Tenkin, New Marital Relationships, and Women’s Challenges in Employment and Family

Along with significant demographic change caused by declining birthrates and an aging population, Japan is facing a labor shortage. The government has tried to implement labor market reforms, setting two objectives—women’s job continuity and promotion—as major strategies to increase the total labor force (Kantei 2014). The Act on Promotion of Women’s Participation and Advancement in the Workplace (Josei Katsuyaku Suishin Hō) was put into effect in April 2016. This legislation encouraged firms to boost women’s active participation in the workforce through measures that included an increase in the number of female managers (Gender Equality Bureau 2016). These reforms have cast a larger spotlight on women’s employment.

I argue that these government actions, however, may make little contribution to women’s promotion in the workplace because of the tenkin system: the established business practice of various kinds of personnel transfer that require the employee to move house (JILPT 2005: 64).¹ In most corporations, both blue-collar and white-collar regular workers (seishain) are trained and promoted using personnel transfers (Cole 1979, Sugayama 2011, Gordon 2012). For blue-collar workers, these transfers are a means by which they acquire new technical skills and receive employment security, even in the case of plant closures (Yamamoto 1967, Koike 1977). For white-collar, career-track employees, transfers facilitate promotion by helping them develop their managerial skills and thereby ascend the corporate hierarchy (Hatvany and Pucik 1981, Pucik 1984, Koike 1991). But transfers can also be used as demotions, perhaps after low evaluations (Rohlen 1974) or due to a surplus of manpower (Inagami 2003), based on the premise of long-term employment (Rebick 2005).

Tenkin refers to the practice of transferring an employee to an office to which he or she is unable to commute, thereby necessitating that he or she move house. A 2005 study indicates that at that time about 83.5 percent of Japanese firms with one thousand employees or more had adopted the practice of tenkin (JILPT 2005: 64). Indeed, recruitment websites of large firms often state that those seeking career positions must be willing to accept tenkin both domestically and internationally. Since personnel transfer is part and parcel of the employment system, tenkin is taken for granted in Japanese society.

Tenkin as Gendered Practice

However, tenkin has hindered female workers from continuing their jobs and seeking promotions. For example, in a working married couple, it has often been the wife who quit her job to accompany her husband who accepted tenkin from his corporation (Okifuji 1991, Tanaka 1991, 2002, MHLW 2009a). One reason was the social expectation that a wife should prioritize providing a sense of “home away from home” to enable her husband to give his full physical and mental commitment to work (Kurotani 2005). In terms of the women’s promotion, previous studies have discussed how, for instance, female career-track workers were not offered tenkin and were thereby deprived opportunities to develop the skills and networks necessary for their future careers (Yashiro 1995, Senda and Ouchi 2002). Researchers have found that, even when some women were given the option to work as regular workers with tenkin, they avoided this employment category and eventually switched to being part-time workers (pāto) not on a career track within the company (Kim 2008). Other women made efforts to fulfill their roles through tenkin but later left their jobs due to work-family conflicts (Connor 2010). Tenkin has thus functioned as a source of trouble and disadvantage in women’s employment.

As more women enter the labor force, the number of dual-career couples is increasing (Gender Equality Bureau 2013: 7, 30). As long as the gendered practice of tenkin remains, how can the promotion of married women, particularly in large companies, be enhanced? How do married women who pursue a career through tenkin balance their work and family responsibilities? Through an anthropological study of married women who have experienced tenkin, either in their own career or in their husband’s, this article seeks to answer these questions, which are arising more and more frequently Japan...