Ten Shoku – Switching Jobs in Japan

This article (all in Japanese) asked 665 people in their 30s if switching their jobs is advantageous in their careers or not. In the US, especially in the big cities, if you stay too long at one company, you are often viewed as “dead wood”; so, answer to this question is quite obvious. But in Japan, it’s not so obvious.

My father’s generation in Japan had never considered switching their jobs. Everyone worked for one company all of their lives. If they did switch, their fate at the new company was quite grim. They were labeled as outsiders and treated as such forever. Their chances of climbing up to the management was slim.

In this article, the anxiety of switching jobs is still clear even for the current generation of 30-somethings. More than half of the people interviewed said that they expected their salaries to go down or remain the same. This is certainly strange from the American point of view. Many American companies avoid hiring at lower salaries since they won’t be as motivated and excited as the people hired at higher salaries. The reason for switching jobs in Japan is obviously not about money. In many cases, it’s probably an unbearable feeling of discontent and unhappiness. In other words, the word “ten shoku”, which simply means switching jobs, has the implications that are equivalent to changing one’s career entirely, like a lawyer quiting his job to work as a cook in a restaurant. This is one of many reasons why the Japanese expats living in the US feel Japan is “suffocating”.