of his wife, he would take child-care leave.

Why not? They both had the same employer--the economy ministry. He could stay home and take care of the baby. She could continue her new project. On loan from the ministry to a government-affiliated institute, she'd just started research on the Constitution.

Anyway, it seemed like the fair thing to do. It was his turn.

Atsuko agreed, and he took a one-year leave of absence in October 2004 to take care of Takashi, now 18 months old.

Before he made the leap, his former university classmates and colleagues--all government bureaucrats--chastised him, saying it would be an act of sheer lunacy. Government officials are expected to work around-the-clock. If the Diet is in session or if crucial budget negotiations are in progress, you had to be there. Why waste time on a baby, and more importantly, put future promotions at risk for something that was essentially women's work?

Yamada's experience was recounted in book form with the January publication of "Keisansho no Yamada Kacho-hosa, Tadaima Ikukyu-chu" (Yamada, an economy ministry assistant manager, is now on child-care leave).

If Yamada's case sounds unusual, that's because it is. Few dads absent themselves from work for child care in Japan.

A recent Asahi Shimbun survey of 100 major corporations is illustrative. When asked how many male employees had taken child-care leave since 1992--the year the child-care leave law went into effect--more than 30 percent of the firms said zero.

This is especially disappointing because further legislation by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare to promote child-care leave was introduced in April 2005.

The new legislation was instigated by Japan's ever-declining birth rate and the demographic disaster it portends. Known as the "10-year-limit law," companies with more than 300 employees are required to formulate policies to aid child rearing by workers. The government's goal is to have at least 10 percent of men taking child-care leave within 10 years.

Japan's child-care and family-care leave law stipulates that employees can take up to one-year of child-care leave (18 months in special cases). Employees are guaranteed a minimum of 40 percent of their salaries for the duration of the leave period.

A 2004 labor ministry survey of companies with 30 or more employees found that while 78 percent of women have taken a child-care leave, only 0.43 percent men did the same.

"Taking care of the children is still considered the role of the mother," Hiroki Sato and Emiko Takeishi write in their book "Dansei no Ikuji Kyugyo" (Men's child-care leave).

"Social and corporate systems are designed with this idea in mind. Raising children is mainly done by women, while men commit themselves more to their job after having a child," the authors say in their book.

One reason Japanese men are adverse to child-care leave is that employees in their 30s and 40s often work in the neighborhood of 60 hours a week, according to the book. In other words, employer demands on their time peak at the age when they would most likely need to take leave.

Satoshi Hirahara is a 36-year-old employee of a major electronics firm. His company has a generous child-care leave system, yet Hirahara has "never even thought about taking leave" and knows "no male employee who has used the system."

He leaves the child-rearing duties during the week to his wife--a full-time homemaker. He has no intention of taking advantage of his company's child-care benefits, he says.

He says he is afraid that if he took leave he might not get the assignments he wants in the future.

Providing child-care leave presents difficulties for small firms. "Often, an employee is responsible for multiple tasks at a small company and it is very difficult to find someone to replace him for a short time," Koji Harakawa, research manager at the National Federation of Small Business Associations, says.

Social pressure is another factor. Kunihiko Imamura, a 35-year-old researcher in Hiroshima Prefecture, is planning to take three months off in December to care for his now six-month-old daughter, Haruka.

"I don't want to become a father who can work but cannot do housework and child care," he says. Also, he thinks it might be the only opportunity for him to spend a significant amount of time with the baby.

However, when he announced his intentions at the office--he is employed by the Hiroshima prefectural government--he ran into a storm of criticism. Colleagues, while not coming right out and saying it, made it clear they were not happy with his decision. Superiors were less discrete, not to say loud, confrontational and hostile.

One senior employee accused Imamura of being a slacker: "You just want to take it easy by taking the time off, right?"

In fact, taking care of a newborn is far from easy. For Yamada, it was especially tough because he had to take care of twins in addition to the infant.

He also had to learn the ropes in a new environment. While men may still run the business world to a certain degree, when it comes to babies, toddlers and kids, women control the territory.

Yamada says he had a difficult time adjusting to the female-dominated community at his children's kindergarten. To make matters worse, his neighbors gave him the cold shoulder--they apparently didn't approve of an adult male choosing to stay at home when he could be commuting to an office, he says.

Despite the hassles, Yamada says it was worth it. He was able to watch the baby grow day by day--an event he says he could never match with a work-related achievement, even as one of Japan's elite bureaucrats.

This feeling is shared by other fathers who have taken child-care leave. Takahiro Tsuzuku, a 28-year-old systems engineer at IBM Japan Systems Engineering Co., worked late into the night, frequently taking the last train home. And then he took two months off to take care of his daughter, Ayumi.

While taking a walk with the baby near his house in Kashiwa, Chiba Prefecture, he says: "I learned how a baby can be totally out of control. But you still love her because she's your child."

Tsuzuku--the first man to take child-care leave at his company--wants to do it again. "If we ever have another child, I'll ask my wife to work full time while I become a full-time house husband taking a year's leave."

Kosuke Abe, 31, a Sony Corp. employee, has formed "Kozure Okami no Kai" (Lone wolf and cub association), a group of men who have taken child-care leave.

"After taking child-care leave, I felt a strong need to set up a network of fathers," Abe says. "You can get lonely and feel alienated, as if you don't belong anywhere."

Bureaucrat Yamada has little time to feel lonely. He now leaves the ministry at 6 p.m. two days a week to take his kids home from nursery school. And he says he is more dedicated than ever at work, determined not to let his child-care experience damage his career. He says his professional success can serve as an example for other men.

Yamada says he's learned a lot. "Previously, I thought I was driving the Japanese economy. But after meeting mothers in the neighborhood I learned what happiness really means as far as the Japanese public is concerned," he says.

"I also learned tolerance. However idiotic my subordinates may be, at least they understand Japanese and won't suddenly burst out crying," he says, while trying to keep track of the twins running around his Shibuya Ward condo.

Sitting next to her husband, Atsuko smiles, while holding the baby she once considered not having at all.

(IHT/Asahi: April 29,2006)